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so Warhammer 40k has always fitted into its self-made box of stats up to 10, saves of 2-6+ (though some units had "-" for saves).

Recently, stats like strength have been going over this old limit, and I wonder if this might be the best route to take.

My proposal (which will always need tweaks, points adjustments etc):

To Wound:
S<T/2: 6+, +1 to saves
S><<T: 6+
S<T: 5+
S=T: 4+
S>T: 3+
S>>T: 2+
S>T*2: 2+, -1 to saves

(basically the current chart, but making it more difficult if double or more (by affecting saves) and narrowing the window of effective firepower - S3 will wound T5 on 6's.

This would be a more flexible chart which makes wounding monsters with lasguns less effective, and blowing marines up with lascannons more effective, but doesn't change much of weapons shooting their prime targets.

Then you do the following (specifics to be decided):

1: Uncap toughness, and boost the toughness of everything by 1 (gretchin become T3, tanks become T10-11)
2: Uncap saves - Gretchin get Sv 7+, Tanks get 1+ or 0+. a natural roll of a 1 always fails, as always.
3: Boost AP of things which should have it - lascannons to AP-5, meltaguns to AP-6, -7 on close range.

The effects I can see in this is:

1: separating tanks and men somewhat
2: making tanks seem as scary as they should be by removing the limits of the statline
3: making anti-tank weapons as scary as they should be by making them keep up with the tanks
4: Making the game less killy - reducing turn 1 overkill and such like.


Things which might occur & need tweaking:

Heavy infantry becoming too susceptible to AT firepower. If this occurs, I would suggest changing cover to instead reduce incoming AP, rather than adding to saves, and then have it reduce AP by 2, or maybe even 3 This would protect from AP weapons but not make elites overpowered vs small-arms fire. AP- weapons would give +1 to saves on units in cover, perhaps.

thoughts?

Things like S and T go well over 10 these days. I think a better approach would be something like removing casualties at the end of the game turn, or have units engage like in Epic Armageddon so that units being shot at can return fire before they're all dead.

Nurglitch wrote:
Things like S and T go well over 10 these days. I think a better approach would be something like removing casualties at the end of the game turn, or have units engage like in Epic Armageddon so that units being shot at can return fire before they're all dead.

This would have no effect on making tanks tougher and anti-tank stronger. It also has the issues where a unit knows full well that it is dead at the end of the turn, so can perform out-of-character suicide charges in an effort to deal as much damage as possible, with no consequences - they're already dead.

"The last thing the tau did before being shot to bits was to run at the enemy and punch them because they were close enough and it might have worked." not really a good image, to me.

I like end-of-turn damage if it is still a bit random - I mocked up a skirmish game where damage cards were dealt face down, and some of them did no damage. That way, if your unit had 8 wounds left and 8 damage cards, it might be dead anyway, or it might not, so suicide charges are tempered somewhat.

At any rate, mitigating alpha strike was low on my priority list. I mainly want to make antitank guns worth it, and anti infantry weapons less effective vs tanks. Then tanks can lower their wounds a bit to balance it (if you lose a wound to a lasgun, which needs 6's and you get +1 save, then unlucky!

I would also make all "+1 to wound" abilities instead confer +1 Strength. Otherwise it's too easily abused (lasguns need a 6, autocannon needs a 6, I'll put +1 to wound on the massed laser pointers!).

I think the wound counts/damage counts/rate of fire needs work more than the to-wound table does; because GW's locked themselves into "tanks have 10-14W"/"anti-tank weapons do d6 damage"/"spammable high-volume weapons do 2 damage". If you wanted to make tanks feel more like tanks and spamming D2 not the answer to everything you might increase the wound count of all tanks by 50-100% and then make anything that does d6 damage do d6+3 or 2d6 damage (re-pointing as necessary), see what that does.

You might also include a global 5+ Invulnerable save for being a "tank" in the first place, possibly bumping the Eldar vehicles that already have a 5++ up to a 4++ to keep them distinct, just to make them harder to casually auto-remove.

 some bloke wrote:

The effects I can see in this is:

1: separating tanks and men somewhat
2: making tanks seem as scary as they should be by removing the limits of the statline
3: making anti-tank weapons as scary as they should be by making them keep up with the tanks
4: Making the game less killy - reducing turn 1 overkill and such like.

1: Tanks and men are already plenty separated, 90 S3 hits kills 3 infantry Squads, if you spread the fire it'll do more with morale and it will do 5 wounds to a Leman Russ.
2: Tanks are overrated, wars are won by the blood of heroes and the genius of their commanders. At least that's how I want my 40k to work.
3: It's essentially a less egregious version of 6th edition flyers and flakk weapons, you either bring the right weapons to the fight or you die.
4: It's not going to become less killy if you can still just shoot lascannons twice with a Stratagem, ignore modifiers because of an ability, add 1 to hit rolls for a special doctrine, re-roll hit rolls because of an aura ability and add 1 to wound rolls and re-roll wound rolls of 1 with another Stratagem and Aura and get AP-7 between increased base AP and another ability or two.

Iron Hands vehicles are going to be impossibly hard to kill with S6 D3 damage weapons and now you want to take them from wounding on 5+ to 6+. Not to mention all the other amazing vehicles in the game, Doomsday Arks, Aeldari and Necron flyers, Tank Commanders, Knights. Nerfing abilities that improve damage by disgusting amounts would be a good start, thinking hard about which abilities need to be offensive and which could be replaced with defensive alternatives could help slow the game down. Let's imagine two SM gunlines shooting at eachother, they both have banners so as they shoot and kill opposing models they'll shoot more and kill more of eachother, before the second player gets his turn both players might have lost half their army.

