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Even still, I'm currently using a few plasma guns on infiltrating/outflanking platforms via shenningans and I'm starting to think marine plasma is probably a bit overcosted considering you want to be double tapping, but overheat is a real liability when your guys already cost around 30 pts with it.

Saying that, non relentless marines is a niche in itself outside of battle companies.

more often then not it will be nay, some units can make them work and if your going up against a specific opponent it will be fine if your doing your best to build against their army.

the biggest problem is that their really designed for squashing heavy infantry and other then the nimble as feth crisis suit your never going to get any kind of meaningful use from them

the plasma cannon is a weapon that gets better as TEQ's get better and unless your a crisis suit no they arent getting better, their in fact very very bad

I find that grav out does melta most the time.

HoundsofDemos wrote:
I find that grav out does melta most the time.

Until you have to kill that Imperial Knight.

Martel732 wrote:

HoundsofDemos wrote:
I find that grav out does melta most the time.

Until you have to kill that Imperial Knight.

or anything av14

AV 14 doesn't matter for grav. Only immunity to immobilization.

Yay. They are cheap. Points wise, they are the best dev weapon (pendingthey hit 2 models).

Even if they dont,ot keeps people from packing tight, and makes them react to you.

It's been forever since I've used proper plasma cannons (nids and CSM were my two armies for a LONG time). I can say, however, that they are definitely a threat. Against my bugs they feel like a much bigger general threat than grav, and they just delete CSM the moment I have to leave cover. Even against the boogymen like Riptides they are good. Another plus is that they get to actually roll on the damage table, so that chance to explode the av10-12 vehicle is definitely clutch.
As Astartes, if you can get some sort of relentless on devastators (red scorpions, biomancy) I think they are the best actual heavy weapon.

There is no world in which a plasma cannon is better than a grav cannon.

They are also terrible against Riptides because they have less than a 66% hit rate and only can get one hit. It's not crazy to expect a full squad to do nothing to a Riptide at all after all the misses and saves.

Martel732 wrote:
Even with some clumping, the plasma cannon is very lack luster. Again, it's optimal targets are no longer the power units in the game. You can shoot TWC all day with plasma cannons and get nowhere.

And lots of people play with a lot of terrain that doesn't block LOS. Of course, adding a lot of LOS blocking terrain will make your plasma cannons garbage anyway.

Sorry, but I have to give you a sarcastic "boo-hoo" to complaints that plasma cannons are no good against TWC. You know what is good against TWC? Punisher gatling cannons, lasguns(to a lesser degree due to low s vs high T), bolters, shuricats, etc.

You don't need or want a big gun to take down the power units, fill them full of small holes and forced saves.

As for LOS blocking terrain, now you have a fire-lane and board control. The enemy must come to you and meet you on your terms; same as I said earlier about the 2"-spread conga line: you control where the enemy moves by positioning a unit so that it does nothing else, which can still earn back it's points via area denial(gets better if that unit is also camping an objective).

I used to hate Multi-meltas on marines(3rd-5th editions), then I realized that while the gun would likely never fire for effect; that was because it created a 25" bubble that vehicles would not enter; 10 points let me control a huge portion of the board.

 Kommissar Kel wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Even with some clumping, the plasma cannon is very lack luster. Again, it's optimal targets are no longer the power units in the game. You can shoot TWC all day with plasma cannons and get nowhere.

And lots of people play with a lot of terrain that doesn't block LOS. Of course, adding a lot of LOS blocking terrain will make your plasma cannons garbage anyway.

Sorry, but I have to give you a sarcastic "boo-hoo" to complaints that plasma cannons are no good against TWC. You know what is good against TWC? Punisher gatling cannons, lasguns(to a lesser degree due to low s vs high T), bolters, shuricats, etc.

You don't need or want a big gun to take down the power units, fill them full of small holes and forced saves.

As for LOS blocking terrain, now you have a fire-lane and board control. The enemy must come to you and meet you on your terms; same as I said earlier about the 2"-spread conga line: you control where the enemy moves by positioning a unit so that it does nothing else, which can still earn back it's points via area denial(gets better if that unit is also camping an objective).

