Proposed "fix" to Bolt Weapons

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**BaconCatBug**

Galas wrote:
BaconCatBug wrote:
I think it would be nice if tacical marine bolters had the same profile as the Primaris Bolt Rifle, but since Primaris Marines only exist to gouge players, that won't happen.

Actually, just SQUAT normal marines, give the variety of special and heavy weapons to Primaris Squads, and call it a day.

Imagine a Tactical Primaris Squad. 30" -1AP bolters on 2A and 2W models, with Primaris Lasscannons and Primaris Plasmaguns.

Or better. Primaris Assault Marines with 2W and 3A per model, with options to have Powerclaws, or Powerfists, or Powerswords, etc...

Ya know what, I wouldn't mind seeing this and I am sure this is what GW want to do. Squat the rules for manlette marines and officially instruct people to use their old kits as counts-as.

**AnomanderRake**

BaconCatBug wrote:
Galas wrote:
BaconCatBug wrote:
I think it would be nice if tacical marine bolters had the same profile as the Primaris Bolt Rifle, but since Primaris Marines only exist to gouge players, that won't happen.

Actually, just SQUAT normal marines, give the variety of special and heavy weapons to Primaris Squads, and call it a day.

Imagine a Tactical Primaris Squad. 30" -1AP bolters on 2A and 2W models, with Primaris Lasscannons and Primaris Plasmaguns.

Or better. Primaris Assault Marines with 2W and 3A per model, with options to have Powerclaws, or Powerfists, or Powerswords, etc...
Ya know what, I wouldn't mind seeing this and I am sure this is what GW want to do. Squat the rules for manlette marines and officially instruct people to use their old kits as counts-as.

Let me put them in all the rest of the vehicles and I wouldn't complain too much.

**skchsan**

Another potential solution is to bump it up to S5, much like heavy bolter. All bolt weapons are supposed to use the same rounds as per fluff. HB should just be a bolt weapon with better range and higher rate of fire.

Having said, bumping it up to S5 would affect only the following without breaking the game:
-has no change against T3 (S4 and S5 both wounds on 3+)
-improved dmg against T4's
-bolter wounds on 5+ against T8's.

Note only necrons, and SM/CSM has base troops with T4. Above proposal will guarantee that bolters are always stronger than flashlights against T8's. Then bolters can truly become a weapon thats (fairly) reliable against all possible enemies.

**greatbigtree**

Martel732 wrote:
T3 / + is better than you're giving credit for. At 4 ppm, morale is irrelevant. 12 squads of 10 of these guys covers all the holes in a DZ and is harder to kill than it looks because there's 120 of them! Also, they get that 5+ against most cheap weapons. 4+ if they are in cover, which is totally possible with 10 man squads.

Yes it goes on and on my friends! Someone started calling the other people scrubs, while they clearly can't figure out how to play Marines because... This is the refrain that doesn't end...

If Marines need improvement, it comes at fixing the price of their basic model. It is a poor craftsman that blames their tools. If Marines are shoehorned into a single style of play, so is Imperial Guard. So is Chaos. So is anyone. Changing a bolter's profile doesn't change Guard's ability to fill a DZ. It doesn't change the access to cheap and effective artillery.

Marines are ok. There are other units that are too good / useful for their cost. The concept that a Tactical marine should be better at everything is flawed. Tactical marines don't engage the enemy's strength and overcome it. They engage their weakness, and overcome it. If a person can't wrap their head around that, they need to git gud, not blame other Marine players for figuring out what they can't, nor should they blame the opponents of said players, that know how to play their army.

There is a clearly false assumption of correctness. One might think, that if they can't figure out how to win, they might start taking the advice of others.

Guard play revolves around "Favourable Attrition". Trading pieces. Protecting the heavy hitters with cheap filler. This edition has made that overly easy. The solution is to make it easier for other armies to get to the heavy hitters. The solution is to make filler more expensive, because it's job isn't to be good, but to create favorable trades. Maintaining effectiveness despite losses. As Guardsmen / Conscripts go up in cost, their "defensive value per point" goes down.

That fixes IG's "OP-Ness" right now, without changing bolters.

**Formosa**

AnomanderRake wrote:
Formosa wrote:
...Start over with what? what are you referring to when you say "you want to redefine small arms" I have not said anything of the kind, and how would it make 100% of models using small arms irrelevant, it would be very short ranged but also powerful at 9", explain yourself properly and dont leave one line answers, its an awful way to have a discussion.

