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Bharring wrote:
There's still design space and fluff space for them to roll Primaris and Real marines into the same statline. I hope that's the direction they go.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
"And really any weapon that was AP3 in 7th edition became way stronger against terminators in 8th."

Shouldn't AP3 weapons - things liked shaped-charge missiles - have been better at cracking 2+ armor than AP- stuff?

I always found it odd that the main gun of Predator tank was just as likely to pierce the armor of a Space Marine as a Lasgun was. The ASM route lets them actually model that. They can have the Autocannon have light armor piercing (AP-1) without it being as good against armor as a Lascannon.

The problem is they handed AP-1 and AP-2 out like candy.

AP 0 lays waste to 3+ armor in 8th just fine. They handed out rof like candy, too. Power armor just doesn't work in 8th. Theres lethality in multiple forms in 8th, and power armor works against none of it.

 Crimson wrote:

HoundsofDemos wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
They obviously aren't best selling any more. No new player will buy minimarines when they can get much better looking Primaris. And sure, some rule support will remain, but I really doubt fixing minimarines is a priority to GW. They want people to buy the new stuff, and as you said, everybody already has loads of minimarines.

Except a new player who wants to have any chance playing marines either needs a ton of allies from another book or needs to buy at least some of the older kits. A primaris only army is one of the weaker builds the marine book has. It's clear that it's going to be years before GW can uncouple the two.

There will be new Primaris wave later this year. And then the third and fourth. Look at the Stormcast, they were very limited in the beginning too, but now just after few years they have a crazy amount of models. It will happen faster than you think.

I'd hardly call there range crazy. They have 64 entries over all and over half of that is clam pack characters or easy to build duplicates of other kits. The space marine line is much larger than that and that's not even looking at FW.

The current marine line has dozens of speeders, tanks, drop pods, dreadnaughts, and transports.

The primaris have five kits and one tank.

 Crimson wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

And yet VV, Chosen, and Stormshields all went down in cost.

Surely no new "old marine" kit will ever be made, but the production of them will be around for as long as they're profitable.

So Tacticals, who already have their direct Primaris replacements remained bad, whilst elite units which yet do not have Primaris equivalents got buffed...

You think Inceptors, Reivers, and Agressors are not equivalents of other marine units?

Tacs got buffed indirectly by weapon drops.

 Daedalus81 wrote:


You think Inceptors, Reivers, and Agressors are not equivalents of other marine units?

No, not as directly as Intercessors are to Tacticals.

Tacs got buffed indirectly by weapon drops.

Great! So minimarines are fixed now and this thread is unnecessary!

I'd hardly call there range crazy. They have 64 entries over all and over half of that is clam pack characters or easy to build duplicates of other kits. The space marine line is much larger than that and that's not even looking at FW.

The current marine line has dozens of speeders, tanks, drop pods, dreadnaughts, and transports.

The primaris have five kits and one tank.

One of the most extensive indeed. I don't think many armies or factions have that many modelling kits.

Great! So minimarines are fixed now and this thread is unnecessary!

O.O

 Marmatag wrote:
How about any IG artillery?

Manticores, basilisks, etc?

And really any weapon that was AP3 in 7th edition became way stronger against terminators in 8th. Because much of it became AP-2. And 2 wounds with a 4+ save isn't really more durable than 1 wound with a 2+ save. (Obvious math: 6 saves versus 4 saves to kill, and that's not factoring in multi-damage.)

They gained nothing but an extra wound against AP2 transitioning to AP-3. So while that is extra durability, those guns and weapons also gained the bog-standard 8th edition shot increase.

While true, these are also corner cases. It should also be pointed out that the Basilisk was hot garbage in basically every edition until 8E, few people ever saw one on an actual table. I can count on one hand the number of Basilisks I saw in non-apoc games before 8E in the preceding four editions.

If we are talking IG artillery, we should also not forget that there was the Medusa, which got to play with S10 and AP2, so it's not like IG artillery units didn't have an option to play with for that.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
How about any IG artillery?

Manticores, basilisks, etc?

