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Or, the blasts are only used to determine if a barrage weapon hit, and all other instances it just causes d3 hits per shot.

So, small blast does d3, large 2d3, 7" 3d3 etc.

That suddenly allows blast templates to do actual work on vehicles and monstrous creatures too.

I'd do the following for both small and large blasts.

#1 - Place the blast template however you want so long as at least one model in the target unit is under it.

#2 - Roll to hit using BS. On a hit, the blast stays in place.

#3 - On a miss, the blast scatters 2d6", using the small arrow if a HIT is rolled.


For barrage, place as above, then use the current barrage rules.

Personally, I feel the simplest fix is to simply allow players to place the blast such that any part of the template is over enemy models, not the center. In my experience, scattering completely away isn't really the problem of small blasts. I mean, obviously that happens, but I find myself hitting one (or even two) models with small blasts more often than not. The problem I run into is that I rarely hit more than one (or two) models if my opponent has made any effort at all to spread out his dudes. So the problem in my eyes isn't that the blasts completely miss. It's that they usually only get a single hit despite seeming to be intended to be a weapon that can shoot up multiple models per shot. Having more flexibility in where I can place a small blast means that I can aim more "center of mass" of the unit as a whole and thus get more hits on a bull's eye and maybe even mitigate how problematic a scatter is.

I'm not a fan of changing the size of a small blast. I feel it's an impractical suggestion given that it would be difficult to implement without convincing GW to roll out a ton of new templates and somehow motivate people to embrace them rather than seeing them as an annoying change.

I don't dislike the suggestion that blasts essentially just inflict d6 or d3 (or whatever number) hits on a unit rather than actually using the blast. I'd add the caveat that a blast can't inflict more hits than there are models in the unit though. Not getting 3 hits on a single raider with a single blast shot, for instance. The only thing that feels off about this is that I'm reluctant to orphan our poor, underutilized small blast templates entirely. ;_;

I'm not a fan of the whole "roll to hit and then roll to scatter if you miss" thing purely because it adds an extra roll to an already potentially lengthy bit of shooting resolution. My buddy uses lobbas and biovores. It already takes a little while to resolve all those scatters. Adding to-hit rolls into the mix would make it take even longer.

Wyldhunt wrote:
I'm not a fan of the whole "roll to hit and then roll to scatter if you miss" thing purely because it adds an extra roll to an already potentially lengthy bit of shooting resolution. My buddy uses lobbas and biovores. It already takes a little while to resolve all those scatters. Adding to-hit rolls into the mix would make it take even longer.

I get where you're coming from, but I don't think this would eat up more time. Rather, It think it would save time. Each time you "hit", you are not rolling the scatter die and 2d6 and measuring (or potentially re-measuring) the blast and re-checking how many models are beneath it. You save a LOT of steps with a quick to-hit roll. This goes extra for when there are multiple blasts from the same unit and weapon. Normally if there's 3 blasts, you have to roll scatter 3 times. In this method, that might still happen, but you also might hit with all three and be done the scattering in a single roll! That sounds like a big time-saver for me.

Allow blasts to snap fire and shoot at flyers. In addition add this.

-Yarium

"I'd do the following for both small and large blasts.

#1 - Place the blast template however you want so long as at least one model in the target unit is under it.

#2 - Roll to hit using BS. On a hit, the blast stays in place.

#3 - On a miss, the blast scatters 2d6", using the small arrow if a HIT is rolled.


For barrage, place as above, then use the current barrage rules."

Then small blasts are in no way inferior to other weapon types.

What if the roll To Hit was already part of the scatter roll? Roll 1d6 for To Hit, if it doesn't succeed then roll an additional 1d6 for scatter and add them together. This has the interesting side effect of scaling BS to reduce the potential scatter distance; BS4 would always fail with two or less. I'm in favour of keeping the scatter die as it is, though.

The point of a small blast is that, its small.

Why is this even a problem? No one I've played with ever had problems with them, literally this is the 1st time I've heard of such things.

Because they're awful. I haven't used a plasma cannon since last century because they are so awful.

Amishprn86 wrote:The point of a small blast is that, its small.

Why is this even a problem? No one I've played with ever had problems with them, literally this is the 1st time I've heard of such things.

I've seen a lot of complaints about them. It occurred to me to try to get a bunch of people to talk solutions at once, to see if anything can be done about it. It isn't really the small size itself, but the unreliability that comes with it. Unfortunately weapons like plasma cannons can be easily outclassed by their lighter counterparts (plasma guns).

Martel732 wrote:Because they're awful. I haven't used a plasma cannon since last century because they are so awful.