It might make the game better for you if low S weapons destroying your high toughness models is something that bugs you or if your low S weapons are better AT weapons than your lascannons, but you'd probably have to drop some wounds to make it fair balance wise. You could introduce a negative FNP for example. Depends on how many values you want to change and whether you want to dig into the costs of every unit.

 vict0988 wrote:

 some bloke wrote:

The effects I can see in this is:

1: separating tanks and men somewhat
2: making tanks seem as scary as they should be by removing the limits of the statline
3: making anti-tank weapons as scary as they should be by making them keep up with the tanks
4: Making the game less killy - reducing turn 1 overkill and such like.

1: Tanks and men are already plenty separated, 90 S3 hits kills 3 infantry Squads, if you spread the fire it'll do more with morale and it will do 5 wounds to a Leman Russ.
2: Tanks are overrated, wars are won by the blood of heroes and the genius of their commanders. At least that's how I want my 40k to work.
3: It's essentially a less egregious version of 6th edition flyers and flakk weapons, you either bring the right weapons to the fight or you die.
4: It's not going to become less killy if you can still just shoot lascannons twice with a Stratagem, ignore modifiers because of an ability, add 1 to hit rolls for a special doctrine, re-roll hit rolls because of an aura ability and add 1 to wound rolls and re-roll wound rolls of 1 with another Stratagem and Aura and get AP-7 between increased base AP and another ability or two.

Iron Hands vehicles are going to be impossibly hard to kill with S6 D3 damage weapons and now you want to take them from wounding on 5+ to 6+. Not to mention all the other amazing vehicles in the game, Doomsday Arks, Aeldari and Necron flyers, Tank Commanders, Knights. Nerfing abilities that improve damage by disgusting amounts would be a good start, thinking hard about which abilities need to be offensive and which could be replaced with defensive alternatives could help slow the game down. Let's imagine two SM gunlines shooting at eachother, they both have banners so as they shoot and kill opposing models they'll shoot more and kill more of eachother, before the second player gets his turn both players might have lost half their army.

It might make the game better for you if low S weapons destroying your high toughness models is something that bugs you or if your low S weapons are better AT weapons than your lascannons, but you'd probably have to drop some wounds to make it fair balance wise. You could introduce a negative FNP for example. Depends on how many values you want to change and whether you want to dig into the costs of every unit.

S6 D3 weapons shouldn't be tank hunting, they are for heavy infantry.

My proposals involve reducing the wound pool of vehicles and then making them harder t owound. Thus meaning that a lascannon would actually do a higher proportion of damage to a tank compared to a marine champion. D6 wounds off a tank =/= D6 wounds off a character, which is better than the idea that 1 wound = 1 wound.

Another option for tanks is to give them an invuln or FnP roll when attacked by weapons without the "anti-tank" rule, and then add that rule to the relevant weapons, thus reducing damage input from anti-infantry weapons and allowing the wound count on vehicles to be reduced.

The aim is to make anti-vehicle weapons good at anti-tank but bad at anti-infantry. if a missile only does 1 wound, but can bypass a 2+++ on the tank, then the tank can only have 6 wounds, as an extreme example. Thus anti-vehicle spam will be less effective. It would also give Frag missiles a purpose.

Example:
Land raider: T12, 8 wounds, 1+ save

Behemoth: If this model suffers an unsaved wound from a weapon below S7, it can ignore the wound on a roll of a 3+.

Lascannon: S11, AP-5, Dam 3
Krak Missile: S10, AP-4, Dam 2
Meltagun: S10, AP-5, Dam 2 (AP-6 if in half range)


Thus the heavy weapons will be less inclined to lunch heavy infantry, but infantry weapons would need to hit, 6 to wound, fail a 2+ followed by failing a 3+++ to chip a wound off a vehicle - but vehicles have a lot less wounds than they do now.

Plasmaguns are the start of anti-tank, thus S7+ is the range where the "Behemoth" rule stops working.

Lighter vehicles (trukks, landspeeders) would be for S below 6, and perhaps only a 4+++

Thoughts?

Monolith?

I'm amused by the number of threads popping up in this forum lately suggesting a return to pre-8e rules. Armour facings, vehicles not getting locked in combat, less buff-stacking on superheavies, and now making hard targets unwoundable by weapons that aren't real AT weapons...

For those who weren't around then from 3e to 7e vehicles had "armour values" from 10-14 instead of Toughness, and you "penetrated" (rather than "wounding") them by rolling d6+Str, which resulted in superficial damage if your result equalled the armour and real damage if you exceeded it. As such lasguns couldn't scratch the paint on anything, boltguns could tickle AV10, and you needed a lascannon or equivalent to have a hope of doing anything to a Land Raider (AV14).

 Blndmage wrote:
Monolith?

Monolith is fine vs. bolters, I'd say it's a counter to a bolter-heavy list, maybe not against a heavy bolter list. It dies quite quickly to overcharged plasma, melta, lances and lascannons. The rules for bringing in reserves aren't worth the ink they are printed with. It also has very little shooting. All relative to it's cost of course, IMO it just needs a proper gate rule and a pts reduction. I rely a great deal on chip damage from my S5 tesla, maybe it would be good to change the wound system since it'd make my S7 tesla worth a whole lot more relatively. I'm still sceptical, I've heard leafblower lists terrorized a meta before I started 40k, I've destroyed people with flying circuses and you can see how much love people have for the modern Craftworld flying circus. I also absolutely hate Riptides and that's because they become invulnerable due to Shield Drones. Tank Commanders becoming the same sort of hard to kill doesn't sound fun. Now you'd update your lists, include more high S, high AP weapons to deal with them. But what happens when you face 8 Leman Russes and they shoot down your anti-vehicle weapons? Guess you've got to tag them in melee to get them to stop shooting. I'd also say S6 should be an anti-vehicle option since that's the strength of a krak grenade.

 some bloke wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

 some bloke wrote:

The effects I can see in this is:

1: separating tanks and men somewhat
2: making tanks seem as scary as they should be by removing the limits of the statline
3: making anti-tank weapons as scary as they should be by making them keep up with the tanks
4: Making the game less killy - reducing turn 1 overkill and such like.