And really any weapon that was AP3 in 7th edition became way stronger against terminators in 8th. Because much of it became AP-2. And 2 wounds with a 4+ save isn't really more durable than 1 wound with a 2+ save. (Obvious math: 6 saves versus 4 saves to kill, and that's not factoring in multi-damage.)

They gained nothing but an extra wound against AP2 transitioning to AP-3. So while that is extra durability, those guns and weapons also gained the bog-standard 8th edition shot increase.

While true, these are also corner cases. It should also be pointed out that the Basilisk was hot garbage in basically every edition until 8E, few people ever saw one on an actual table. I can count on one hand the number of Basilisks I saw in non-apoc games before 8E in the preceding four editions.

If we are talking IG artillery, we should also not forget that there was the Medusa, which got to play with S10 and AP2, so it's not like IG artillery units didn't have an option to play with for that.

Or heaven forbid a deathstrike missile which was one of the ig's best artillery until it went the way of the dodo.

 mew28 wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Ghorgul wrote:
How about this, these are mostly quite blatantly copied from Eldarsif who suggested similarly in
"How would you *slightly* change your favourite underperforming units/models?" thread

Every power armor unit:
Ignore first one single damage non-mortal wound every phase. (Eldarsif suggested similar for terminators)

Terminators:
Ignore first two single damage non-mortal wounds every phase.

The ignore single damage non-mortal wounds rules award MEQs and Terminators increased survivability against massed single damage attacks without making them super OP as it's still only one per phase. Basically every MEQ unit would have 1 extra ablative wound every phase, and Terminators would have 2, while both would still be affected by damage >1 attacks similarly as before, like they should.

Terminators are already durable as is compared to any previous edition.

Prove me wrong. Write a list of ALL the weapons they became weaker to and I'll provide a list greater than that to everything they're more durable to.

I will bite, from the space marine list we got
In Gmans aura
Last edition a tac marine shoting them with a melta gun would have done .46 of a wound each shot now it wounds .576 and that would turn into a 56% chance of doing the two wounds needed to kill the termi now each shot or about a 22% increase in damage
How about a power fist? Would have done .34 wounds last edition now it has a .37% chance of killing a termi with it and a chance of doing one wound as well.
How about a plasma gun? Last edition it would get .92 of a wound now it has a can get 1.152 kills and has lower chance of killing the guy using it. Or about a 25% up in kills
Sure they got better vs the stuff they could tank anyways like flamers or bolters but the kind of stuff the was killing terminators is doing so better even other then grav since it got gutted.

The moment you decided you should put everyone in Roboute's aura it was dishonest math. Sorry, but that doesn't prove your point at all.

 Asherian Command wrote:
Essentially. I think it is incredibly short sighted for people to suggest completeley get rid of marines. They have to balance them. Grey Knights, 30k, its completely pointless for them to get rid of them if they are the longest lasting miniature line GW has ever produced.

Oh they are going away:
"You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain"
Second Heresy confimed! They will become CSM.

Ghorgul wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
Essentially. I think it is incredibly short sighted for people to suggest completeley get rid of marines. They have to balance them. Grey Knights, 30k, its completely pointless for them to get rid of them if they are the longest lasting miniature line GW has ever produced.

Oh they are going away:
"You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain"
Second Heresy confimed! They will become CSM.

At worst they will have to "just" have their already over bloated range. They already have everything they would eve need (*) which is why GW resorted to making a whole new type of Marines.

(*) They could have done a signature unit for lots of neglected Chapters rather than just churning out flanderised units for the snowflake chapters.....

 Crimson wrote:

No, not as directly as Intercessors are to Tacticals.

So because it doesn't meet your very specific criteria it doesn't count?

Great! So minimarines are fixed now and this thread is unnecessary!

There will be a lot to unpack from CA and the FAQ, which is less than 3 months out. They may not be opaquely stronger, but they're not worse off, either.

 Asherian Command wrote:
Well super heavies should be limited, just like how i think it was dumb to give knights their own codex :/

Well one of the main reason why SM are suffering in this edition is the spam of undercosted superheavies/superheroes and the fact that some T3 5+ troops cost less than 6-7 points. It's hard to make heavy infantries or heavy armored light infantries (like power armour dudes) shine while there is a huge amount of firepower that has an high AP in each list to counter those big scary guys. At the same time with the new AP system you can't make T3 5+ dudes less resilient against light firepower without also making SM less resilient against the same weapons. If AP- weapons get a better AP they'd also be more efficient against power armour. Hence the need to increase the cost of some cheap troops which have the same points costs of previous editions, when CPs didn't exist and light firepower completely bypassed their saves.