I used to hate Multi-meltas on marines(3rd-5th editions), then I realized that while the gun would likely never fire for effect; that was because it created a 25" bubble that vehicles would not enter; 10 points let me control a huge portion of the board.

So why wouldn't I buy more of the things that are good vs the power units and leave garbage weapons like plasma cannons at home? What is the optimal target for plasma cannons? Largely units no one uses and units that I don't care about.

My vehicles enter MM bubbles all the time. You take them because they have a 12" melta radius. It's really hard to mess up deep striking dual MM land speeders because of this.

Martel732 wrote:
There is no world in which a plasma cannon is better than a grav cannon.

They are also terrible against Riptides because they have less than a 66% hit rate and only can get one hit. It's not crazy to expect a full squad to do nothing to a Riptide at all after all the misses and saves.

PC are way better than Grav against orks.

 koooaei wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
There is no world in which a plasma cannon is better than a grav cannon.

They are also terrible against Riptides because they have less than a 66% hit rate and only can get one hit. It's not crazy to expect a full squad to do nothing to a Riptide at all after all the misses and saves.

PC are way better than Grav against orks.

But I don't care about Orks. And neither should you in the scheme of 7th ed. And with grav amps, I'm not too sure about that actually.

Well, i'm having good results with orks. We've got some solid lists. Certain ork lists can counter even eldar pretty well.

Grav amp cannons might be somewhat near pc in terms of damage but they're 2 times more expensive. You can shoot your 300 pt unit and kill like 30 pt of boyz or 15 pt of mek gunz.

 koooaei wrote:
Well, i'm having good results with orks. We've got some solid lists.

Grav amp cannons might be somewhat near pc in terms of damage but they're 2 times more expensive.

Yes, but they will also gut that manz unit in a single turn instead of having to whittle away like plasma. And you could have drawn Eldar to play and need the grav to down WKs, or drawn Tau and need it to kill Riptides. List tailoring for Orks doesn't make it a good weapon. If fact, needing to tailor is the definition of bad.

Come to think of it, the last marine player I went up against with plasma cannons, I tabled him. They're so bad. Leave them at home.

Let's put it this way. Gravcannons are great when you've got moving relentless platforms. Cool. So, cents and skyhammer devs. That's it.

PC have higher range, so you can use them with your devs and even backlne tactical marines if you have some. personally, i like tac marines to be used offensively but others use them as backline pointholders with good results.

Grav is not omnipotent. There's a number of common things that plain ignore it. Like void shields and buildings. Daemons and orks also don't care bout your grav all that much. Whereas daemons can have some problems with PC as they tend to deepstrike tight packs of stuff. Grav can never explode anything. I've used it with my orklequins for an advantage when grav cents could only wreck a vehicle and i could disembark in a way he couldn't charge me on his turn.

 koooaei wrote:
Let's put it this way. Gravcannons are great when you've got moving relentless platforms. Cool. So, cents and skyhammer devs. That's it.

PC have higher range, so you can use them with your devs.

Grav is not omnipotent. There's a number of common things that plain ignore it. Like void shields. Daemons and orks also don't care bout your grav all that much. Whereas daemons can have some problems with PC as they tend to deepstrike tight packs of stuff.

I don't use devs anymore. Because they are bad in 7th. They are only good in Skyhammer, which BA don't get. And BA devs can't get any weapons that matter in 7th anyway. So even if non-relentless heavy weapons weren't a disaster, BA don't have anything to purchase anyway.

I'll hedge my bets with grav because there are other ways to deal with demons and Orks, and no other ways to deal with WKs and Riptides.

" Grav can never explode anything."

Neither can anything else in 7th seemingly.

I would never pay extra points for them outside of a Russ Executioner with PE.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
I would never pay extra points for them outside of a Russ Executioner with PE.

This sounds about right.

Plasma Cannons are pretty good on Inquisition Servitors, because of how ridiculously cheap they are.

Small blasts are typically 2x or damn close to it the price of the single-shot variant, and unless your opponent isnt spread out at all (which is uber rare outside rookie battles) it usually wont generate any extra hits. Its also less accurate unless you plop it in the middle of a blob.

