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Clearly what we need is Repentia, Arco-flagellants and Zephyrim for all!

The reason why I mentioned terminators specifically is because I thought that in the past (why are talking many years and editions ago) different units were killed in melee and range at different point efficiency. This made melee a tad more point efficient provided you choose the right engagements.

For example, tac marines could choose to engage in a shooting battle with a couple of guard squads, but point efficiency wise probably it would be better for them to engage them in melee.

IMHO melee will only be sorted out when it is a point efficient manner to engage in enough situations, without relying on deepstrike alpha striking only. For that to be viable, some targets ought to be harder to remove at range. The current ap system, in combination with current volume of fire (which in turns is due to the point efficiency of shooting skewing army compositions in that direction, means that most supposedly durable targets are not tough in reality. Custodes are a prime example, IMO.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
However, if you are a Terminator, you got the short end of the stick. At no level of AP did you get any better than you would have been in the past, but for the very common AP2 weapons like missile launchers and battle cannons [and the also very common AP1 weapons like Heavy Bolters and Assault cannons], your resilience halved or worse.

Keep in mind that in 8th TDA provides +1 wound in addition to 2+/5++. Weapons with AP-2 and d3 damage are pretty terrible at killing terminators.

I mean, terminators in cover ignore all AP-1 weapons. The real problem for terminators equivalent are AP-2 (or -3) weapons with 2 Damage. Sadly those have become more common after the marine codex number 2. But yeah, d3 damage weapons are pretty bad specially if you can put some kind of FNP in your terminators.

 Galas wrote:
I mean, terminators in cover ignore all AP-1 weapons. The real problem for terminators equivalent are AP-2 (or -3) weapons with 2 Damage. Sadly those have become more common after the marine codex number 2. But yeah, d3 damage weapons are pretty bad specially if you can put some kind of FNP in your terminators.

D3 damages isn't pretty bad with normal rolling your still going to kill a terminator per failed save.
The really difference is getting a 5+ FNP as that means you need 3 damage to avarage a dead terminator per save, 3 wounds with a 5+ FNP soes get kinda disgusting.
Look at how much of a PITA centurions in cover are to kill, the it's not a close combat or a power armour issue it's that the lethality in 8th is just too high but it kinda has to be given the mobility.

Ice_can wrote:

 Galas wrote:
I mean, terminators in cover ignore all AP-1 weapons. The real problem for terminators equivalent are AP-2 (or -3) weapons with 2 Damage. Sadly those have become more common after the marine codex number 2. But yeah, d3 damage weapons are pretty bad specially if you can put some kind of FNP in your terminators.

D3 damages isn't pretty bad with normal rolling your still going to kill a terminator per failed save.
The really difference is getting a 5+ FNP as that means you need 3 damage to avarage a dead terminator per save, 3 wounds with a 5+ FNP soes get kinda disgusting.
Look at how much of a PITA centurions in cover are to kill, the it's not a close combat or a power armour issue it's that the lethality in 8th is just too high but it kinda has to be given the mobility.

d3 damage means that one in three shots will just not kill a terminator, basically providing another layer of protection. Mathhammer averages don't properly display this, but most lighter anti-tank weapons have a pretty high failure rate against them.

Terminators shouldn't need to cower in cover from heavy bolters. But they do. -1 AP halves the effectiveness of 2+ armor. That's crazy.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
But AP -1 being the biggest swing makes no sense at all.

It isn't ap-1 so much as that it can be spammed so efficiently now thanks to doctrines. The way to kill terminators was always massed fire. Make someone roll enough saves and a few 1s will turn up. Now massed space marine fire is just looking for 2s. Letting them ignore -1 and -2ap would make them as tough as before, but most likely at added ppm, and spamming massed cheap shots would still be the way to eliminate them.

So *shrug*.

