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It's two competing philosophies. I intentionally throw my guys into harm's way. Because cheap.

Tyel wrote:
I don't want to upset people, but putting stuff in your IG squads is just a bad idea. You are not giving yourself redundancy - you are just turning some of the least efficient to shoot units in the game into point pinatas.

Guardsmen are not hard to kill - but the problem is you wipe a squad and its just 40 points. The Guard/Imperial player has plenty of more stuff - and most likely, plenty of more guardsmen.

You load them up with a lascannon, and a plasma gun, give the sergeant some stuff, throw in a vox and suddenly I am getting double or more the return when I wipe the squad. Which I can still do just as easily before.

Not taking advantage of the special/heavy weapons slots is a waste.

A plasma gun is 7 points and dramatically increases the squad's firepower (especially vs low armor save units), a heavy bolter is 8 points and replaces a lasgun with 3 str5 AP-1 shots with 36" range. It is worth it unless you are using the IS purely as a meatshield.

I'd rather have 3 IS with plasma/heavy bolter than 4 barebones IS. Especially since "take aim" or cadian regimental traits nearly eliminates the possibility of plasma overheat.

If you do the math, the tooled up IS sacrifices roughly 25% durability (per point) for a huge offensive damage output increase.

Tyel wrote:
I don't want to upset people, but putting stuff in your IG squads is just a bad idea. You are not giving yourself redundancy - you are just turning some of the least efficient to shoot units in the game into point pinatas.

Guardsmen are not hard to kill - but the problem is you wipe a squad and its just 40 points. The Guard/Imperial player has plenty of more stuff - and most likely, plenty of more guardsmen.

You load them up with a lascannon, and a plasma gun, give the sergeant some stuff, throw in a vox and suddenly I am getting double or more the return when I wipe the squad. Which I can still do just as easily before.

Which is boring. I want to give them that stuff, I built models for it!

 Crimson wrote:

Tyel wrote:
I don't want to upset people, but putting stuff in your IG squads is just a bad idea. You are not giving yourself redundancy - you are just turning some of the least efficient to shoot units in the game into point pinatas.

Guardsmen are not hard to kill - but the problem is you wipe a squad and its just 40 points. The Guard/Imperial player has plenty of more stuff - and most likely, plenty of more guardsmen.

You load them up with a lascannon, and a plasma gun, give the sergeant some stuff, throw in a vox and suddenly I am getting double or more the return when I wipe the squad. Which I can still do just as easily before.

Which is boring. I want to give them that stuff, I built models for it!

Fun has no place in the hobby when people are trying to be hyper competitive and squeeze every last point out of a list instead of rolling dice and making pew pew noises.

You can throw a las cannon in every squad if you want. a 60 point lascannon with 10 W 4+ in cover is a deal man. It's just not making the best use of their orders. I'd much rather take 36 str 3 shots and charge with 2 str 4 attacks and tie up enemy units. It's a lot better than sitting back paying more and shooting a lascannon.

Martel732 wrote:
I know they are gonna die miserably. I KNOW this. They get nothing. Maybe mortars. I don't have the models, though. I'm new to IG.

The officer doesn't get a vox caster, because they are gonna die, too. 6" is fine. It's a 30 pt model.

But the temporal cost on the opponent is crushing. Even if they don't realize it. Every time they shoot a 4 pt dum dum, or even assault them, I'm pulling ahead. Unless I'm being forced to kill guardsmen, too.

The temporal cost is more than made up for by the VP gain from Butchers Bill, Reaper, and the Primary Kill One VP/EoR Kill More Units VP. There's a reason the top soup lists stick to the bare minimum number of infantry squads and a huge part of that is taking more than 30 guardsmen is pretty much giving your opponent easy VP. Part of the reason why having a Knight is such a boon to a list. If they take your Knight down, you likely will only need to kill two small units to come ahead that round for the killed more primary. If they fail to kill your Knight for whatever reason, then you basically get to pull ahead by a full turn's primary kill VP.

A fix without nerfing guard into the ground is to bring back platoons, say 2 infantry squads and a PL per troops choice minimum for 100 points/troops choice barebones. This makes the cost of a soup CP battery 360 points while doing little to change the structure of most mono-guard armies (other than adding 60 points of PL's you normally wouldn't take). GW has already showed willingness to be flexible with force orgs in the Knight and DE codices so its not breaking any new ground there. This would be a much more elegant fix than vainly searching for a nonexistent points value that magically makes Guardsmen unattractive for soup while at the same time being balanced as a mono-faction.