 Asherian Command wrote:

I think termies, in general, need more firepower than they currently put out, while also having very little weakness to moving and shooting.

Or you have to start considering them as pure melee specialists, which is also something that SM may lack. 3++ shield and close combat weapon, that would give them a role. There are already too many shooty units in all SM armies, and to work properly they need to lose their generalist role. Giving both shooting and melee options would make termies too expensive, aka a very underperforming unit points wise. 5 dudes with PF and shield is only 170 points now.

Ok, but how would GW fix the termintors that can't take Stormshields? GK termintors are ment to be generalists, they are troops.

I'm kinda wishing GW would actually use the AP modifiers a bit more creatively. Say, a weapon with like 30 shots, S2 and +1 AP (yes, +1 AP, not -1 AP). This'd actually be better at killing Guardsmen than Marines.

Unfortunately, due to the new To Wound chart, it'd also be weirdly effective at killing high-toughness models, and because 2+ armour would gain nothing from the +1 AP it'd (relatively) massacre Terminator-equivalents.

Karol wrote:
Ok, but how would GW fix the termintors that can't take Stormshields? GK termintors are ment to be generalists, they are troops.

Just introduce the invuln option also for them maybe?

I play SW, which are an elite army maybe not that elite compared to GK but still very far from an horde army, and I litterally never bring generalists. My troops are always anti infantries with maybe a single anti tank weapon (plasma gun for grey hunters or power fist for blood claws) which doesn't make them particularly more expensive. More expensive units like characters, TWC, termies, wulfen, wolf guard are 100% anti infantries or anti tank/monsters/characters. So are shooty units. I do the same with orks but also DE, where only kabalites get a single anti tank weapon but most of the times I just give them shredders to be 100% anti infantries.

I'm not familiar with GK but to make them work you should be able to field them as anti infantries or anti tank, not generalists. Since you need multiple squads of them just give every unit a clear role on the table. The generalists concept can work only on overpowered/undercosted units or super cheap ones, it's something that should be avoided at competitive levels since everything must be optimized.

Space Wolves can run horde units though through Wolves themselves, and they have lots of cheap units like Sentry Guns and Attack Bikes (though their Attack Bikes are actually super garbage).

Look at the cheapest unit for each slot for GK and you'll see an issue there.

Or give termies actual strategems they can use. Cause currently they have 0

So I’ve been testing various fixes for marines for the last 3 months now with the help of my local group.

More firepower:
1st: We changed all boltguns to rapid fire 3 18”, storm bolters to rapid fire 4 18” and heavy bolters to rapid fire 3 30”

This worked quite well but with stratagems it became OP pretty quickly, in a game without re rolls for everything and strats this would work as far as we were concerned but that is not the game we play so this idea needs tweaking or scrapping.

10pt marines: this idea also worked, but the downside (if you choose to call it that) was loss of theme, marines went from elite to heavy armour horde, we did see an upsurge in large infantry lists and the loss of MSU with an average of 4/5 full tactical squads in most games, but then we might as well be playing heresy with the sheer amount of bodies on the table, it also added a further problem as most armies just could not deal with that much power armour, so again, tweak it or scrap it.

Mixed: we adjusted the first idea of firepower with the slightly cheaper marine, after a lot of games we decided around 11/12pts per tactical marine, we then gave them the following weapon that only marines have access to (sorry every other army that can get bolters, primaris we are leaving alone at the moment)
Astartes boltgun: range 24” rapid fire 2 ap-1 mass reactive: on a roll to hit of 6+ This weapons becomes damage 2, allocate these hits separately.

None of these solutions are perfect, but at the moment marines have a power armour problem, after a lot of games we think it’s a firepower problem mainly as the standard marine simply cannot put the wounds on thing through lack of AP and low shots

^ That stuff is totally bonkers.