I will attempt to elaborate: I expect sticking Rapid Fire 3 on weapons available to arbitrary Troops units to lead to a cascade effect by which small arms need to be buffed across the board to keep up. I expect the end result of this massive power spike to exacerbate the first-turn-wins problem characteristic of 8e where whoever's massive spurt of firepower shoots first destroys all infantry on the table, thereby making things like Tactical Marines effectively unplayable because they only actually get to shoot if you get first turn.

I don't see how tripling the amount of firepower coming out of small arms would improve the game for anyone.

Could you try and explain what you hope this change would achieve?

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Unbalanced buffs? You have yet to show how it's not balanced besides saying it is.

I mean, I've got math on my side. Tactical Marines and Bolter Scouts lose firefights to units with the most basic arms in their army, even when taking special weapons into consideration.

I'd love to see your math. At 12" and without cover I've got Tactical Marines handily beating everything I check them against, point for point, in a straight contest of small arms (they come close enough to tying Guardians (though they still win that firefight) that it'd come down to who shot first in practice, though).

What would an Eldar player know? They only had it bad with the Index. Otherwise AT WORSE they were Tier 2.

In the interests of full disclosure I am going to explain that I have a Corsair army, a Space Marine army, and an Inquisition army. Two of those have been mostly deleted and require me to hop books and homebrew content trying to scrabble together something that works. I'd love it if you took your "you play the wrong army to have any interest in balance" attitude somewhere else and tried to talk about the actual issues.

Sure, having range 18" means that your maines are put ranged by most small arms in the game, except eldar shurikins and ork shootas, both of which are assault 2 not rapid fire, so most armies with still have the edge when it comes to this, hardly game breaking, but what it would mean is that when the marine/chaos/sisters unit gets within 9", which isn't easy against most dedicated shooting armies or mobile armies, then you rip them apart, something a lot of Mathhammer people always forget is that in this game a LOT of other factors matter, a rapid fire 3 Bolter would not break the game in any way.

**Torga_DW**

Out of interest, i put the numbers of marines vs guard into excel to get a better idea of the differences. I used standard rounding to the nearest number, as you can't roll a decimal.

10 guardsmen (40 points) vs 10 marines (130 points), marines are 325% the cost of the guard.
10 guardsmen shoot: 5 hits, 10 marines shoot: 7 hit, marines hit 140%
5 guardsmen hit: 2 wound, 7 marines hit: 5 wound, marines wound 250%
2 guardsmen wound: 1 marine saves, 5 Marines wound: 2 guardsmen save, marines save 200%
end result: 1 dead marine, 3 dead guardsmen. Marines have suffered 33% of the casualties. Marines have lost 108% in relative points.
Guardsmen are now operating at 70% of their initial strength, marines are operating at 90%.
But guard will be subject to morale, and have a (worst case scenario) 16.5% chance to lose 2 more guys.
end result: 1 dead marine, 5 dead guardsmen. Marines have suffered 20% of the casualties. Marines have lost 65% in relative points.
Guardsmen are now operating at 50% of their initial strength, marines are operating at 90%.

So i wondered what would happen if the points were a little more even:

30 guardsmen (120 points) vs 10 marines (130 points), marines are 108% the cost of guard.
30 guardsmen shoot: 15 hits, marines shoot: 7 hit, marines cause hit 47% hits
15 guardsmen hit: 5 wound, 7 marines hit: 5 wound, marines cause 100% identical wounds
5 guardsmen wound: 3 marines save, 5 marines wound: 2 guardsmen save, marines save 150%
end result: 2 dead marines, 3 dead guardsmen. Marines have suffered 67% of the casualties. Marines have lost 217% in relative points.
Guardsmen are now operating at 90% of their initial strength, marines are operating at 80%.
Guard are still subject to morale whereas marines are not. again, 16.5% chance to lose 2 more guys.
end result: 2 dead marines, 5 dead guardsmen. Marines have suffered 40% of the casualties. Marines have lost 113% in relative points.
Guardsmen are now operating at 83% of their initial strength, marines are operating at 80%.

