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My usual army is Emperor's Children chaos marines, and one of my most hated units to face is the thunderfire cannon. Its multiple templates and barrage sniping means I'm making 6-8 armor saves, often even when I'm spread out to max coherency, and that the first failed saves hit either my doomsiren-wielding aspiring champions or my blast master heavy weapons troopers. I hate them! They nullify some of my key long-range firepower early in the game.


So naturally, using my new Dark Eldar army I'm building, I was nervous fighting against two today in my opponent's white scar army. I knew that thunderfires laid 4 templates. I knew they had an ignores cover round, so my raiders couldn't jink for their 3+ save. I was in trouble. I deep struck a lot of resources near the cannons to deal with them - blasterborn in a venom, archon and court in a venom... even turbo-boosted my reavers behind the building they were hiding in to get to them. In the end, I only killed one of them, but I lost everything that went back there to flush them out.

Then I realized, after the game.... the cannons had done little. The 4 templates, on a raider, actually don't do much. If they use the S6 shot, I get my 3+ jink save. If they use the ignores cover shot, it's only S5. If it scatters it stands good odds of missing completely, and even on a dead-on hit, any scatter that goes directly to the sides of the raider will miss (the raider is less wide than the small blast template is). The result is that the thunderfire cannon gets about 3 hits, needing a 5+ to glance, so it's likely to do only about 1 hull point of damage. True, it could penetrate on a 6 and then blow it up on another 6 - but I think those are decent odds. At least enough to make killing the thunderfires not nearly as high a priority as I had made them, this game. Had I used those resources elsewhere, I could have taken out the rest of his army and spared me a lot of trouble!


Granted, should it catch a squad of warriors outside of their raider...it's all over but the crying. But while in your vehicles - not so bad!

Thunderfire Cannons are childs play for Dark Eldar. It has 2 3+ T7 wounds and i regularly kill it with a venom or 2 in a single volley. When i see a Thunderfire Cannon i usually think ''first blood'' as long as it isn't hidden to well.

2 3+ and 1 2+ wounds honestly isn't that hard to handle, put a venom or two into them they shouldn't be a problem anymore.

I'm not sure if it's actually a barrage weapon - it has multiple templates but I thought it was a direct fire gun, which can't therefore snipe out models from the midst of a squad.

It's barrage since 6-th dex.

The TFC is really not that big of a threat....My friend got one a few months ago. I was terrified of it with the same reasons you had. But we played our first game , and it did next to nothing. I had 1 venom shoot at it, and it was destroyed.

So now I know it isnt a huge threat like I thought, But it is still on my list of things that must die.

 koooaei wrote:
It's barrage since 6-th dex.

Nice. Shows how often I come up against one, I guess.
But yes, it's not as scary as all that to dark eldar - yes it has an ignores cover shell, but to use that it's reducing its strength.....meaning less hits anyway.
Kill it if you have an easy shot, but don't pile after it at the expense of the mission.

Does the T-Fire template not automatically hit all the warriors in the vehicle? Is that only flamer style templates? Never played with one.

No its a small blast barrage.

RIght I thought when a blast template hit an open topped vehicle, everyone in the vehicle got hit, Is that just the flame thrower template?

 Silverthorne wrote:
RIght I thought when a blast template hit an open topped vehicle, everyone in the vehicle got hit, Is that just the flame thrower template?

Yes, that is only the flamer template.(thank goodness)