1: Tanks and men are already plenty separated, 90 S3 hits kills 3 infantry Squads, if you spread the fire it'll do more with morale and it will do 5 wounds to a Leman Russ.
2: Tanks are overrated, wars are won by the blood of heroes and the genius of their commanders. At least that's how I want my 40k to work.
3: It's essentially a less egregious version of 6th edition flyers and flakk weapons, you either bring the right weapons to the fight or you die.
4: It's not going to become less killy if you can still just shoot lascannons twice with a Stratagem, ignore modifiers because of an ability, add 1 to hit rolls for a special doctrine, re-roll hit rolls because of an aura ability and add 1 to wound rolls and re-roll wound rolls of 1 with another Stratagem and Aura and get AP-7 between increased base AP and another ability or two.

Iron Hands vehicles are going to be impossibly hard to kill with S6 D3 damage weapons and now you want to take them from wounding on 5+ to 6+. Not to mention all the other amazing vehicles in the game, Doomsday Arks, Aeldari and Necron flyers, Tank Commanders, Knights. Nerfing abilities that improve damage by disgusting amounts would be a good start, thinking hard about which abilities need to be offensive and which could be replaced with defensive alternatives could help slow the game down. Let's imagine two SM gunlines shooting at eachother, they both have banners so as they shoot and kill opposing models they'll shoot more and kill more of eachother, before the second player gets his turn both players might have lost half their army.

It might make the game better for you if low S weapons destroying your high toughness models is something that bugs you or if your low S weapons are better AT weapons than your lascannons, but you'd probably have to drop some wounds to make it fair balance wise. You could introduce a negative FNP for example. Depends on how many values you want to change and whether you want to dig into the costs of every unit.

S6 D3 weapons shouldn't be tank hunting, they are for heavy infantry.

My proposals involve reducing the wound pool of vehicles and then making them harder t owound. Thus meaning that a lascannon would actually do a higher proportion of damage to a tank compared to a marine champion. D6 wounds off a tank =/= D6 wounds off a character, which is better than the idea that 1 wound = 1 wound.

Another option for tanks is to give them an invuln or FnP roll when attacked by weapons without the "anti-tank" rule, and then add that rule to the relevant weapons, thus reducing damage input from anti-infantry weapons and allowing the wound count on vehicles to be reduced.

The aim is to make anti-vehicle weapons good at anti-tank but bad at anti-infantry. if a missile only does 1 wound, but can bypass a 2+++ on the tank, then the tank can only have 6 wounds, as an extreme example. Thus anti-vehicle spam will be less effective. It would also give Frag missiles a purpose.

Example:
Land raider: T12, 8 wounds, 1+ save

Behemoth: If this model suffers an unsaved wound from a weapon below S7, it can ignore the wound on a roll of a 3+.

Lascannon: S11, AP-5, Dam 3
Krak Missile: S10, AP-4, Dam 2
Meltagun: S10, AP-5, Dam 2 (AP-6 if in half range)


Thus the heavy weapons will be less inclined to lunch heavy infantry, but infantry weapons would need to hit, 6 to wound, fail a 2+ followed by failing a 3+++ to chip a wound off a vehicle - but vehicles have a lot less wounds than they do now.

Plasmaguns are the start of anti-tank, thus S7+ is the range where the "Behemoth" rule stops working.

Lighter vehicles (trukks, landspeeders) would be for S below 6, and perhaps only a 4+++

Thoughts?

Hmm. I don't know. This seems like it moves towards two problems at the same time:
1.) You make it so that only a small percentage of weapons in the game can realistically take down a vehicle. Which is your intent, of course. But by doing that, you kind of force people to take a higher ratio of anti tank weapons over other options. If I'm fielding a mechanized army and your list only has 4 units packing strength 7+, then I just have to kill those 4 units and the rest of my army is semi-immune to the rest of your offense. This was one of my biggest frustrations with 5th edition. It felt like I had to max out my anti-tank units (mostly fire dragons at the time) instead of taking a well-rounded force with an interesting mix of weapons because my opponent could field as many tanks as I had anti-tank guns. In 8th edition, we saw a similar problem when Castellans were king of the meta; light vehicles were discouraged because castellans erased them, and lists that weren't packed to the gills with anti-knight firepower were at a disadvantage.

2.) You make it easier to kill vehicles with 1 or 2 anti tank shots. And I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. As satisfying as it was to "crit" and kill a razorback with a single bright lance back in the day, it's pretty frustrating to lose an entire vehicle to a single lucky shot. Making it harder to one-shot vehicles seems like a very intentional move in 8th edition, presumably to prevent the feelbads that came with it. It's one thing if my opponent spends the firepower of three units to kill a tank; it feels like my tank at least absorbed some firepower. If a single razorback kills me in a single phase from down range, however, it feels like I'm not benefitting from the durability I paid for.

I'd actually be tempted to go the opposite direction: give vehicles lots of wounds but make them easier to wound. That way, weapons with high Damage characteristics will be much more efficient at killing vehicles, but the other weapons in your army can still reliably chip in. Bolters won't be a good tool for killing a land raider on their own, but they could reliably chip off X% of its total health. So if I kill all the anti tank units in your take all comers list, you can still concentrate your low and medium damage weapons and bring my tanks down or lower their damage output.

Wyldhunt wrote:

 some bloke wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

 some bloke wrote:

The effects I can see in this is:

1: separating tanks and men somewhat
2: making tanks seem as scary as they should be by removing the limits of the statline
3: making anti-tank weapons as scary as they should be by making them keep up with the tanks
4: Making the game less killy - reducing turn 1 overkill and such like.

1: Tanks and men are already plenty separated, 90 S3 hits kills 3 infantry Squads, if you spread the fire it'll do more with morale and it will do 5 wounds to a Leman Russ.
2: Tanks are overrated, wars are won by the blood of heroes and the genius of their commanders. At least that's how I want my 40k to work.
3: It's essentially a less egregious version of 6th edition flyers and flakk weapons, you either bring the right weapons to the fight or you die.
4: It's not going to become less killy if you can still just shoot lascannons twice with a Stratagem, ignore modifiers because of an ability, add 1 to hit rolls for a special doctrine, re-roll hit rolls because of an aura ability and add 1 to wound rolls and re-roll wound rolls of 1 with another Stratagem and Aura and get AP-7 between increased base AP and another ability or two.