So, interesting results. When there's a roughly equal number of points involved (and depending on who shoots first), marines need the guard to catastrophically fail their morale check just to lose roughly the same amount of performance *and* marines still end up losing more in equivalent points. If guard pass their morale check, marines do worse in performance and way worse in relative points.

edit: and assuming 'magic dice' scenarios, the guard can theoretically wipe out the marines, whereas the marines cannot do the same, even assuming catastrophic morale failures.

**Slayer-Fan123**

Wyldhunt wrote:
Let's all keep it civil folks. Taking shots at one another, especially over what armies they happen to play, isn't productive and only serves to distract from more useful discussion.

@SlayerFan
While I don't wish to turn this into another thread about the problems with tactical marines (which I acknowledge do exist), I believe it's important to keep the platform a weapon is on in mind when discussing that weapon. So if we want to say that shootas are superior to bolters, that's true enough in a vacuum, but let's also acknowledge that shootas are only available to models with pretty unimpressive BS, and many of those models tend to get killed off pretty quickly.

Also, how are the avengers running away after firing? Battle Focus doesn't do that any more, and using the stratagem that lets them move away after shooting seems like it would be a waste of resources most of the time. Unless you mean they'll get within 18" and shoot on their turn, take a single round of return fire, and then spend the rest of the game running away? In which case I'd argue we've entered into a bizarre realm of theory hammer.

But really, I'm not sure that making direct comparisons between units is what we're trying to discuss here. You can say special weapons are pointless because you can't get enough of them or whatever, I can point out that avengers don't get them at all. You can point out that strength scores don't matter on a unit that is better at shooting than punching and that our exarch can have two of our bolter equivalents, and I can point out that marine sergeants can pack significantly more impressive weapon options than an avenger exarch. That's all well and interesting, but is it really the point of the conversation here?

But steering back towards the topic of bolters...

* If we're talking about the effectiveness of bolters in a vacuum, we shouldn't be. A bolter wielded by a guardsman isn't really the same as a bolter wielded wielded by a space marine. Similarly, a shoota would be much more potent in the hands of a marine than in the hands of an ork.

*If we're here to discuss whether or not a bolter fits its fluff, I'd argue that it doesn't. Partly because bolter fluff is, "Space marines are the best and bolters are awesome. Watch us kill this wraith knight with our version of small arms fire!" And hey, I'm all for space marines taking a step closer to their fluff, but let's acknowledge that fluffy marines are going to be very different creatures from what normal marines are today. Personally, I feel like intercessors are pretty close to what I imagine a fluffy tactical marine looking like mechanically.

*If we're talking about the mechanical design of a bolter... meh? Tacticals have a problem, I agree, but I'm not sure that problem lies with the humble bolter. The bolter is essentially just a standard, boring rapidfire gun that wounds T3 targets more often than not, wounds space marines half the time, and hurts most vehicles a third of the time. Compared to the 41st millenium's version of a "basic" weapon, the lasgun, which wounds T3 targets half the time, marines a third of the time, and most vehicles only a sixth of the time. If you hold a bolter up to a lsgun or a bolt pistol up to a laspistol, the bolt weapons do appear to have a bit more kick to them. Which doesn't seem inappropriate.

*So with that last point in mind, what exactly is the problem with the bolter? Is it that we just don't think it does enough damage for its points? Because bolt weapons are pretty cheap and pack more punch than "common" human weapons. Is it that they don't feel special enough next to alien weapons? Because I'm all for cool rules on various weapons, but that reason does sound a little, "But my marines are supposed to be special though!" Is it that non-cheap infantry units just don't have a place in the game? Because that's a valid issue, but it's one that has its roots in much broader issues than bolters not being nifty enough.

I already went over the platform issue. When you look at the base units that carry them like Sisters and Chaos Marines and Chosen and Sternguard...you get the point...the weapon is readily replaced by anything else. That's why I'm advocating a change to the Bolter on all platforms.
In the same manner, it doesn't matter the platform for either the Avenger Shuriken Catapult or Shoota. They're strictly better weapons, with the former being the worst offender. However, it's just a good base weapon and nobody would call it broken, and nobody would call Dire Avengers bad, as the Dire Avenger platform is solid and has a specified role that it does. Generalist is garbage, so you gotta make the generalist just a little more attractive.