If small blasts were either vastly cheaper (say 5pts more than the single-shot variant) or had an alternate firing option to fire 2-3 regular shots if desired, they'd be great to bring. Only small blast i will regularly field out of any army (that i know of) are lobbas because 5 small blasts using Barrage rules causes a ton of damage lol.

As I have said; unless you get a direct hit against a spaced opponent(fully, or just over an inch), spacing will generally result in 2 hits, and on very large targets it is very hard to miss with bs4+.

Bs4 hits 1/3 of the time on the scatter dice, and the 2/3 scatter will still directly hit the small based target on a distance of 4 or lower with a hit still occuring up to a 6" scatter(if it is centered, or at least declared centered). A 28mm base has just over an inch in diameter(1 inch is 25.4mm) and a small blast has a radius of 1.5".

I feel like everyone who says "Grav Cannons are always better" hasn't even tried running Plasma cannons lately.

They are only 15pts, VS 35 for Grav Cannon (looking at regular marine prices here)

So for example, if you have 4x in a squad, you are looking at 60PTS vs 140PTS on top of the squad.

I think we all agree that GravCannon Devs are not great, due to the cost/range/die easily vs Grav Centurions... But if you are looking for some CHEAP good firepower, Plasma Cannons are VERY GOOD for the cost. Again, if you can hit 2 models (which in 99% of games, you will be able to hit 2+ models) they are simply the better choice even if they were the same cost.

Add in the fact that they cause your opponent to spread out and overthink sometimes, and I cant ever imagine arming a regular marine dev squad with anything else (other than Multi-Meltas sometimes) unless you are running Skyhammer, where Multi Meltas become very strong.

I'm thinking of building my next unit of Kataphrons as plasma culvereins right now, 3 strong unit firing 6 S7 Ap2 blasts is definitely going to give people a "nope" in thoughts of moving near them. Yarr.

Plasma canons are literally infinitely better on my sentinels. I just wish evil sentinels could get them.

maceria wrote:
Plasma canons are literally infinitely better on my sentinels. I just wish evil sentinels could get them.

Evil sentinels can get a squadron of 5 with heavyflamers for like 150 (?) pts. That's pretty powerful.

 Btothefnrock wrote:
I feel like everyone who says "Grav Cannons are always better" hasn't even tried running Plasma cannons lately.

They are only 15pts, VS 35 for Grav Cannon (looking at regular marine prices here)

So for example, if you have 4x in a squad, you are looking at 60PTS vs 140PTS on top of the squad.

I think we all agree that GravCannon Devs are not great, due to the cost/range/die easily vs Grav Centurions... But if you are looking for some CHEAP good firepower, Plasma Cannons are VERY GOOD for the cost. Again, if you can hit 2 models (which in 99% of games, you will be able to hit 2+ models) they are simply the better choice even if they were the same cost.

Add in the fact that they cause your opponent to spread out and overthink sometimes, and I cant ever imagine arming a regular marine dev squad with anything else (other than Multi-Meltas sometimes) unless you are running Skyhammer, where Multi Meltas become very strong.

There's nothing cheap about plasma cannon devs on a per model basis given how flimsy marines are in 7th. Again, they suffer mightily because the new power units in the game don't care about them at all. You are just punching things in the face that are already bad. Lots of posters on here are forgetting that they don't fire 16% of the time and kill the user 5% of the time. And, they are worse than BS 4. They are, in my experience, the worst heavy available to marines.

 koooaei wrote:

maceria wrote:
Plasma canons are literally infinitely better on my sentinels. I just wish evil sentinels could get them.

Evil sentinels can get a squadron of 5 with heavyflamers for like 150 (?) pts. That's pretty powerful.

100pts. 150 for lascannons and multiple rocket pods. But those are without BS upgrade, which you only need for the las. Evil sentinels rock.

100 pts. that's amazing.

Going a a little off topic here but i am really disappointed by plasma cannons on Armored Sentinels. Maybe with the new Formation that gives them PE against a single unit they could be made better but i find that they either lose Hull points on their own or can't really inflict enough damage.
I am of the opinion that in guard lists the Plasma Cannon belongs on a Russ Executioner (preferably w/PE and/or Prescience)