Now you can kill them with high AP OR massed fire! I'm not so sure massed fire was really the best way in the old AP system. (.83)^X falls off a lot slower than (.66)^X. AP 2 being everywhere was their true undoing before. I never shot a non-AP2 weapon at a terminator for the most part, except maybe TH/SS.

 Jidmah wrote:

Ice_can wrote:

 Galas wrote:
I mean, terminators in cover ignore all AP-1 weapons. The real problem for terminators equivalent are AP-2 (or -3) weapons with 2 Damage. Sadly those have become more common after the marine codex number 2. But yeah, d3 damage weapons are pretty bad specially if you can put some kind of FNP in your terminators.

D3 damages isn't pretty bad with normal rolling your still going to kill a terminator per failed save.
The really difference is getting a 5+ FNP as that means you need 3 damage to avarage a dead terminator per save, 3 wounds with a 5+ FNP soes get kinda disgusting.
Look at how much of a PITA centurions in cover are to kill, the it's not a close combat or a power armour issue it's that the lethality in 8th is just too high but it kinda has to be given the mobility.

d3 damage means that one in three shots will just not kill a terminator, basically providing another layer of protection. Mathhammer averages don't properly display this, but most lighter anti-tank weapons have a pretty high failure rate against them.

One in three really doesn't matter when it's the go too style of anti tank shooting like its autocannons and battle cannons etc because 8th rewards quantity over quality of attacks, especially if you have rerolls.

Also, GW just add the fluff that "enemies have adapted to the once-mighty tactical dreadnought suit, rendering them vulnerable on the battlefield as never before. Marine chapters were forced to start phasing it out in favor of the new gravis armor". There done. Why enemies never adapted between 30K-40K makes no sense, but here we are.

I would get behind GW a lot more if they just admitted that a bunch of their units suck.

Martel732 wrote:
Terminators shouldn't need to cower in cover from heavy bolters. But they do. -1 AP halves the effectiveness of 2+ armor. That's crazy.

No, they shouldn't. That's the problem with the new ap and cover system, as Inquisitor Lord Katherine points out.

Under the old system terminators didn't care until ap2 showed up, and standard power armour didn't care until ap3 did. Space marines only worried about cover when the nasty stuff showed up, so they were more mobile. Stuff like guardsmen, however, wanted to be in cover, where they would get a guaranteed save ap be damned. Now ap penetrates even cover.

This is where the whole "marines feeling like marines" problem starts. Marines shouldn't be hiding in cover against low ap weapons, terminators doubly so.

Then you add rerolls, shooting twice, and doctrines into the mix and lethality becomes ridiculous. Really, when you think about it, doctrines really just made bolters closer to their old effectiveness against geq who weren't sticking to cover.

5th ed and onward allowed for spamming of AP2, though. So we have to go back to 4th for marines to feel like marines. IG mech vets in particular had crazy amounts of AP.

Spot on last post.

I'd add that maybe marines shouldn't fear "too much" low AP weapons per se, but they should not be the best shooters out there from a point efficient perspective (IMO). Non specialist troops, at least.

For example, point efficiency should dictate that it is better to engage guards in melee than just sit shooting (with basic marine troop).

Yeah, probably. But IG just made sure that never happened by murdering your marines at range. And by having 3 layers of bubblewrap. Cheap models are VERY powerful. Generalists have always suffered in 40K. Look at all the crap they've had to bolt onto marines, and even then, only certain chapter tactics make them competitive.

Martel732 wrote:
5th ed and onward allowed for spamming of AP2, though. So we have to go back to 4th for marines to feel like marines. IG mech vets in particular had crazy amounts of AP.

Agreed, ap has been too cheap and easy to acquire for a while. I miss late 3rd/4th for a lot of reasons.

GW's "fix" is invulns everywhere! So now it's all high rate of fire mid-level AP. Why pay for melta or a lascannon?