 Formosa wrote:
So I’ve been testing various fixes for marines for the last 3 months now with the help of my local group.

More firepower:
1st: We changed all boltguns to rapid fire 3 18”, storm bolters to rapid fire 4 18” and heavy bolters to rapid fire 3 30”

This worked quite well but with stratagems it became OP pretty quickly, in a game without re rolls for everything and strats this would work as far as we were concerned but that is not the game we play so this idea needs tweaking or scrapping.

10pt marines: this idea also worked, but the downside (if you choose to call it that) was loss of theme, marines went from elite to heavy armour horde, we did see an upsurge in large infantry lists and the loss of MSU with an average of 4/5 full tactical squads in most games, but then we might as well be playing heresy with the sheer amount of bodies on the table, it also added a further problem as most armies just could not deal with that much power armour, so again, tweak it or scrap it.

Mixed: we adjusted the first idea of firepower with the slightly cheaper marine, after a lot of games we decided around 11/12pts per tactical marine, we then gave them the following weapon that only marines have access to (sorry every other army that can get bolters, primaris we are leaving alone at the moment)
Astartes boltgun: range 24” rapid fire 2 ap-1 mass reactive: on a roll to hit of 6+ This weapons becomes damage 2, allocate these hits separately.

None of these solutions are perfect, but at the moment marines have a power armour problem, after a lot of games we think it’s a firepower problem mainly as the standard marine simply cannot put the wounds on thing through lack of AP and low shots

Interesting. I wonder if storm bolters would improve because of that.

Would fit the lore, and in 30k they had bolter drills as a standard where you could unload the entirety of your clip in one turn but you couldn't use that ability again for the rest of the game. I actually quite like that idea for tacticals and intercessors.

I think to balance scouts you just make em cost 10 - 9pts.

Seriously - 8 shots from each stormbolter within 9"?

Wow.

 Mr Morden wrote:
Seriously - 8 shots from each stormbolter within 9"?

Wow.

Yeah, this is the sort of stuff that makes people not take the complaints about marine underperformance seriously. Utterly ludicrous. Hey, let's triple the firepower and lower the cost!

I've tried "Primaris-as-resculpt" where "Primaris Marines" aren't distinct units and everyone gets two wounds and a bolt rifle, but the end result seems mostly to just screw everyone else's small arms even harder. I honestly don't think the fix to Marines is a change to Marines; making them bigger/killier just passes the buck for the basic size creep problem on to units rendered irrelevant by bigger/killer Marines.

 Crimson wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Seriously - 8 shots from each stormbolter within 9"?

Wow.

Yeah, this is the sort of stuff that makes people not take the complaints about marine underperformance seriously. Utterly ludicrous. Hey, let's triple the firepower and lower the cost!

Yea no to the above. PA issue is that the game has gotten much deadlier and defensive saves/durability has been left well behind. Even the Primaris stat line is kinda a joke given how common two plus damage weapons are. The main way to fix this would be to limit offensive output and put superheavies back were they belong (apoc). GW won't do that though because they make a lot of money off of knights and other big stompy things. I miss 5th edition when a 3+ save actually meant something.

 Mr Morden wrote:
Seriously - 8 shots from each stormbolter within 9"?

Wow.

I mean he did say they thought it was too cheesy and powerful.

I honestly don't think the fix to Marines is a change to Marines; making them bigger/killier just passes the buck for the basic size creep problem on to units rendered irrelevant by bigger/killer Marines.

Then what would you suggest?

 Asherian Command wrote:

I mean he did say they thought it was too cheesy and powerful.

Yes. And then their solution was eleven or twelve point tacticals with AP -1 stormbolters which have a chance of doing two damage. It's just nuts.

 Crimson wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:

I mean he did say they thought it was too cheesy and powerful.

Yes. And then their solution was eleven or twelve point tacticals with AP -1 stormbolters which have a chance of doing two damage. It's just nuts.

That would be great for Sternguard, but not for regular tacticals, just give em rapid fire 1.

6's are not that common on marines, to make it even a bit 'worse' it should be on 'natural 6s'

Just like how plasma should be on 'natural 1s' they explode.