Would some players still take a 360 point soup battery? Maybe, but it opens up a lot more battalion choices within Imperium to include admech and taking the 360 point platoon-based version opens you up to three reaper, four butchers bill, four headhunter, and a lot of easy primary VP's, which not everyone will see as a worthwhile trade.

Maybe. I don't own more than 30, so I can only comment about playing against more than 30. Which is nightmarish.

Tyel wrote:
I don't want to upset people, but putting stuff in your IG squads is just a bad idea. You are not giving yourself redundancy - you are just turning some of the least efficient to shoot units in the game into point pinatas.

Guardsmen are not hard to kill - but the problem is you wipe a squad and its just 40 points. The Guard/Imperial player has plenty of more stuff - and most likely, plenty of more guardsmen.

You load them up with a lascannon, and a plasma gun, give the sergeant some stuff, throw in a vox and suddenly I am getting double or more the return when I wipe the squad. Which I can still do just as easily before.

(shrugs) I've heard your argument for 25+ years. You play your IG squads however suits you, I'll continue to play them how works for me, & we'll just agree to disagree on wether the other guys way is effective.

w1zard wrote:
Not taking advantage of the special/heavy weapons slots is a waste.

A plasma gun is 7 points and dramatically increases the squad's firepower (especially vs low armor save units), a heavy bolter is 8 points and replaces a lasgun with 3 str5 AP-1 shots with 36" range. It is worth it unless you are using the IS purely as a meatshield.

I'd rather have 3 IS with plasma/heavy bolter than 4 barebones IS. Especially since "take aim" or cadian regimental traits nearly eliminates the possibility of plasma overheat.

If you do the math, the tooled up IS sacrifices roughly 25% durability (per point) for a huge offensive damage output increase.

I guess it depends on you look at it.
In a "everything teleports into 12"" scenario (realistic or otherwise) you are doing 32% more damage output than the 4 IS squads, but if I shoot you back I am getting a 37.5% increase (assuming I wipe the squads that is, and this arguably swings things in your favour in a real game situation).

However if I have 2 company commanders issuing FRFSRF on the 4 IS squads, and you have 3 orders on your 3 squads, the damage output increase for you is pretty marginal (just 13% if you are Cadian and rerolling all misses, but not moving can cause issues - and we are not giving a chapter tactic to the 4 IS), while you are still giving your opponent that 37.5% increase to their damage.

On the other hand outside of 12" your HB/plas unit performs a lot better. It would be expected to around 70% more damage for a 37.5% increase in your opponents damage - which is probably worth it, especially as you get the benefit until the special weapons die. This is however mitigated somewhat by orders doubling las output compared to what they can do for the special weapons. (There are also the additional downsides of the HB being heavy, and the plasma gun potentially killing the bearer).

So if you are going to have orders and you expect to get in close (either because you are moving up or they are) I'd argue its not worth it. If you are going to camp at the back plinking away its probably is. Although in my experience most of the armies keen to keep you at range have -1s to hit, which further skews the numbers. You can also say that the Plasma gun opens up new targets - and yes if you run into Primaris or most bikers anything T7/3+ no invuls it will serve you well. On the other hand a lot of these units are judged bad that reason.

In my view you want to keep them cheap, make them Catachan, bundle up the table together and FRFSRF then charge, preferably with 2 or 3 S4 attacks but I can see the argument if you are planning to stay outside of 12" the game.

I'd like if sergeant equipment on just about all codexes was worth it but with certain exceptions this usually isn't the case versus just taking more stuff.

I use Valhallans and am perfectly content with how they work.

Too many invulns in the game now for random plasma to be worth it. Optimizing to kill meq is very 3rd ed.

how about giving armies that have detachments sharing all traits, some sort of a blank buff, on top of what ever they get from the detachments?

the soup would be the flexibility of picking units that are better vs solid rules for someone who has only ultramarines on the board and nothing else.

Karol wrote:
how about giving armies that have detachments sharing all traits, some sort of a blank buff, on top of what ever they get from the detachments?

the soup would be the flexibility of picking units that are better vs solid rules for someone who has only ultramarines on the board and nothing else.