So while tackling that issue you gotta ignore the Tactical Marine unit entry, which has its own issues. Look at the OTHER Bolter units, like Scouts (who you never take Bolters on), Sisters (who you take as cheaper bodies for more special weapon survivability), Sternguard and Chosen (where everything is replaced by a special weapon or Combi, and the Sternguard have a better Bolter to begin with!), and Biker varieties (where the Special Weapon proliferation does most of the work, though the edition has treated anything twinlinked a little better and allows it fired with anything else)

In this case, there isn't a platform that the Bolter is attractive at all, and the Storm Bolter is barely making that mark. So obviously we need to ask the following question. On which unit does the proposed fix break an army or unit? I can't find any reasonable argument it breaks Marines or Sisters, other than some people are simply adverse to change and keeping the status quo. I'm ignoring fluff overall, otherwise all Marines WOULD have the Primaris statline.

**Grey Templar**

skchsan wrote:
Another potential solution is to bump it up to S5, much like heavy bolter. All bolt weapons are supposed to use the same rounds as per fluff. HB should just be a bolt weapon with better range and higher rate of fire.

Having said, bumping it up to S5 would affect only the following without breaking the game:
-has no change against T3 (S4 and S5 both wounds on 3+)
-improved dmg against T4's
-bolter wounds on 5+ against T8's.

Note only necrons, and SM/CSM has base troops with T4. Above proposal will guarantee that bolters are always stronger than flashlights against T8's. Then bolters can truly become a weapon thats (fairly) reliable against all possible enemies.

That's not true.

There are multiple calibers of bolt shells. The typical bolter is, usually, .75 cal. Though there are other calibers for bolters(and pistols). Heavy bolters are 1.0cal. Vulcan Mega Bolters are likely in the 5.0cal range. And even different firearms which use the same round can have very different killing power. If a pistol and rifle use the same bullet, the rifle will have much more significant power due to the longer barrel as it puts more energy into the bullet.

**Wyldhunt**

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

I already went over the platform issue. When you look at the base units that carry them like Sisters and Chaos Marines and Chosen and Sternguard...you get the point...the weapon is readily replaced by anything else. That's why I'm advocating a change to the Bolter on all platforms.
In the same manner, it doesn't matter the platform for either the Avenger Shuriken Catapult or Shoota. They're strictly better weapons, with the former being the worst offender. However, it's just a good base weapon and nobody would call it broken, and nobody would call Dire Avengers bad, as the Dire Avenger platform is solid and has a specified role that it does. Generalist is garbage, so you gotta make the generalist just a little more attractive.

So while tackling that issue you gotta ignore the Tactical Marine unit entry, which has its own issues. Look at the OTHER Bolter units, like Scouts (who you never take Bolters on), Sisters (who you take as cheaper bodies for more special weapon survivability), Sternguard and Chosen (where everything is replaced by a special weapon or Combi, and the Sternguard have a better Bolter to begin with!), and Biker varieties (where the Special Weapon proliferation does most of the work, though the edition has treated anything twinlinked a little better and allows it fired with anything else)

In this case, there isn't a platform that the Bolter is attractive at all, and the Storm Bolter is barely making that mark. So obviously we need to ask the following question. On which unit does the proposed fix break an army or unit? I can't find any reasonable argument it breaks Marines or Sisters, other than some people are simply adverse to change and keeping the status quo. I'm ignoring fluff overall, otherwise all Marines WOULD have the Primaris statline.

Some fair points there. To be clear, I'm not opposed to modifying the bolter. I even rather like some of the changes that have been proposed. However, I think that divorcing the weapon from its platforms might be the wrong approach, even if the weapon isn't "good" on any of its current platforms. What I mean is that, ideally, I'd like for given unit/option to not only be good for its points but to also fit the fluff-based "feel" of the unit in question. I imagine that's something we'd all be in favor of. So my concern with making the bolter better in a vacuum is that there are certain considerations that might not be... er... considered in that process. I'd want to make sure that a change made with marines in mind doesn't break sisters or give a commissar access to an overly good option, for instance. I'd want to make sure that a given improvement to a bolter doesn't discourage marines from ever getting closer to the enemy. I'd want the change to capture the "feel" of the weapon. All of which is, I'm sure, quite doable.

**Slayer-Fan123**

I only advocated ignoring a few key platforms. The Chaos Marine and Tactical Marine are the prime ones to ignore because the unit entries themselves are redundant and need serious work.