 Jidmah wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
So, here's my hot take: I contend that there is nothing you can do to the melee rules that will make footslogging melee units viable without otherwise breaking the game. You have to reduce the lethality of shooting to give melee units a chance to get up the board, and restrict units from being able to move, shoot at max range, and charge all in the same turn to give assault-oriented units a real reason to exist. The various solutions that make melee more lethal (eg free hits when enemies try to fall back) are just compounding the game's general lethality problem.

Yeah, you're probably right on spot with that. I miss the times when I spend two turns setting up a Waaagh! which resulted in a huge multi-assault in turn 3 when the orks from the transports were joined by the ones which had to slog it because theirs got blow up.

I thought I'd do a little thought experiment about what it would take to make footslogging melee work in a very simple scenario;

• Say we have 3 slugga boys mobs facing off against 3 tactical squads on grassy flatlands.
• Orks are roughly half the price of space marines, so we have 60 orks vs 30 marines.
• An ork is roughly equal to a space marine in melee combat, so we want about half the orks to die to shooting before the melee begins.
• A game is 6 turns long, so we want the melee to begin in the charge phase of turn 3 so the game is split evenly between shooting and fighting. This gives the marines 2-3 shooting phases to kill 30 orks.
• If all the marines have one boltgun shot at 24" and 2 at 12" thats about 90-120 shots killing 30-40 orks with current stats.

So at a very simple level, I think foot slogging melee could be OK in this scenario. That's actually quite surprising to me!
Stripping out all the bumpf like fall back, chapter/clan tactics and rerolls and just looking at base stats on the basic units.

I might try replicating my thought experiment with a friend and some real models and see how it feels!

That's because expensive models always struggle at shooting cheap models unless they have some very favorable rules. Tac marines really don't.

Martel732 wrote:Yeah, probably. But IG just made sure that never happened by murdering your marines at range. And by having 3 layers of bubblewrap. Cheap models are VERY powerful. Generalists have always suffered in 40K. Look at all the crap they've had to bolt onto marines, and even then, only certain chapter tactics make them competitive.

It is true, sm basic troops struggled to find a role.

Kroem wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
So, here's my hot take: I contend that there is nothing you can do to the melee rules that will make footslogging melee units viable without otherwise breaking the game. You have to reduce the lethality of shooting to give melee units a chance to get up the board, and restrict units from being able to move, shoot at max range, and charge all in the same turn to give assault-oriented units a real reason to exist. The various solutions that make melee more lethal (eg free hits when enemies try to fall back) are just compounding the game's general lethality problem.

Yeah, you're probably right on spot with that. I miss the times when I spend two turns setting up a Waaagh! which resulted in a huge multi-assault in turn 3 when the orks from the transports were joined by the ones which had to slog it because theirs got blow up.

I thought I'd do a little thought experiment about what it would take to make footslogging melee work in a very simple scenario;

• Say we have 3 slugga boys mobs facing off against 3 tactical squads on grassy flatlands.
• Orks are roughly half the price of space marines, so we have 60 orks vs 30 marines.
• An ork is roughly equal to a space marine in melee combat, so we want about half the orks to die to shooting before the melee begins.
• A game is 6 turns long, so we want the melee to begin in the charge phase of turn 3 so the game is split evenly between shooting and fighting. This gives the marines 2-3 shooting phases to kill 30 orks.
• If all the marines have one boltgun shot at 24" and 2 at 12" thats about 90-120 shots killing 30-40 orks with current stats.

So at a very simple level, I think foot slogging melee could be OK in this scenario. That's actually quite surprising to me!
Stripping out all the bumpf like fall back, chapter/clan tactics and rerolls and just looking at base stats on the basic units.

I might try replicating my thought experiment with a friend and some real models and see how it feels!

Are you sure that a marine is equally good as an ork in melee? A primaris marine has 2W and 3+ save in melee. We could run the numbers, but I think that probably an intercessor is equal to a little less than two orks, depending on who gets the charge.