Yup, Buff Mono rather than nerf soup!

allies get access to all the tools .. mono gets the CP pool to make their limited tools hit harder / more often

I've suggested +3 CP (Random number off top of head) for every detachment that shares the warlords <codex> including the first (replaces battleforged)

Mono guard still get a shed load of CP and continue to not be able to spend them all in a game anyways

Mono Nids, Crons and Marines etc. get access to a few more tools to combat squad or SFTS or go to ground without having to use 20% of their CP in turn 1 just to survive

Tyel wrote:
I don't want to upset people, but putting stuff in your IG squads is just a bad idea. You are not giving yourself redundancy - you are just turning some of the least efficient to shoot units in the game into point pinatas.

Guardsmen are not hard to kill - but the problem is you wipe a squad and its just 40 points. The Guard/Imperial player has plenty of more stuff - and most likely, plenty of more guardsmen.

By 'plenty of [sic] more stuff', are you referring to units other than guardsman?

Or are you saying that even an army like mine - which only uses IG infantry - should still stick to lasguns?

I mean, I can maybe see your point when it comes to Lascannons, since you're increasing the cost of the squad by 50% (though you are gaining significant long-range firepower in return). However, a 7pt plasmagun seems like a pretty good investment on a 40pt squad.

Hmm that would actually be cool I guess. A knight army that is mono could fuel its knights longer or easier, but lack the chaff a soup list would have. GW could even play with some of the stratagems too.Lets say if a all detachments the same, you get some or one stratagem cheaper, or you get auto CP return, so mono lists wouldn't be forced in to running aquilas or specific traits etc. Everyone would still have access to the same stuff, soup would be more flexible, but using a craftworld stratagem on a Inari unit wouldn't be as efficient as doing the same in an alaitoc army.

 vipoid wrote:
By 'plenty of [sic] more stuff', are you referring to units other than guardsman?

Or are you saying that even an army like mine - which only uses IG infantry - should still stick to lasguns?

I mean, I can maybe see your point when it comes to Lascannons, since you're increasing the cost of the squad by 50% (though you are gaining significant long-range firepower in return). However, a 7pt plasmagun seems like a pretty good investment on a 40pt squad.

Its everything in moderation. A 40 point unit and a 47 point unit with a plasma gun are both different from say a 75~ point fully blinged up unit with a lascannon, a plasma gun, a vox, a plasma pistol etc etc.

Plasma and heavy weapons tend to pull a unit in two directions - because the first wants to be in 12" to rapid fire (which tends to mean moving forward), and the other wants you to stay still to avoid the -1 to hit.

If you are only going to have infantry then I agree you need to bring some heavier weapons along and put them somewhere. A heavy weapons team in an infantry squad is more protected than a heavy weapons squad, which can (LOS ignoring mortars hidden behind a cardboard box aside) be quite easily nuked. So sure - but then saying you only want to run infantry is an arbitrary limit you have placed upon yourself. Mathematically, you probably want a Castellan.

Tyel wrote:
Its everything in moderation. A 40 point unit and a 47 point unit with a plasma gun are both different from say a 75~ point fully blinged up unit with a lascannon, a plasma gun, a vox, a plasma pistol etc etc.

Oh, I agree that you don't want to just buy everything (e.g. I'd never have a pistol and Lascannon in the same unit, and I think Vox Casters are abysmal at the best of times), but there's still some middle ground between that and buying no upgrades at all.

Tyel wrote:
Plasma and heavy weapons tend to pull a unit in two directions - because the first wants to be in 12" to rapid fire (which tends to mean moving forward), and the other wants you to stay still to avoid the -1 to hit.

12" for Plasma is ideal, but I'm happy to just take a single shot at 24" if it means not having to move my Heavy Weapon.

Also, having a Heavy Weapon and a Plasmagun means the squad gets more benefit out of the 'reroll 1s to hit' order.

Tyel wrote:
If you are only going to have infantry then I agree you need to bring some heavier weapons along and put them somewhere. A heavy weapons team in an infantry squad is more protected than a heavy weapons squad, which can (LOS ignoring mortars hidden behind a cardboard box aside) be quite easily nuked. So sure - but then saying you only want to run infantry is an arbitrary limit you have placed upon yourself. Mathematically, you probably want a Castellan.

I'm aware that all-infantry is an arbitrary limit, but that's because I play the game for fun and I find infantry hordes fun.

I'm sure it's mathematically better, but the day I buy a Castellan is the day I snort gunpowder while smoking three cigars.

RogueApiary wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
I know they are gonna die miserably. I KNOW this. They get nothing. Maybe mortars. I don't have the models, though. I'm new to IG.