**AnomanderRake**

Formosa wrote:
...Sure, having range 18" means that your maines are put ranged by most small arms in the game, except eldar shurikins and ork shootas, both of which are assault 2 not rapid fire, so most armies with still have the edge when it comes to this, hardly game breaking, but what it would mean is that when the marine/chaos/sisters unit gets within 9", which isn't easy against most dedicated shooting armies or mobile armies, then you rip them apart, something a lot of Mathhammer people always forget is that in this game a LOT of other factors matter, a rapid fire 3 Bolter would not break the game in any way.

I'm not sure you're using Rapid Fire to mean what I think it means. Last I checked "Rapid Fire 3" meant three shots at full range, six at half range.

I would ask that you try and consider some of the spill-over effects from up and tripling the firepower of a unit that isn't in that bad a place to begin with. Are you proposing making Storm Bolters (right now effectively two bolters) Rapid Fire 6? Are you proposing giving Sternguard Rapid Fire 3 weapons with -2AP? Are you proposing giving the Hurricane Bolter (right now 6 bolters strapped together) 36 shots at 9" range?

And the next question following on from this is what you're expecting other small arms in the game to do if you're going to throw something this huge at Marines without a significant points jump. If you've declared that in this play environment a BS3+/T4/Sv3+ model with a S4 Rapid Fire 3 weapon should cost 13pts what can you call a T3/Sv4+ model with a S4/Assault 2 weapon at 12pts other than utter trash?

**fraser1191**

AnomanderRake wrote:
Formosa wrote:
...Sure, having range 18" means that your maines are put ranged by most small arms in the game, except eldar shurikins and ork shootas, both of which are assault 2 not rapid fire, so most armies with still have the edge when it comes to this, hardly game breaking, but what it would mean is that when the marine/chaos/sisters unit gets within 9", which isn't easy against most dedicated shooting armies or mobile armies, then you rip them apart, something a lot of Mathhammer people always forget is that in this game a LOT of other factors matter, a rapid fire 3 Bolter would not break the game in any way.

I'm not sure you're using Rapid Fire to mean what I think it means. Last I checked "Rapid Fire 3" meant three shots at full range, six at half range.

I would ask that you try and consider some of the spill-over effects from up and tripling the firepower of a unit that isn't in that bad a place to begin with. Are you proposing making Storm Bolters (right now effectively two bolters) Rapid Fire 6? Are you proposing giving Sternguard Rapid Fire 3 weapons with -2AP? Are you proposing giving the Hurricane Bolter (right now 6 bolters strapped together) 36 shots at 9" range?

And the next question following on from this is what you're expecting other small arms in the game to do if you're going to throw something this huge at Marines without a significant points jump. If you've declared that in this play environment a BS3+/T4/Sv3+ model with a S4 Rapid Fire 3 weapon should cost 13pts what can you call a T3/Sv4+ model with a S4/Assault 2 weapon at 12pts other than utter trash?

Lol if a single bolter is rapid fire 3 a hurricane bolter is rapid fire 18 and a stormraven has 2 that's 72 shots at half

**Martel732**

It's just easier to make marines and their upgrades cheaper.

**skchsan**

Martel732 wrote:
It's just easier to make marines and their upgrades cheaper.

Kind of like IG's weapon cost difference for BS3 and BS4?

**Martel732**

They did that because the scions were already undercosted and they just adjusted the cost for the one weapon they were spamming.

**Xenomancers**

Grey Templar wrote:
skchsan wrote:
Another potential solution is to bump it up to S5, much like heavy bolter. All bolt weapons are supposed to use the same rounds as per fluff. HB should just be a bolt weapon with better range and higher rate of fire.

Having said, bumping it up to S5 would affect only the following without breaking the game:
-has no change against T3 (S4 and S5 both wounds on 3+)
-improved dmg against T4's
-bolter wounds on 5+ against T8's.

Note only necrons, and SM/CSM has base troops with T4. Above proposal will guarantee that bolters are always stronger than flashlights against T8's. Then bolters can truly become a weapon thats (fairly) reliable against all possible enemies.

That's not true.

There are multiple calibers of bolt shells. The typical bolter is, usually, .75 cal. Though there are other calibers for bolters(and pistols). Heavy bolters are 1.0cal. Vulcan Mega Bolters are likely in the 5.0cal range. And even different firearms which use the same round can have very different killing power. If a pistol and rifle use the same bullet, the rifle will have much more significant power due to the longer barrel as it puts more energy into the bullet.