 Formosa wrote:
Astartes boltgun: range 24” rapid fire 2 ap-1 mass reactive: on a roll to hit of 6+ This weapons becomes damage 2, allocate these hits separately.

None of these solutions are perfect, but at the moment marines have a power armour problem, after a lot of games we think it’s a firepower problem mainly as the standard marine simply cannot put the wounds on thing through lack of AP and low shots

This Astartes boltgun of yours:
Do you really mean this as 24" rapid fire 2 (TWO)? AP -1. Rapid fire 2 means 4 at half range, so 4 AP -1 shots at 12" this is pretty crazy buff.
Doubling the rapid fire doubles their firepower, and then adding AP -1 to that they gain like +116.7% firepower against units with saves of 6+ or better, compared to previous version. This is too much, unless their point cost is increased, although I would say there isn't that much 'space' to increase their point cost without increasing their durability at the same time, even if their firepower is increased. Marine unit of 5 isn't really durable at all, and increasing their point cost would make the durability problem even worse, even if firepower were to be increased.

 Asherian Command wrote:

I honestly don't think the fix to Marines is a change to Marines; making them bigger/killier just passes the buck for the basic size creep problem on to units rendered irrelevant by bigger/killer Marines.

Then what would you suggest?

I've tossed around the idea of WHFB percentage-based army composition caps, where you'd get, say, 25% of your points to spend on the "giant guns" section of the org chart (anything that's got a large number of long-range multi-damage shots lives here, so at current prices three Russes at 2,000pts is about all you could afford); the problem with any comp-based system is that it screws the people whose Troops are bad and rewards the people whose Troops are good, so it'd have to come with a broader overhaul to just about everything to better control what goes in what slot. I've got other grand-overhaul question-notes about things like the AP system (set up to reward spamming -1/-2 AP way more than having better AP), the damage system (10-wound tanks feel like tissue paper and d6-damage guns create frustrating levels of randomness ("I got a lascannon shot through! (rolls damage) aaand...One damage! Good job, team!")), and the number of conflicting profiles (it frequently feels like "veterans" are a hold-over from older editions when Ld was relevant that end up just cluttering the granularity spectrum; a "Veteran" has to be between a Tactical Marine and a Terminator so there aren't as many things you can do to either of those profiles).

 Crimson wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Seriously - 8 shots from each stormbolter within 9"?

Wow.

Yeah, this is the sort of stuff that makes people not take the complaints about marine underperformance seriously. Utterly ludicrous. Hey, let's triple the firepower and lower the cost!

you go too far before you dial it back, and given that marines are nearly triple the cost of guardsman for the same firepower, triple the firepower for triple the cost at an extremely short range isnt much to ask



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ghorgul wrote:

 Formosa wrote:
Astartes boltgun: range 24” rapid fire 2 ap-1 mass reactive: on a roll to hit of 6+ This weapons becomes damage 2, allocate these hits separately.

None of these solutions are perfect, but at the moment marines have a power armour problem, after a lot of games we think it’s a firepower problem mainly as the standard marine simply cannot put the wounds on thing through lack of AP and low shots

This Astartes boltgun of yours:
Do you really mean this as 24" rapid fire 2 (TWO)? AP -1. Rapid fire 2 means 4 at half range, so 4 AP -1 shots at 12" this is pretty crazy buff.
Doubling the rapid fire doubles their firepower, and then adding AP -1 to that they gain like +116.7% firepower against units with saves of 6+ or better, compared to previous version. This is too much, unless their point cost is increased, although I would say there isn't that much 'space' to increase their point cost without increasing their durability at the same time, even if their firepower is increased. Marine unit of 5 isn't really durable at all, and increasing their point cost would make the durability problem even worse, even if firepower were to be increased.

Yep its a pretty crazy buff but its the one that we have settled on at the moment, as it stands now they have awful firepower and awful durability, lowering cost and upping firepower is the way we went with it after a lot of games of multiple tweaks in various ways.

think to yourself if this was GW that made this version of the boltgun not one of you would bat an eyelid, but because its just one of us (gamers) and it strays from the status quo a large amount, its jarring, marines need a large fix to deal with hordes, this version of the bolter does that AND for the first time shows the power of the weapon.