The officer doesn't get a vox caster, because they are gonna die, too. 6" is fine. It's a 30 pt model.

But the temporal cost on the opponent is crushing. Even if they don't realize it. Every time they shoot a 4 pt dum dum, or even assault them, I'm pulling ahead. Unless I'm being forced to kill guardsmen, too.

The temporal cost is more than made up for by the VP gain from Butchers Bill, Reaper, and the Primary Kill One VP/EoR Kill More Units VP. There's a reason the top soup lists stick to the bare minimum number of infantry squads and a huge part of that is taking more than 30 guardsmen is pretty much giving your opponent easy VP. Part of the reason why having a Knight is such a boon to a list. If they take your Knight down, you likely will only need to kill two small units to come ahead that round for the killed more primary. If they fail to kill your Knight for whatever reason, then you basically get to pull ahead by a full turn's primary kill VP.

A fix without nerfing guard into the ground is to bring back platoons, say 2 infantry squads and a PL per troops choice minimum for 100 points/troops choice barebones. This makes the cost of a soup CP battery 360 points while doing little to change the structure of most mono-guard armies (other than adding 60 points of PL's you normally wouldn't take). GW has already showed willingness to be flexible with force orgs in the Knight and DE codices so its not breaking any new ground there. This would be a much more elegant fix than vainly searching for a nonexistent points value that magically makes Guardsmen unattractive for soup while at the same time being balanced as a mono-faction.

Would some players still take a 360 point soup battery? Maybe, but it opens up a lot more battalion choices within Imperium to include admech and taking the 360 point platoon-based version opens you up to three reaper, four butchers bill, four headhunter, and a lot of easy primary VP's, which not everyone will see as a worthwhile trade.

Except the temporal cost of focusing guardsmen is too great.

You have 1-2 turns where your army is going to be at peak or near peak strength. It reaches a point in the game where guardsmen squads are difficult to remove, simply because points are sorely depleted on both sides of the fence.

For example, i shoot poison at knights in the early going. Because by turn 3 i'll be scraping by with a few units left, with probably 60% of my army dead. That's how it is playing against Knights. I need to kill 2 before turn 3 or i'm dead. And every single shot counts.

If you're killing my 4pt dum dums, I'm probably winning.

Tyel wrote:
I don't want to upset people, but putting stuff in your IG squads is just a bad idea. You are not giving yourself redundancy - you are just turning some of the least efficient to shoot units in the game into point pinatas.

Guardsmen are not hard to kill - but the problem is you wipe a squad and its just 40 points. The Guard/Imperial player has plenty of more stuff - and most likely, plenty of more guardsmen.

You load them up with a lascannon, and a plasma gun, give the sergeant some stuff, throw in a vox and suddenly I am getting double or more the return when I wipe the squad. Which I can still do just as easily before.

Maybe so, but I'd still take the Auto Cannon. That's a magnificent gun for the points, I wish Tactical Marines could still equip them.

Tyel wrote:
I guess it depends on you look at it.
In a "everything teleports into 12"" scenario (realistic or otherwise) you are doing 32% more damage output than the 4 IS squads, but if I shoot you back I am getting a 37.5% increase (assuming I wipe the squads that is, and this arguably swings things in your favour in a real game situation).

However if I have 2 company commanders issuing FRFSRF on the 4 IS squads, and you have 3 orders on your 3 squads, the damage output increase for you is pretty marginal (just 13% if you are Cadian and rerolling all misses, but not moving can cause issues - and we are not giving a chapter tactic to the 4 IS), while you are still giving your opponent that 37.5% increase to their damage.

On the other hand outside of 12" your HB/plas unit performs a lot better. It would be expected to around 70% more damage for a 37.5% increase in your opponents damage - which is probably worth it, especially as you get the benefit until the special weapons die. This is however mitigated somewhat by orders doubling las output compared to what they can do for the special weapons. (There are also the additional downsides of the HB being heavy, and the plasma gun potentially killing the bearer).

So if you are going to have orders and you expect to get in close (either because you are moving up or they are) I'd argue its not worth it. If you are going to camp at the back plinking away its probably is. Although in my experience most of the armies keen to keep you at range have -1s to hit, which further skews the numbers. You can also say that the Plasma gun opens up new targets - and yes if you run into Primaris or most bikers anything T7/3+ no invuls it will serve you well. On the other hand a lot of these units are judged bad that reason.