.75 rocket propelled automatic grenade launcher. Str 4 rapid fire - 0 ap. It just doesn't sound right does it?

**Martel732**

Modern-day rifles with AP ammo are more effective vs humans in flak armor than boltguns are in this genre. Whatever. I don't care. But if bolters are gonna be weak sauce, charge accordingly.

**Xenomancers**

Martel732 wrote:
Modern-day rifles with AP ammo are more effective vs humans in flak armor than boltguns are in this genre. Whatever. I don't care. But if bolters are gonna be weak sauce, charge accordingly.

At some point you can't make the weapon any free-er.

**Martel732**

You make the units forced to take them cheaper. Or give the bolter a negative cost.

**Slayer-Fan123**

AnomanderRake wrote:
Formosa wrote:
...Sure, having range 18" means that your maines are put ranged by most small arms in the game, except eldar shurikins and ork shootas, both of which are assault 2 not rapid fire, so most armies with still have the edge when it comes to this, hardly game breaking, but what it would mean is that when the marine/chaos/sisters unit gets within 9", which isn't easy against most dedicated shooting armies or mobile armies, then you rip them apart, something a lot of Mathhammer people always forget is that in this game a LOT of other factors matter, a rapid fire 3 Bolter would not break the game in any way.

I'm not sure you're using Rapid Fire to mean what I think it means. Last I checked "Rapid Fire 3" meant three shots at full range, six at half range.

I would ask that you try and consider some of the spill-over effects from up and tripling the firepower of a unit that isn't in that bad a place to begin with. Are you proposing making Storm Bolters (right now effectively two bolters) Rapid Fire 6? Are you proposing giving Sternguard Rapid Fire 3 weapons with -2AP? Are you proposing giving the Hurricane Bolter (right now 6 bolters strapped together) 36 shots at 9" range?

And the next question following on from this is what you're expecting other small arms in the game to do if you're going to throw something this huge at Marines without a significant points jump. If you've declared that in this play environment a BS3+/T4/Sv3+ model with a S4 Rapid Fire 3 weapon should cost 13pts what can you call a T3/Sv4+ model with a S4/Assault 2 weapon at 12pts other than utter trash?

I think they meant it fires three shots at Rapid Fire range. Doesn't entirely make sense since it isn't the kind of weapon spraying bullets everywhere.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Martel732 wrote:
Modern-day rifles with AP ammo are more effective vs humans in flak armor than boltguns are in this genre. Whatever. I don't care. But if bolters are gonna be weak sauce, charge accordingly.

You can only bump the forced Bolter users down so far. Tactical Marines and Chaos Marines become 12, Bolter Scouts 10, Sisters 10...it becomes bonkers and ridiculous. It's easier just to buff the base weapon like the suggestions of last edition (which the most proposed seemed to be rerolls of 1 to wound).

That's why with the modern system of armor modifiers, I wanted a unique way to make armor less powerful against the Bolter, but without taking rules from anyone else.

**sennacherib**

This is a needless post. Bolt weapons are fine.

**Slayer-Fan123**

sennacherib wrote:
This is a needless post. Bolt weapons are fine.

Then defend your position.

**Cothonian**

Vaktathi wrote:
For a game that plays at 40k's scale, bolters really are fine. While handheld SMG style bolters may be the province of the Astartes, Sororitas, and the odd IG noncom, heavy versions are commonplace on almost everything from basic IG infantry to IFV's and tank secondary weapons, and those seem to be fine.

For greater differentiation, play one of the RPG's, but for a game like 40k, that can have hundreds if models in the board, the bolter is largely fine as is.

Pretty much my opinion on the matter as well.

**Bharring**

Or take a Special or Heavy alongside those bolters.

The Shuriken Catapault is the better comparison. That's the basic troop weapon at about the same level. Lose the 1 shot at 24", gain the pseudorending.

The Avenger Shuriken Catapault is more in the Storm Bolter range. It's got 6" less range, and 2 fewer shots within 12", but it pseudorends.

The comparisons have been done to death.

Without 7E BattleFocus, Marines win even if the DAs get the alpha. By a lot. With 8thE, Marines win even if they sit outside 12", but in cover. It was close when Marines couldn't get within 12" each turn, but now they only have to close 6" - which is their base movement. It's not even close.