Grey40k wrote:
Are you sure that a marine is equally good as an ork in melee? A primaris marine has 2W and 3+ save in melee. We could run the numbers, but I think that probably an intercessor is equal to a little less than two orks, depending on who gets the charge.

Given the context, I'm pretty sure he was talking about Tac Marines versus Orks no special rules involved.

Yea I was just talking about the most basic scenario with tac marines vs boyz to see if the statement about footslogging melee always being screwed holds up.
The thought experiment doesn't attempt to capture the complexities of a full scale game with all the options available.

 Kroem wrote:
Yea I was just talking about the most basic scenario with tac marines vs boyz to see if the statement about footslogging melee always being screwed holds up.
The thought experiment doesn't attempt to capture the complexities of a full scale game with all the options available.

Alright, didn't read all the details, sorry.

But I'd argue the intercessor example would be more relevant currently.

Martel732 wrote:Terminators shouldn't need to cower in cover from heavy bolters. But they do. -1 AP halves the effectiveness of 2+ armor. That's crazy.

Gadzilla666 wrote:No, they shouldn't. That's the problem with the new ap and cover system, as Inquisitor Lord Katherine points out.

Under the old system terminators didn't care until ap2 showed up, and standard power armour didn't care until ap3 did.

Again, I have to point out that Terminators are exactly as hard to kill with heavy bolters in 8th as they were in 4th/5th/take-your-pick. Twice as likely to fail a save, but twice as many wounds, so it evens out. If they're afraid of heavy bolters now, they were afraid of heavy bolters then, too.

Otherwise Gadzilla666 I agree entirely with your assessment of cover. The old system of providing essentially an invuln save might not have been supremely realistic, but from a narrative perspective it did exactly what it should: Guardsmen stick to cover all the time, Marines don't care about cover when they're facing massed lasguns, Marines start caring about cover when it's lascannons and missile launchers pointed at them instead. I like the current AP system, but I don't think cover should be rolled into it, as it creates the completely counterintuitive (from both realism and narrative perspectives) situation where the less armor you have, the less incentive you have to take cover.

As I've said before, I really like the Kill Team system of rolling cover and long range into the to-hit roll, and it would contribute significantly to the goal of reducing shooting lethality, but the entire game would need a balance pass (see: Orks) and I doubt GW's going to do that for the next edition.

Re: screens being too effective / Guardsmen being too tough, I'm also going to throw some blame onto the morale system (or lack thereof). It used to be that you just had to kill three Guardsmen to force a morale test that they had a decent chance of failing, causing the entire squad to flee out of position and opening up a hole. Now inflicting 3 casualties can't result in more than 2 extra casualties (with a 1-in-6 chance of doing so), and the remainder stay right where they were. Making those cheap, crappy screen units stop sticking around once they start taking casualties would greatly diminish their value as meatshields.

Grey40k wrote:

 Kroem wrote:
Yea I was just talking about the most basic scenario with tac marines vs boyz to see if the statement about footslogging melee always being screwed holds up.
The thought experiment doesn't attempt to capture the complexities of a full scale game with all the options available.

Alright, didn't read all the details, sorry.

But I'd argue the intercessor example would be more relevant currently.

I've fudged exact model counts to get us to basically equal points:

31 Boyz - 16 slugga choppa, 15 shoota - 217 points
12 Intercessors - Auto Bolt Rifles - 216 points

Intercessors vs Boyz @ 24" range, boyz move first:

Boyz Turn 1: Move up 9". No shooting.

Intercessors Turn 1: No Movement. 36 shots, 24 hits, 12 wounds, 10 dead shoota boyz

Boyz 2: Move up 6". 26 shots, 8.67 hits, 4.33 wounds, 1.44 unsaved wounds

Intercessors Turn 2: No Movement. 36 shots, 24 hits, 12 wounds, 5 dead shoota boyz, 5 dead slugga boyz

Boyz Turn 3: Move up 6". 11 shots, 3.67 hits, 1.83 wounds, 1 dead Intercessor.
Charge.

