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I have played a few games with my Leviathan Dreadnought and was curious how it has performed for others in 8th edition.

My current loadout is 2 grav flux bombard cannons, but I was thinking about switching one out for a storm cannon array.
Less scaling of S9 -5 D3 shots against infantry squads and D5 damage against vehicles for a more reliable flat 10 shots at S7 -2 D2.
I usually don't run him with cc weapons, since the shooty weapons do way more damage in my experience.

I have played this loadout in 3 games so far, using ultramarines rules, and he has survived to the end of the game, usually doing close if not more than his 309 points in damage to my opponents army.

I used another dread in one of those games with a siege drill and grav, but he did not do nearly the same amount of damage.
8" move just did not get him in there fast enough before his brother killed whatever I was attempting to assault. Mostly because of the 8 + 18" shooty range vs 8 + 2d6 for charging.

Anyway, let me know your experiences and if I should consider other weapon loadouts!

Gravs are the best all rounder by far. Against a 30 blob of boys/conscripts that is 14d3 shots, so on average 28 shots. Works like a better twin lascannon (most of the time) against vehicles. Yes, there's a chance that it won't, but that's dice for you.

I'm building 3 right now, not because they are crazy competitive, but because they now aren't complete ass like they were in 7th for Marines.

I agree. I love the grav, but would the storm cannon add anything overall? I have been running into the issue where I might only do a few casualties to a unit early in the game and then later not be able to get enough shots into said unit from the grav. I had some terrible dice rolls on turn 1 and 2 in the last game. Ended up only killing one or two guys in a handful of units from a ton of fire. Then on turn 4 my dread was the only thing left holding that part of the table, and he was shooting at units of 4 to 8 guys. So I was losing the extra d3 shots I needed to actually wipe the unit. I know that storm cannon would have done amazing in that instance, but I don't know if it is something inconsistent. Mostly due to the bad rolling in earlier turns.

Go double storm cannons and never look back

I've just finished building mine and I've magnetized the weapons, the options I brought were a grav, a stormcannon and a drill.

With the current rules I don't intend to use the drill but it seemed like I should have a close combat option on such a beefy dread. I intend to use the Grav and the Stormcannon as the standard loadout, the storm is likely the best allround weapon which will never have a bad target but the grav is incredible in certain situations so I like a mix of the two. Plus I prefer the look of two different weapons ;-)

slobulous wrote:
Go double storm cannons and never look back

This and lean into things and watch them pop.

If you're going to use it in an Ultrasmurf army there's no reason to not run it with 2 ranged weapons as you can fall back whenever you're charged and still shoot with it. Loadout depends on what you want to do with it, double Grav-Flux for heavy tank hunting (Land Raider and the like, haven't done the math but I don't think that it'll be better than double Storm Cannon Array against T7 3+ save vehicles like the Rhino and Predator) and horde killing and the Storm Cannon Array for a solid allrounder.

Magnetising the weapon arms is also a good idea, this way you can use the Storm Cannon Arrays as a standard loadout and switch to the Bombards if you expect superheavies and/ or Ork/Nid/Guard blobs.

Come to think of it, the Grav Flux Bombard is a really odd weapon, performing very well against both extremes of the unit spectrum (both superheavies and big hordes) but being slightly lackluster against everything in between.

Agreed. I was thinking the storm cannon would make up the difference and add the extra 6" range I seem to be lacking part of the time.

I am waiting to get my storms from fw currently. Hopefully they get here before the next tournament so I can use them.

Thanks for the input everyone!