Iron Hands vehicles are going to be impossibly hard to kill with S6 D3 damage weapons and now you want to take them from wounding on 5+ to 6+. Not to mention all the other amazing vehicles in the game, Doomsday Arks, Aeldari and Necron flyers, Tank Commanders, Knights. Nerfing abilities that improve damage by disgusting amounts would be a good start, thinking hard about which abilities need to be offensive and which could be replaced with defensive alternatives could help slow the game down. Let's imagine two SM gunlines shooting at eachother, they both have banners so as they shoot and kill opposing models they'll shoot more and kill more of eachother, before the second player gets his turn both players might have lost half their army.

It might make the game better for you if low S weapons destroying your high toughness models is something that bugs you or if your low S weapons are better AT weapons than your lascannons, but you'd probably have to drop some wounds to make it fair balance wise. You could introduce a negative FNP for example. Depends on how many values you want to change and whether you want to dig into the costs of every unit.

S6 D3 weapons shouldn't be tank hunting, they are for heavy infantry.

My proposals involve reducing the wound pool of vehicles and then making them harder t owound. Thus meaning that a lascannon would actually do a higher proportion of damage to a tank compared to a marine champion. D6 wounds off a tank =/= D6 wounds off a character, which is better than the idea that 1 wound = 1 wound.

Another option for tanks is to give them an invuln or FnP roll when attacked by weapons without the "anti-tank" rule, and then add that rule to the relevant weapons, thus reducing damage input from anti-infantry weapons and allowing the wound count on vehicles to be reduced.

The aim is to make anti-vehicle weapons good at anti-tank but bad at anti-infantry. if a missile only does 1 wound, but can bypass a 2+++ on the tank, then the tank can only have 6 wounds, as an extreme example. Thus anti-vehicle spam will be less effective. It would also give Frag missiles a purpose.

Example:
Land raider: T12, 8 wounds, 1+ save

Behemoth: If this model suffers an unsaved wound from a weapon below S7, it can ignore the wound on a roll of a 3+.

Lascannon: S11, AP-5, Dam 3
Krak Missile: S10, AP-4, Dam 2
Meltagun: S10, AP-5, Dam 2 (AP-6 if in half range)


Thus the heavy weapons will be less inclined to lunch heavy infantry, but infantry weapons would need to hit, 6 to wound, fail a 2+ followed by failing a 3+++ to chip a wound off a vehicle - but vehicles have a lot less wounds than they do now.

Plasmaguns are the start of anti-tank, thus S7+ is the range where the "Behemoth" rule stops working.

Lighter vehicles (trukks, landspeeders) would be for S below 6, and perhaps only a 4+++

Thoughts?

Hmm. I don't know. This seems like it moves towards two problems at the same time:
1.) You make it so that only a small percentage of weapons in the game can realistically take down a vehicle. Which is your intent, of course. But by doing that, you kind of force people to take a higher ratio of anti tank weapons over other options. If I'm fielding a mechanized army and your list only has 4 units packing strength 7+, then I just have to kill those 4 units and the rest of my army is semi-immune to the rest of your offense. This was one of my biggest frustrations with 5th edition. It felt like I had to max out my anti-tank units (mostly fire dragons at the time) instead of taking a well-rounded force with an interesting mix of weapons because my opponent could field as many tanks as I had anti-tank guns. In 8th edition, we saw a similar problem when Castellans were king of the meta; light vehicles were discouraged because castellans erased them, and lists that weren't packed to the gills with anti-knight firepower were at a disadvantage.

2.) You make it easier to kill vehicles with 1 or 2 anti tank shots. And I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. As satisfying as it was to "crit" and kill a razorback with a single bright lance back in the day, it's pretty frustrating to lose an entire vehicle to a single lucky shot. Making it harder to one-shot vehicles seems like a very intentional move in 8th edition, presumably to prevent the feelbads that came with it. It's one thing if my opponent spends the firepower of three units to kill a tank; it feels like my tank at least absorbed some firepower. If a single razorback kills me in a single phase from down range, however, it feels like I'm not benefitting from the durability I paid for.

I'd actually be tempted to go the opposite direction: give vehicles lots of wounds but make them easier to wound. That way, weapons with high Damage characteristics will be much more efficient at killing vehicles, but the other weapons in your army can still reliably chip in. Bolters won't be a good tool for killing a land raider on their own, but they could reliably chip off X% of its total health. So if I kill all the anti tank units in your take all comers list, you can still concentrate your low and medium damage weapons and bring my tanks down or lower their damage output.

I feel your suggestion has some merit, but also means a lot more bookkeeping. If you have vehicles with 40-50 wounds, and a flat 10 damage on lascannons, that would be a fairly simple approach, and mean that chipping wounds off a vehicle is a very unrealistic method of killing one. I think that perhaps a combination would work - upping vehicles toughness such that S6 or less needs a 6 to wound, stretching anti-tank weaponry to keep it on-par with vehicles toughness (as hard to kill as now) and increasing vehicle wounds to make small-arms fire more inconsequential. Some sort of wound-dial system would be needed to keep track!

Also, increase Krak grenades as they are meant to hurt vehicles a bit!