That isn't helpful.

The small blast doesn't cover enough guys and doesn't fully take advantage of BS. Better?

 Yarium wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
I'm not a fan of the whole "roll to hit and then roll to scatter if you miss" thing purely because it adds an extra roll to an already potentially lengthy bit of shooting resolution. My buddy uses lobbas and biovores. It already takes a little while to resolve all those scatters. Adding to-hit rolls into the mix would make it take even longer.

I get where you're coming from, but I don't think this would eat up more time. Rather, It think it would save time. Each time you "hit", you are not rolling the scatter die and 2d6 and measuring (or potentially re-measuring) the blast and re-checking how many models are beneath it. You save a LOT of steps with a quick to-hit roll. This goes extra for when there are multiple blasts from the same unit and weapon. Normally if there's 3 blasts, you have to roll scatter 3 times. In this method, that might still happen, but you also might hit with all three and be done the scattering in a single roll! That sounds like a big time-saver for me.

This is a very fair point.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Allow blasts to snap fire and shoot at flyers. In addition add this.

That would make sense for weapons that fragment/explode/otherwise go kablooey when they come near a target, but it doesn't make a lot of since for, say, a mortar shell. Even going slow enough to fight on a 6x4 table, flyers are meant to be traveling very fast. Turning the gun of something like a vindicator in such a way as to catch the flyer mid-air with the shell in order to trigger the explosion doesn't seem right to me. Now making flakk missile into blasts and saying that blasts with skyfire can target flyer bases, that makes sense to me.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Amishprn86 wrote:
The point of a small blast is that, its small.

Why is this even a problem? No one I've played with ever had problems with them, literally this is the 1st time I've heard of such things.

It's a fairly common complaint around my neck of the woods. I think part of the reason people don't complain about it out loud very often is that most of the "good" guns available to a given army are high rate of fire non-blasts anyway. People don't complain about plasmacannons out loud very often because competitive players are using grav or assault cannons instead, and casual players aren't as concerned with being sub-optimal.

The biggest problem I see with small blasts isn't that they won't hit anyone but that they rarely hit more than one or two guys. If I'm only going to hit one or two models anyway, you might as well say that a plasma cannon is Heavy 3 non-blast. You'd end up with similar results when firing against infantry, but you wouldn't have to fiddle with scatter rolls.

Which isn't to say that that's the solution I want. II rather like the idea of simply placing any part of the blast over a target model rather than the center. It helps you mitigate scatter and model spacing quite a bit while still allowing the shot to behave like a blast.

The issue with blasts is more of a holdover from the original Warhammer Fantasy mechanic, where the rank system and decently large units basically guaranteed that unless you rolled catastrophically bad, the blast would always hit something.

Doesn't work in 40k due to unit coherency and base sizes.

I think it would be better if it just always scattered (no hits) and only used 1 dice and reduce it by the firer's BS. Also they just got rid of the small blast entirely and use the 5" as the small one and the 7" for the big one.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
The issue with blasts is more of a holdover from the original Warhammer Fantasy mechanic, where the rank system and decently large units basically guaranteed that unless you rolled catastrophically bad, the blast would always hit something.

Doesn't work in 40k due to unit coherency and base sizes.

I think it would be better if it just always scattered (no hits) and only used 1 dice and reduce it by the firer's BS. Also they just got rid of the small blast entirely and use the 5" as the small one and the 7" for the big one.

Hadnt thought of this but you are totally right. The small blast is a holdover from fantasy, where units fight in ranks. There a single small blast will hit like 9 models. We should probalby switch to bigger templates.

I also like the idea someone suggested - get rid of the blast marker all together and just have the weapon roll d6 auto hits for small blast and 2d6 for large blast - but never able to hit the same model in a unit for than once. vs blast - no LOS ether. maybe just remove LOS rolls from the game anyways.

Look Out, Sir was a terrible patch in the first place. Bring back old-school defender-chooses wound allocation and you get rid of a giant complex mess, and dodge the idiotic situation where Coteaz gets to stand in front of an artillery unit and tank everything on T7/2+ armour, and Look Out, Sir! any shots that would actually threaten him.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Look Out, Sir was a terrible patch in the first place. Bring back old-school defender-chooses wound allocation and you get rid of a giant complex mess, and dodge the idiotic situation where Coteaz gets to stand in front of an artillery unit and tank everything on T7/2+ armour, and Look Out, Sir! any shots that would actually threaten him.

It makes mobility more valuable for sure. I've spent two turns encircling an ICs unit so I could shot at the regular dudes.