In my view you want to keep them cheap, make them Catachan, bundle up the table together and FRFSRF then charge, preferably with 2 or 3 S4 attacks but I can see the argument if you are planning to stay outside of 12" the game.

I'd like if sergeant equipment on just about all codexes was worth it but with certain exceptions this usually isn't the case versus just taking more stuff.

Good analysis.

I think it boils down sacrificing the durability (per point) for offensive output. Sure, a barebones squad can come close to the offensive output of a tooled up squad under very specific conditions (officer within 6"+within 12" of target+available order), but in general the tooled up IS is going to have a much better offensive output in the majority of situations.

For a meatshield squad purely desgined to tank wounds and act as a screen, barebones is probably the better way to run them.

People run mortars for the obvious reason that they make it difficult to hold back line objectives, and they're always shooting (and, of course, they're super undercosted).

You can't leave a min-sized cheap squad with little defense on an objective and expect to hold it against Guard. Unless, you, are also, playing Guard.

And a mortar if left alive will fire 6 times. You can't make the same argument for an autocannon.

 Marmatag wrote:
People run mortars for the obvious reason that they make it difficult to hold back line objectives, and they're always shooting (and, of course, they're super undercosted).

You can't leave a min-sized cheap squad with little defense on an objective and expect to hold it against Guard. Unless, you, are also, playing Guard.

And a mortar if left alive will fire 6 times. You can't make the same argument for an autocannon.

What is your 'fair cost' for a mortar? Cause a unit of three with a Cadian officer ordering it to reroll all averages 3.5 dead guardsmen without cover. Let's say you use the officer efficiently and throw in a second mortar team, you're up to 96 points invested and you kill... 7 Guardsmen? Alaitoc rangers are pretty much immune, Skitari vanguard are going to be rocking shroudpsalm or using their 5-man unit size to be in cover (3.5 dead on average, rounding up) and/or are stygies for -1 to hit on top of that. What infantry units get completely wrecked by mortars that aren't other guardsmen? Necron warriors lose 4 per turn, which is probably the best ROI you can get on basic infantry, but Necrons are overcosted anyway. They kill about 2.6 Tactical Marines, which is again, not terrible, but for 96 points invested, I think a 26-39 point ROI is somewhat reasonable given 7 guardsmen is a 28 point return. If they're Raven Guard or in cover, that number goes down even further (1.26 dead in cover, the math for -1 to hit is even lower because the rerolls don't benefit as much and if you have -1 and cover, you can effectively ignore the mortars entirely).

Another thing that I think you're failing to take into account here as well is that rule of three reined in mortars' power substantially. The 15-18 you'd regularly see in lists around January are reduced to 9, and frankly, 9 mortars don't get much done, especially since the number of company commanders was similarly limited to three, meaning they're likely getting two buffs to split among the three units, if they even leave one back there.

Also yes, if an autocannon is left alive, it will fire six times. I assume you meant to say that the mortar is guaranteed to get six shots in over the course of a game, which it's not. A mortar HWS is three 60mm bases, they're not that easy to hide and the moment you can draw a bead on any single one of them, the entire squad is crippled or dead. The only terrain feature that all but guarantees their safety is a ruin with ITC rules in place and a large enough footprint to fit three 60mm bases on the first floor. If your opponent had multiple such buildings in their deployment zone to house the other two, then I assume pretty much your whole army must have cover as well or you let your opponent set up the board in his favor.

Personally, I think you and the rest of the guard hater crew got a bit traumatized from the early days of 8th and haven't realized the game has changed substantially since then.

The point is more that ignoring LOS is way under priced for the advantage it gives, especially when you have a decent range.
It's more a GW problem than a Guard problem, however Guard having the most and easiest and cheapest access to NLOS shooting makes them as a codex the poster child for that issue.

Also they came out of the edition change with almost across the board improvements, heck even the last FAQ screwed other factions over harder to even attempt to impact Guard on the CP farming, and strategum spam.

Ice_can wrote:
The point is more that ignoring LOS is way under priced for the advantage it gives, especially when you have a decent range.
It's more a GW problem than a Guard problem, however Guard having the most and easiest and cheapest access to NLOS shooting makes them as a codex the poster child for that issue.

Also they came out of the edition change with almost across the board improvements, heck even the last FAQ screwed other factions over harder to even attempt to impact Guard on the CP farming, and strategum spam.