What about armies without grenades?

 some bloke wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:


Hmm. I don't know. This seems like it moves towards two problems at the same time:
1.) You make it so that only a small percentage of weapons in the game can realistically take down a vehicle. Which is your intent, of course. But by doing that, you kind of force people to take a higher ratio of anti tank weapons over other options. If I'm fielding a mechanized army and your list only has 4 units packing strength 7+, then I just have to kill those 4 units and the rest of my army is semi-immune to the rest of your offense. This was one of my biggest frustrations with 5th edition. It felt like I had to max out my anti-tank units (mostly fire dragons at the time) instead of taking a well-rounded force with an interesting mix of weapons because my opponent could field as many tanks as I had anti-tank guns. In 8th edition, we saw a similar problem when Castellans were king of the meta; light vehicles were discouraged because castellans erased them, and lists that weren't packed to the gills with anti-knight firepower were at a disadvantage.

2.) You make it easier to kill vehicles with 1 or 2 anti tank shots. And I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. As satisfying as it was to "crit" and kill a razorback with a single bright lance back in the day, it's pretty frustrating to lose an entire vehicle to a single lucky shot. Making it harder to one-shot vehicles seems like a very intentional move in 8th edition, presumably to prevent the feelbads that came with it. It's one thing if my opponent spends the firepower of three units to kill a tank; it feels like my tank at least absorbed some firepower. If a single razorback kills me in a single phase from down range, however, it feels like I'm not benefitting from the durability I paid for.

I'd actually be tempted to go the opposite direction: give vehicles lots of wounds but make them easier to wound. That way, weapons with high Damage characteristics will be much more efficient at killing vehicles, but the other weapons in your army can still reliably chip in. Bolters won't be a good tool for killing a land raider on their own, but they could reliably chip off X% of its total health. So if I kill all the anti tank units in your take all comers list, you can still concentrate your low and medium damage weapons and bring my tanks down or lower their damage output.

I feel your suggestion has some merit, but also means a lot more bookkeeping. If you have vehicles with 40-50 wounds, and a flat 10 damage on lascannons, that would be a fairly simple approach, and mean that chipping wounds off a vehicle is a very unrealistic method of killing one. I think that perhaps a combination would work - upping vehicles toughness such that S6 or less needs a 6 to wound, stretching anti-tank weaponry to keep it on-par with vehicles toughness (as hard to kill as now) and increasing vehicle wounds to make small-arms fire more inconsequential. Some sort of wound-dial system would be needed to keep track!

Also, increase Krak grenades as they are meant to hurt vehicles a bit!

That would address item 2 (you wouldn't make it more likely for one or two lascannons to take out a vehicle with a couple of lucky shots), but it would make the problems with item 1 way worse. If you give vehicles a huge number of wounds and make it so that anything with less strength than a plasma gun has only a tiny chance of hurting them, then you're basically saying that vehicles are immune to small arms fire. If 10 bolter shots lower the max health of a vehicle by an average of 1% (for the sake of discussion), then 10 bolter shots aren't really able to meaningfully interact with a vehicle. Sure, you'll have those rare moments where the 2 wounds out of 40 that your bolters chipped off a tank made the difference between it dying on turn 3 instead of turn 4, but points spent on small arms fire would be more or less wasted in games against vehicle-heavy lists.

Which means it's a lot easier to end up with games where one guy's take all comers list stops being able to hurt most of the enemy army after turns 1 and 2 when his lascannons are dead. Which means that you start loading as much anti tank into your army as you can to be safe. Which means that half your codex's options stop being real options and become more like traps. Sure, you could take that flamer instead of a meltagun, but you really shouldn't. Which means that dedicated horde lists become that much harder to deal with if you tailored for mechanized lists.

Ideally, we want any two lists that show up at a table to be able to meaningfully interact with each other. Making it so that huge chunks of weapon options can't hurt huge chunks of unit options pushes the game further towards a series of rock/paper/scissors hard counters that decide the game before the first turn (but still take a couple of hours to play out).

Honestly, I don't hate where the durability of vehicles against small arms fire is at the moment. Right now, dire avengers or tactical doctrine bolters or a pack of lasguns can shoot at a rhino and chip a wound or two off of it. That's not nearly enough for those small arms to be considered "good at killing vehicles," but 2 wounds off of a rhino is still 20% of its total health. It's enough to put down a rhino that your lascannons hurt but couldn't finish off. It's enough for a swarm of guardians or bolter marines or guardsmen to have a hope of eventually killing that tank you still have running around on turn 4 when most of their bright lances and lascannons are dead. That feels about right.

What about leaving the interactions as they are now, but simply doubling vehicle wounds? That should make the difference between heavy infantry and light vehicles good, and heavy vehicles can still get plinkied at with decent expectations, but it's not the go to.

 Blndmage wrote:
What about leaving the interactions as they are now, but simply doubling vehicle wounds? That should make the difference between heavy infantry and light vehicles good, and heavy vehicles can still get plinkied at with decent expectations, but it's not the go to.

I'd go with that, but also double anti-tank options damages (generally to 2D6) so it feels even more redundant to shoot them at any infantry units.

Basically it looks like the best option is to double damage on anti-tank and double wounds on anything over 10 wounds (with a few exceptions).

Obviously, monsters are included under the heading of "tanks" as we don't want a lascannon to scratch a rhino but obliterate a carnifex.

 some bloke wrote:

 Blndmage wrote:
What about leaving the interactions as they are now, but simply doubling vehicle wounds? That should make the difference between heavy infantry and light vehicles good, and heavy vehicles can still get plinkied at with decent expectations, but it's not the go to.

I'd go with that, but also double anti-tank options damages (generally to 2D6) so it feels even more redundant to shoot them at any infantry units.

Basically it looks like the best option is to double damage on anti-tank and double wounds on anything over 10 wounds (with a few exceptions).

Obviously, monsters are included under the heading of "tanks" as we don't want a lascannon to scratch a rhino but obliterate a carnifex.

I agree.

I'd suggest either changing d6D stuff to 2d6, OR, against VEHICLES and MONSTERS they become 5D.

What if they fired a single shot, and if it hits it deals D3+2 hits against Vehicles and Monsters, 6d6 hits against infantry (just as an example, depending on weapon. Like, giving that to a missile launcher or something would be nuts. A battle cannon or a Doomsday cannon would be fine though)? Yeah sure, its one shot, but if it hits its going to hurt a lot.