For hard targets, Avengers outshoot naked Marines, but die much faster. Against small arms - such as boltguns - *twice* as fast. When it was 7 DAs vs 5 PG/Combi Marines, the Marines had better shooting but some tradeoffs:
-Gets Hot on every Plasma shot
-Need to position so Plasma isn't killed early
-Combi is one-use

With the index, it became 5DAs vs 5 PG/Combi Tacs, and all drawbacks changed. Combis aren't one-use anymore. Plasma doesn't Gets Hot at S7. Ablative Wounds are guarenteed now. It's now 7DAs vs 5 Tacs, so the old math comes back. Except now, Tacs don't have those drawbacks.

If you want to kill Guard or Orkz or other light targets, the ASC is an equal tradeoff (1 less shot 18-24", 1 more at 12-18").

If you want to carry Melta or Flamer or Grav, DAs have no eqivelent. If you want to carry Lascannons or MLs or whatever, DAs can't.

If you want to give them a CC weapon, Marines add it for 4 points. DAs swap out their 4point weapon for a 4point CC weapon.

They can't even hold a Tac squad in CC - 5 Tacs will beat 10 DAs. Much less a min ASM squad or any other skirmishers. They aren't that much better than Guardsmen in CC, whereas Marines are.

As for the "easy access to a 5++", that's 24 points you're spending to upgrade your Exarch to have 0 shooting. At 5-mans, that's a LOT of lost dakka.

DAs are a little overtuned. Probably just need to pay 10pts for the Exarch again. But the ASC vs Bolter isn't the problem.

**Martel732**

After playing against necrons of all lists, I think the bolter's biggest problem is GEQs. Especially the heavy bolter. Heavy bolter is magnificient vs necrons, but crap vs geqs. Red flags galore.

**AnomanderRake**

Martel732 wrote:
After playing against necrons of all lists, I think the bolter's biggest problem is GEQs. Especially the heavy bolter. Heavy bolter is magnificient vs necrons, but crap vs geqs. Red flags galore.

The thing that's most made Guardsman-spam take off in 8th is the removal of the template weapons that used to be the efficient way to up and delete huge chunks of them. I'd rather see a special/heavy weapon introduced that's a more cost-effective tool for dealing with light infantry (storm bolters, grenade launchers, bring back the rotor cannon from 30k...) to plug the hole in the arsenal, as opposed to changes to the bolter.

**Bharring**

KILL THEM WITH FIRE!

That translates to "And buff the basic Flamer" in non-caps-speak.

**Xenomancers**

This is a pretty cool idea. For all bolter weapons if you deal an unsaved wound ad an additional str 3 auto hit to the unit. To represent the explosion on the round on vehicals and over penetration on infantry.

**Wyldhunt**

Xenomancers wrote:
This is a pretty cool idea. For all bolter weapons if you deal an unsaved wound ad an additional str 3 auto hit to the unit. To represent the explosion on the round on vehicals and over penetration on infantry.

Hmm. That is neat. Does the math work out on that in a desirable fashion? 5 marines shoot 10 shots at some guardsmen. They generate 6 ish hits (for the sake of easy math) which results in 4 wounds which results in about 3 dead guardsmen. This results in 3 bonus hits that will wound 1.5 times and kill one guardsman. Not amazing, but feels good.

6 hits against a chaos marine squad gives you 3 wounds, 1 dead chaos marine, 1 bonus hit, 1/3rd of a wound, and 1/9ths of a dead chaos marine. So not very useful.

6 hits against a rhino gives you 2 wounds, maybe 1 unsaved wound, 1 bonus hit, 1/6th of a wound, 1/18th of an extra hull point.

So I feel like this rule won't actually be very useful, but it also seems like it would feel good when it does work. And that rare time that you bsaically double your casualty count and evaporate a whole swarm of hormagaunts is going to feel pretty darn good. Would it be annoying to resolve though? For a bolter marine squad, it isn't too bad, but what about when you have to roll that extra to-wound roll and armor save and feel no pain roll each time a random drop pod or vehicle-mounted storm bolter tosses a couple of shots at you? You're almost doubling the time it takes to resolve a given bolt weapon's attacks.

**pelicaniforce**

Yeah, as regards drop pods et al, I don't like extra rolls for any basic weapon. It seems very consistent that bladestorm and gauss happened on a six on a normal to wound roll and that they didn't trigger a special kind of roll or reroll. They also happened on the wound roll instead of the hit roll, since things that triggered on a hit roll could force a second pool of special wound rolls.