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Okay so imagine you're facing a Centurion Deathstar consisting of 3 Centurions, Tiggy and a Chapter Master on bike with Artificer Armor and Shield Eternal to tank wounds.

You have 3 Vindicators at your disposal, but dropping 3 pie plates on said deathstar will have no effect as the CM will keep individually tanking all the wounds as he will be the "speartip" of this unit, and this the closest enemy model to receive the allocated wounds.

Well, here's the thing:

Whenever the opponent's deathstar moves, the Chapter Master gains a jink save - whether he likes it, or not. Can you exploit this presence of a cover save to declare focus fire on the unit (as long as Tiggy hasnt rolled an invuln save power like Forewarning (in which case you still avoid the tanking EW CM's Shield eternal, though) or cover save power like Fire Shield (which would make the focus fire mechanic pointless)) and by doing so, "skip" the CM at the front and force the opponent to allocate insta-killing S10 AP2 wounds to either the Centurions or Tiggy himself (who funny enough isnt EW)

If a single model in a unit has a cover save you can declare focus fire on those without cover saves and the opponent has to allocate the wounds to models without cover saves. This is even true if the cover save would be worse than their armor or invulnerable saves. The only thing that focus fire cares for is if the model has a different cover save.

As above, hence why in that case you leave the cm off the bike.

The chapter Master gains nothing from the bike as the unit is already T5 with slow and purposeful

Kisada II wrote:
The chapter Master gains nothing from the bike as the unit is already T5 with slow and purposeful

The bike is useful in keeping the majority toughness 5 once Centurions start dropping.

I thought you couldn't focus fire with blast or template weapons?

Marshall Ragnar wrote:
I thought you couldn't focus fire with blast or template weapons?

You can. But you have to center the blast marker over a model that can have wounds allocated to it.

Template weapons will ignore the fact that you've chosen to Focus Fire an wounds from them will be allocated 'normally' (p52). I don't see a similar note for Blast weapons though.

 Mywik wrote:

Marshall Ragnar wrote:
I thought you couldn't focus fire with blast or template weapons?

You can. But you have to center the blast marker over a model that can have wounds allocated to it.

That would only be close to true for Barrage.

Close to true in that the model(s)you are focus firing at would have to be under the marker(since cover and wound allocation is worked out from the center of the blast); but then if you have a barrage weapon firing at this deathstar you can ignore the focus fire altogether whenever your marker falls in a way that the captain is not the nearest model to the center hole.

 Kommissar Kel wrote:

 Mywik wrote:

Marshall Ragnar wrote:
I thought you couldn't focus fire with blast or template weapons?

You can. But you have to center the blast marker over a model that can have wounds allocated to it.

That would only be close to true for Barrage.

Close to true in that the model(s)you are focus firing at would have to be under the marker(since cover and wound allocation is worked out from the center of the blast); but then if you have a barrage weapon firing at this deathstar you can ignore the focus fire altogether whenever your marker falls in a way that the captain is not the nearest model to the center hole.

Not sure of your exact meaning. So to make it clear, his statement is true all of the time. For blasts and blast/barrage weapons you must target a valid focus fire target with the center of the blast marker. Though focus fire isn't as important if using a barrage weapon. (which may be what you were meaning to say)

forget it ... brainfart. Reading comprehension sometimes is hard.