Weapons that were previously blast behave weird. They are supposed to be weapons that fire a single, powerful round that deals damage over an area, but they act more like unreliable machine guns.
There's actually a lot wrong with 8th ed, that doesn't really work well when compared to the earlier editions.

A lot of people complain about how hard template weapons were to use and how it encouraged spacing everything out, but at least when they worked they worked, as opposed to the current system where it doesn't really work and actually causes more problems than it solves. Like sure, you don't have to space out models, but now hoards are harder to deal with, which led GW to introduce weapons with stupid RoF that of course also works better against elite infantry. Sure, its easier to use as you don't have to work out who's under the template and deviation, but now heavy weapons are woefully unreliable, as if they roll a low number of shots they probably aren't going to do anything, whereas before you'd have to roll pretty poorly to not clip something with the large blast template.

8th is rapidly turning into 7th ed with how OTT game balance is going. Apparently they are going to give Salamanders a stratagem where you choose a unit, you're opponent is forced to shoot at only that unit and not at anything within 6" of it. However, the strat doesn't stop the Sally player from choosing a non-visible unit as the target, so he can basically make a 6" untargetable bubble of units. That's just gak design.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
What if they fired a single shot, and if it hits it deals D3+2 hits against Vehicles and Monsters, 6d6 hits against infantry? Yeah sure, its one shot, but if it hits its going to hurt a lot.

Weapons that were previously blast behave weird. They are supposed to be weapons that fire a single, powerful round that deals damage over an area, but they act more like unreliable machine guns.
There's actually a lot wrong with 8th ed, that doesn't really work well when compared to the earlier editions.

A lot of people complain about how hard template weapons were to use and how it encouraged spacing everything out, but at least when they worked they worked, as opposed to the current system where it doesn't really work and actually causes more problems than it solves. Like sure, you don't have to space out models, but now hoards are harder to deal with, which led GW to introduce weapons with stupid RoF that of course also works better against elite infantry. Sure, its easier to use as you don't have to work out who's under the template and deviation, but now heavy weapons are woefully unreliable, as if they roll a low number of shots they probably aren't going to do anything, whereas before you'd have to roll pretty poorly to not clip something with the large blast template.

8th is rapidly turning into 7th ed with how OTT game balance is going. Apparently they are going to give Salamanders a stratagem where you choose a unit, you're opponent is forced to shoot at only that unit and not at anything within 6" of it. However, the strat doesn't stop the Sally player from choosing a non-visible unit as the target, so he can basically make a 6" untargetable bubble of units. That's just gak design.

What if what fired a single shot?

Also, 6d6? Do you really want to deal 21 hits on a single hit roll?

 JNAProductions wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
What if they fired a single shot, and if it hits it deals D3+2 hits against Vehicles and Monsters, 6d6 hits against infantry? Yeah sure, its one shot, but if it hits its going to hurt a lot.

Weapons that were previously blast behave weird. They are supposed to be weapons that fire a single, powerful round that deals damage over an area, but they act more like unreliable machine guns.
There's actually a lot wrong with 8th ed, that doesn't really work well when compared to the earlier editions.

A lot of people complain about how hard template weapons were to use and how it encouraged spacing everything out, but at least when they worked they worked, as opposed to the current system where it doesn't really work and actually causes more problems than it solves. Like sure, you don't have to space out models, but now hoards are harder to deal with, which led GW to introduce weapons with stupid RoF that of course also works better against elite infantry. Sure, its easier to use as you don't have to work out who's under the template and deviation, but now heavy weapons are woefully unreliable, as if they roll a low number of shots they probably aren't going to do anything, whereas before you'd have to roll pretty poorly to not clip something with the large blast template.

8th is rapidly turning into 7th ed with how OTT game balance is going. Apparently they are going to give Salamanders a stratagem where you choose a unit, you're opponent is forced to shoot at only that unit and not at anything within 6" of it. However, the strat doesn't stop the Sally player from choosing a non-visible unit as the target, so he can basically make a 6" untargetable bubble of units. That's just gak design.

What if what fired a single shot?

Also, 6d6? Do you really want to deal 21 hits on a single hit roll?

What if heavy weapons with variable number of shots fired a single shot. Sorry, I wasn't clear, I noticed discussion about how heavy weapons are a bit wonky.

21 hits...yeah, that's a little excessive. I based it off of how many models you can touch at minimum with a large blast template, assuming that they are all spaced out 2". The thing about spacing it is that it was only really effective against small blast templates; against large blast templates you are still looking at about 6-8 models getting touched, provided the blast landed in the middle.
Which is where the 6 in 6d6 comes from. It was then I realized that there was no way, even if all models were squished together, that a large blast template can touch 72 models. I then tried looking for my large blast template to see how many a blast template can touch at maximum...but I can't find it. I think its like 18-20 or something. So it should really be more like 6D3 or 7D3. Anyway, the idea is that the number of hits against infantry is roughly equivalent to how many a blast template can possible touch if it lands in the middle.

How often were you getting a dozen hits with even a Large Blast Template?

6d3 averages to 12. And bear in mind, that would also work against units of, say, three Custodian Guard.

 JNAProductions wrote:
How often were you getting a dozen hits with even a Large Blast Template?

6d3 averages to 12. And bear in mind, that would also work against units of, say, three Custodian Guard.

More times than my orks would have liked.
Anyway, I found a CD which is roughly the same diameter of a Large Blast. I was sort of right. Space out it was about 8. Squished together it was more like 16, probably 18 if I wanted to go over the edges.
So more like 4D3 or 5D3.

Yeah, that is an odd interaction. Maybe a clause like, "cannot inflict more hits than models in the unit"

On the subject of blasts, I stand by the idea that blast (and template) weapons should roll additional shots based on the number of models in the target unit. So a vindicator's cannon might fire 3 shots + 1 shot for every 5 models in the unit (rounding up).