One issue though is that if you remove mortars you effectively take out entire HWS option from the codex. Nothing else is worth putting on 3 super soft models.

tneva82 wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
The point is more that ignoring LOS is way under priced for the advantage it gives, especially when you have a decent range.
It's more a GW problem than a Guard problem, however Guard having the most and easiest and cheapest access to NLOS shooting makes them as a codex the poster child for that issue.

Also they came out of the edition change with almost across the board improvements, heck even the last FAQ screwed other factions over harder to even attempt to impact Guard on the CP farming, and strategum spam.

One issue though is that if you remove mortars you effectively take out entire HWS option from the codex. Nothing else is worth putting on 3 super soft models.

And having a bad unit with only bad options is new or bad for w40k, because ?

Ice_can wrote:
The point is more that ignoring LOS is way under priced for the advantage it gives, especially when you have a decent range.
It's more a GW problem than a Guard problem, however Guard having the most and easiest and cheapest access to NLOS shooting makes them as a codex the poster child for that issue.

Also they came out of the edition change with almost across the board improvements, heck even the last FAQ screwed other factions over harder to even attempt to impact Guard on the CP farming, and strategum spam.

Again, please find a price point for mortars that wouldn't also make them trash tier. They have mediocre damage output against anything that has any type of defensive buff, are easily killed if you can even see one of the three 60mm bases, and can't be brought in significant volume any more to leverage their cheap cost.

9 of them, (the most you can take unless you want to stuff them into infantry squads) get an an average of 32 shots at BS4, killing 2.6 MEQ out of cover. Let's round up and say three dead marines, just a bit over 33% ROI. That's not exactly game breaking. I just don't see how you guys are coming to the conclusion that these things are grossly undercosted. They cost 5 and have an upper ceiling of 7 points before they start stepping onto the heavy bolter's price. Frankly, even at 7points I'd rather just take the heavy bolters at 8 or completely drop the HWS' for other units. I saw one of you jokers throw out 10, which is hilariously overcosted and would basically just delete them from the game.

I really don't know what tables you guys are playing on that you can't draw LOS on a mortar by at least turn 2. Unless you're playing guard players running the old school tiny metal mortars and they fit them all in the first floor of a building, you should be able to wipe out 1-2 easily and the third with some work.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Karol wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
The point is more that ignoring LOS is way under priced for the advantage it gives, especially when you have a decent range.
It's more a GW problem than a Guard problem, however Guard having the most and easiest and cheapest access to NLOS shooting makes them as a codex the poster child for that issue.

Also they came out of the edition change with almost across the board improvements, heck even the last FAQ screwed other factions over harder to even attempt to impact Guard on the CP farming, and strategum spam.

One issue though is that if you remove mortars you effectively take out entire HWS option from the codex. Nothing else is worth putting on 3 super soft models.

And having a bad unit with only bad options is new or bad for w40k, because ?

Because more gakky units means even less diversity in lists? Mortars are not defining the meta and rule of three ensured that. They're a good unit at a cost that might have a single upward point of wiggle room before they become trash. Or are we just playing the "I can't have nice things so nobody can" card?

Finally, if the big bad mortars have really got you down, a whirlwind scorpius has pretty good odds of deleting two full HWS' in cover (6 mortars) per turn.

RogueApiary wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
The point is more that ignoring LOS is way under priced for the advantage it gives, especially when you have a decent range.
It's more a GW problem than a Guard problem, however Guard having the most and easiest and cheapest access to NLOS shooting makes them as a codex the poster child for that issue.

Also they came out of the edition change with almost across the board improvements, heck even the last FAQ screwed other factions over harder to even attempt to impact Guard on the CP farming, and strategum spam.

Again, please find a price point for mortars that wouldn't also make them trash tier. They have mediocre damage output against anything that has any type of defensive buff, are easily killed if you can even see one of the three 60mm bases, and can't be brought in significant volume any more to leverage their cheap cost.

9 of them, (the most you can take unless you want to stuff them into infantry squads) get an an average of 32 shots at BS4, killing 2.6 MEQ out of cover. Let's round up and say three dead marines, just a bit over 33% ROI. That's not exactly game breaking. I just don't see how you guys are coming to the conclusion that these things are grossly undercosted. They cost 5 and have an upper ceiling of 7 points before they start stepping onto the heavy bolter's price. Frankly, even at 7points I'd rather just take the heavy bolters at 8 or completely drop the HWS' for other units. I saw one of you jokers throw out 10, which is hilariously overcosted and would basically just delete them from the game.