This would cause the average and maximum number of hits to increase, but you'd still be able to miss entirely if your luck is bad, and to-hit modifiers would still factor in. This would have the added benefit of creating weapons that ONLY scales up against horde units and not against small, elite units.

And not that we should hang onto the past for its own sake, but this would also reflect the behavior of blast templates from past editions pretty well without reintroducing the frustration of agonizing over model spacing. The larger the enemy unit is, the more likely you are to hit at least a few guys, and the more likely you are to hit more guys, BUT you could still get unlucky and miss entirely.

If you don't make the number of bonus shots too high, then you'll only be generating more hits than the target has models once the target unit's size is below your gun's lowest number of shots. Which is what we have now. And that's probably pretty reasonable. If I land 4 hits on a single marine with a mortar shell, people are usually pretty comfortable shrugging and going, "Yeah, explosions are kind of like that," rather than agonizing over the shrapnel per square inch and how it should interact with the physics of power armor.

Wyldhunt wrote:
On the subject of blasts, I stand by the idea that blast (and template) weapons should roll additional shots based on the number of models in the target unit. So a vindicator's cannon might fire 3 shots + 1 shot for every 5 models in the unit (rounding up).

This would cause the average and maximum number of hits to increase, but you'd still be able to miss entirely if your luck is bad, and to-hit modifiers would still factor in. This would have the added benefit of creating weapons that ONLY scales up against horde units and not against small, elite units.

And not that we should hang onto the past for its own sake, but this would also reflect the behavior of blast templates from past editions pretty well without reintroducing the frustration of agonizing over model spacing. The larger the enemy unit is, the more likely you are to hit at least a few guys, and the more likely you are to hit more guys, BUT you could still get unlucky and miss entirely.

If you don't make the number of bonus shots too high, then you'll only be generating more hits than the target has models once the target unit's size is below your gun's lowest number of shots. Which is what we have now. And that's probably pretty reasonable. If I land 4 hits on a single marine with a mortar shell, people are usually pretty comfortable shrugging and going, "Yeah, explosions are kind of like that," rather than agonizing over the shrapnel per square inch and how it should interact with the physics of power armor.

Yeah, that could also work. Rolling many hit rolls for artillery feels really odd though. Like, am I using a howitzer, or a gatling gun?

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Yeah, that could also work. Rolling many hit rolls for artillery feels really odd tough. Like, am I using a howitzer, or a gatling gun?

This. I always preferred the old blasts and how they hit in a different way to everything else (templates).

I wonder if there's a more fluid way to determine hits. I always felt that a blast weapon should pretty much always hit something.

I'm thinking we need to incorporate:
1: amount of models in the target unit
2: BS of the attacker
3: size of explosion.

so take your BS (2+, 4+ etc) and rolls X dice (as defined by the weapon being used - small blast = 1D6, large = 2D6, larger = 3D6 etc.). Add 1 if the target unit has 10 or more models, add 2 if the target unit has 20 or more models, add 3 if 30 or more etc.. The amount you roll over your BS is the hits (essentially deduct your BS, so a BS4+ firing a small blast at a unit of 30 boys rolls D6 + 3 - 4, IE D6-1, and that's the number of hits. Meaning 0-5 hits, which is about right for a small blast. An ork firing a killkannon (BS5+, large blast) at a unit of 5 marines would roll 2D6-5, meaning 0-7 hits (7 hits needing a double 6) with an average of 2 hits on the small unit.

My next suggestion would be to allow extra hits to overflow the squad - like old blasts scoring a perfect hit on 2 or more units. basically:

If a unit suffers more hits than it has models in the unit, each of the excess hits must be allocated to any unit within 2" of the original target (friend or foe!) by the attacker. If no such unit exists, the hits are discarded. A unit may not have any more hits allocated to it than there are models in the unit.

so in example 2, if you rolled the perfect 12, not only do you get 1 hit per marine in the squad, but you also get 2 hits to pass on to another unit close by.


this would make blasts less gatling-gunny, and allow them to do more to counter MSU (3 units of 1 bunched up = 1 hit on each from a single gun scoring 3+ hits), but it doesn't bring back the old "spread your whole unit out or die" movement-slowing issues from the past. It could also let explosions get around the character targeting a little, if the enemy put him next to someone who can be targeted. It would quickly become practice not to. It would certainly lessen the crammed-in marine circles of aura we get.

Thoughts?

I thought the crammed-in circles of auras was a feature, not a bug.

It might be something to simply have the blasts scale with the units attacked. Or maybe have them act like mortal wounds in that they spread, so a Battle Cannon might do D6 damage, but the damage over-flows onto other models.

An unrelated to what's been discussed idea I had for blasts is to cap penalties to-hit.

Cloaking technology, natural stealth, distortions... It only does so much against a big ol' explosion. So, most blast weapons should have the special rule "This weapon ignores total hit penalties greater than -1."

Make them a little weaker relative to native high ROF guns (compare Battle Cannon to a Punisher Cannon, for instance) but they've got their niche of ignoring stacking penalties.

Yeah, but most times its going to be a -1 to hit, especially as GW is apparently trying to cut down on the number of hit penalties. Now, it would mean that it won't suffer too badly if it moves + debuffed, but chances are you aren't going to want to move with a weapon like that anyway, as they tend to have huge range.

Maybe something more like "ignores cover on a hit roll of a 5+" would be more useful, as what's a wall going to do against a direct hit from a cannon shell? The 5+ represents a direct hit, anything else represents shrapnel. 5+ may seem odd, but there are too many rules that activate on a 6+, and most of the times they tend to be unreliable unless you have a bucket of dice. 5+ would see more play.

Weapons that previously used the flame template should have "ignore cover" by default. I don't know why they don't have it already.

 some bloke wrote:

I'm thinking we need to incorporate:
1: amount of models in the target unit
2: BS of the attacker
3: size of explosion.

My proposal of simply granting more shots to blast weapons when they shoot units containing more models would factor in all of those.

1. The number of models in the target unit increases your number of shots and thus increases your average and max damage output.
2. You'd still be rolling to-hit, so BS is still factored in.
3. The size of the explosion is just a matter of how many shots you get. A small blast might do 2 shots for every 5 models in the target unit while a large blast might do 4 shots per 5 models.

The only thing my approach wouldn't account for is hitting units near the primary target, but I feel like that might be for the best. If I'm punished for not taking the time to make sure I'm more than X" away from a friendly unit, you can bet I'll start spending time doing that, and that slows down the game. Unless you feel that there's a need for more mechanics that punish players for bunching up units. There's probably an argument to be made for that, but my gut feeling is that we'd end up creating more problems than we'd solve.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 JNAProductions wrote:
An unrelated to what's been discussed idea I had for blasts is to cap penalties to-hit.

Cloaking technology, natural stealth, distortions... It only does so much against a big ol' explosion. So, most blast weapons should have the special rule "This weapon ignores total hit penalties greater than -1."

Make them a little weaker relative to native high ROF guns (compare Battle Cannon to a Punisher Cannon, for instance) but they've got their niche of ignoring stacking penalties.

I kind of like that. So long as you're still letting people benefit from a single -1, you're not shutting down anyone's central gimmick; you're just discouraging them from using powers and strats to stack multiple to-hit penalties. On the other hand, as has been pointed out, most armies can't get more than a -1 to hit in one place. That's mostly an eldar thing, and the number of units that can actually stack to hit penalties will drop significantly if Alaitoc gets the Raven Guard treatment. And even then, I struggle to come up with non-aeldari armies that would have stacking to-hit penalties.

Wyldhunt wrote:


My proposal of simply granting more shots to blast weapons when they shoot units containing more models would factor in all of those.

1. The number of models in the target unit increases your number of shots and thus increases your average and max damage output.
2. You'd still be rolling to-hit, so BS is still factored in.
3. The size of the explosion is just a matter of how many shots you get. A small blast might do 2 shots for every 5 models in the target unit while a large blast might do 4 shots per 5 models.

The only thing my approach wouldn't account for is hitting units near the primary target, but I feel like that might be for the best. If I'm punished for not taking the time to make sure I'm more than X" away from a friendly unit, you can bet I'll start spending time doing that, and that slows down the game. Unless you feel that there's a need for more mechanics that punish players for bunching up units. There's probably an argument to be made for that, but my gut feeling is that we'd end up creating more problems than we'd solve.

The issue then is that you're still rolling as if the blast weapon is a gatling gun, which I find a bit unintuitive - every time I fire a killkannon or the shokk attack gun, I find it breaks the immersion.

I also think that punishing people for bunching their units together (but not for bunching models in a unit, as that was the time-killer) would be a happy balance of splash damage (which is what's lacking in this edition, it's an explosion for pities sake!) without the mind numbing movement issues of older editions.

Simply getting X shots per model in the target unit is, in my mind, a little too powerful. Better to have a baseline and then add some for each 10. But I prefer the idea of blast weapons rolling differently to everything else.

 some bloke wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:


My proposal of simply granting more shots to blast weapons when they shoot units containing more models would factor in all of those.

1. The number of models in the target unit increases your number of shots and thus increases your average and max damage output.
2. You'd still be rolling to-hit, so BS is still factored in.
3. The size of the explosion is just a matter of how many shots you get. A small blast might do 2 shots for every 5 models in the target unit while a large blast might do 4 shots per 5 models.

The only thing my approach wouldn't account for is hitting units near the primary target, but I feel like that might be for the best. If I'm punished for not taking the time to make sure I'm more than X" away from a friendly unit, you can bet I'll start spending time doing that, and that slows down the game. Unless you feel that there's a need for more mechanics that punish players for bunching up units. There's probably an argument to be made for that, but my gut feeling is that we'd end up creating more problems than we'd solve.

The issue then is that you're still rolling as if the blast weapon is a gatling gun, which I find a bit unintuitive - every time I fire a killkannon or the shokk attack gun, I find it breaks the immersion.

I get that. There's a lot to be said for how well the "feel" of a mechanic matches the fluff it's trying to represent. Personally, I'm pretty comfortable with the abstraction of more to-hit dice representing how "target rich" the area is combined with the blast radius of the projectile. Like, we all understand that a vindicator's main gun isn't firing up to 6 times when it shoots. This is just a more extreme version of that. My shuriken weapons supposedly fires hundreds or thousands of rounds per second, but that just gets abstracted as Assault 2.

Still, I see where you're coming from. As I said, this level of abstraction doesn't bother me, and I like what it does to the math involved.

I also think that punishing people for bunching their units together (but not for bunching models in a unit, as that was the time-killer) would be a happy balance of splash damage (which is what's lacking in this edition, it's an explosion for pities sake!) without the mind numbing movement issues of older editions.

Yeah, it definitely wouldn't be nearly as much of a hassle as 2" spacing for models in the same unit was. I imagine it would still reintroduce a lot of fidgeting as people try to crowd a bunch of units within the buff auras of a couple characters while simultaneously trying to ensure that no 2 units are within 3" of each other.

What is your goal in reintroducing splash damage? Is it just an aesthetic thing, or do you feel the game would be improved by actively encouraging players to spread out more? Would you still feel it would improve the game if most buff auras got turned into My Will Be Done style mono-target buffs? (Where your character points at a unit within X" and grants buffs to that one unit specifically.)

Simply getting X shots per model in the target unit is, in my mind, a little too powerful. Better to have a baseline and then add some for each 10. But I prefer the idea of blast weapons rolling differently to everything else.

Oh for sure. Granting X shots per Y models would be the way to go. So a frag grenade might roll 2 shots for every 5 models in the target (rounding up). If we have blast weapons rolling differently from other weapons, I'd like them to be filling a mechanical niche to justify the extra rules. Having the number of shots scale up based on unit size does that because it creates weapons that scale up against hordes but not against MSU.