I really don't know what tables you guys are playing on that you can't draw LOS on a mortar by at least turn 2. Unless you're playing guard players running the old school tiny metal mortars and they fit them all in the first floor of a building, you should be able to wipe out 1-2 easily and the third with some work.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Karol wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
The point is more that ignoring LOS is way under priced for the advantage it gives, especially when you have a decent range.
It's more a GW problem than a Guard problem, however Guard having the most and easiest and cheapest access to NLOS shooting makes them as a codex the poster child for that issue.

Also they came out of the edition change with almost across the board improvements, heck even the last FAQ screwed other factions over harder to even attempt to impact Guard on the CP farming, and strategum spam.

One issue though is that if you remove mortars you effectively take out entire HWS option from the codex. Nothing else is worth putting on 3 super soft models.

And having a bad unit with only bad options is new or bad for w40k, because ?

Because more gakky units means even less diversity in lists? Mortars are not defining the meta and rule of three ensured that. They're a good unit at a cost that might have a single upward point of wiggle room before they become trash. Or are we just playing the "I can't have nice things so nobody can" card?

Finally, if the big bad mortars have really got you down, a whirlwind scorpius has pretty good odds of deleting two full HWS' in cover (6 mortars) per turn.

Your overy simplifying or ignoring the advantage that NLOS gives as your unit can hunker down hold a back field objective and still shoot at anything with range. A dirrect fire weapon can be manoeuvred around.

It's also a more fundamental issue that a Guardsmen shouldn't cost 3pts like they do in HWS. Combined with mortars stacking to make it offensively undercosted.

The HWS should be 27 or 30 points before weapons if you want
To have a honest discussion as a 5+ sv is worth more than 3 pt. then mortars should be probably 6 points

RogueApiary wrote:
9 of them, (the most you can take unless you want to stuff them into infantry squads) get an an average of 32 shots at BS4, killing 2.6 MEQ out of cover. Let's round up and say three dead marines, just a bit over 33% ROI. That's not exactly game breaking. I just don't see how you guys are coming to the conclusion that these things are grossly undercosted. They cost 5 and have an upper ceiling of 7 points before they start stepping onto the heavy bolter's price. Frankly, even at 7points I'd rather just take the heavy bolters at 8 or completely drop the HWS' for other units. I saw one of you jokers throw out 10, which is hilariously overcosted and would basically just delete them from the game.

If you can't see why "a bit over 33% ROI" (34.47% - and make that 40%~ with stationary Cadians rerolling 1s) at 48" without LOS is good then I don't know what to tell you. What sort of return do you expect? 45%? And you wonder why people think Guard are overpowered?

Take heavy bolters if you like - but you can't camp them behind a breeze block and just plink away. You can't shoot my objective holders who are hiding behind their own breeze block off the table.

Now I guess if you say "we only play with GW terrain and RAW all those holes make LOS blocking essentially impossible" but that's not the case on tables all over the world either at tournaments or more casual games. I find your claim that you will "definitely" get LOS by turn 2 to just be wrong.

Even then, so what. Sure they are not tough - but at 5.5 points per wound this isn't exactly setting you back.

Karol wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
The point is more that ignoring LOS is way under priced for the advantage it gives, especially when you have a decent range.
It's more a GW problem than a Guard problem, however Guard having the most and easiest and cheapest access to NLOS shooting makes them as a codex the poster child for that issue.

Also they came out of the edition change with almost across the board improvements, heck even the last FAQ screwed other factions over harder to even attempt to impact Guard on the CP farming, and strategum spam.

One issue though is that if you remove mortars you effectively take out entire HWS option from the codex. Nothing else is worth putting on 3 super soft models.

And having a bad unit with only bad options is new or bad for w40k, because ?

Not new but obviously bad. Nobody can seriously claim it's good to have bad units in the game.

Howabout rather than just nerf the only good option make the other options worth taking. If you just up the price of mortar which isn't game dominating option anyway you just remove HMS as that won't help other options one bit.

I still think that the cost of a base squad should increase, but the cost of extras and spacial and heavy weapons should decrease.

I think players should be rewarded for taking things like radios, so making them a 1 point upgrade to a 50 point squad would be great. Drop special weapon costs by 2 points as well. Now you have the same before and after costs for a fully tooled up squad, but a more expensive bare bones one to reflect the fact that the guard does expect its men to fire their weapons lots before dying in droves.