Intercessors Overwatch: 33 shots, 5.5 hits, 2.75 wounds, 2 dead slugga boyz

Boyz Melee: 16 S4 attacks, 10.67 hits, 5.33 wounds, 1.76 unsaved wounds
Nobz Melee: 3 S5 attacks, 2 hits, 1 wound, 1 dead intercessor

Intercessor Melee: 20 attacks, 13.33 hits, 6.67 wounds, 5 dead slugga boyz

The Boyz flee in the morale phase.

Assuming the intercessors have room to fall back 12" it looks even worse for the orks.

 catbarf wrote:

Martel732 wrote:Terminators shouldn't need to cower in cover from heavy bolters. But they do. -1 AP halves the effectiveness of 2+ armor. That's crazy.

Gadzilla666 wrote:No, they shouldn't. That's the problem with the new ap and cover system, as Inquisitor Lord Katherine points out.

Under the old system terminators didn't care until ap2 showed up, and standard power armour didn't care until ap3 did.

Again, I have to point out that Terminators are exactly as hard to kill with heavy bolters in 8th as they were in 4th/5th/take-your-pick. Twice as likely to fail a save, but twice as many wounds, so it evens out. If they're afraid of heavy bolters now, they were afraid of heavy bolters then, too.

Otherwise Gadzilla666 I agree entirely with your assessment of cover. The old system of providing essentially an invuln save might not have been supremely realistic, but from a narrative perspective it did exactly what it should: Guardsmen stick to cover all the time, Marines don't care about cover when they're facing massed lasguns, Marines start caring about cover when it's lascannons and missile launchers pointed at them instead. I like the current AP system, but I don't think cover should be rolled into it, as it creates the completely counterintuitive (from both realism and narrative perspectives) situation where the less armor you have, the less incentive you have to take cover.

As I've said before, I really like the Kill Team system of rolling cover and long range into the to-hit roll, and it would contribute significantly to the goal of reducing shooting lethality, but the entire game would need a balance pass (see: Orks) and I doubt GW's going to do that for the next edition.

Re: screens being too effective / Guardsmen being too tough, I'm also going to throw some blame onto the morale system (or lack thereof). It used to be that you just had to kill three Guardsmen to force a morale test that they had a decent chance of failing, causing the entire squad to flee out of position and opening up a hole. Now inflicting 3 casualties can't result in more than 2 extra casualties (with a 1-in-6 chance of doing so), and the remainder stay right where they were. Making those cheap, crappy screen units stop sticking around once they start taking casualties would greatly diminish their value as meatshields.

I picked a -1 weapon at random. How about stalker bolt rifles?

 catbarf wrote:

Martel732 wrote:Terminators shouldn't need to cower in cover from heavy bolters. But they do. -1 AP halves the effectiveness of 2+ armor. That's crazy.

Gadzilla666 wrote:No, they shouldn't. That's the problem with the new ap and cover system, as Inquisitor Lord Katherine points out.

Under the old system terminators didn't care until ap2 showed up, and standard power armour didn't care until ap3 did.

Again, I have to point out that Terminators are exactly as hard to kill with heavy bolters in 8th as they were in 4th/5th/take-your-pick. Twice as likely to fail a save, but twice as many wounds, so it evens out. If they're afraid of heavy bolters now, they were afraid of heavy bolters then, too.

Otherwise Gadzilla666 I agree entirely with your assessment of cover. The old system of providing essentially an invuln save might not have been supremely realistic, but from a narrative perspective it did exactly what it should: Guardsmen stick to cover all the time, Marines don't care about cover when they're facing massed lasguns, Marines start caring about cover when it's lascannons and missile launchers pointed at them instead. I like the current AP system, but I don't think cover should be rolled into it, as it creates the completely counterintuitive (from both realism and narrative perspectives) situation where the less armor you have, the less incentive you have to take cover.

As I've said before, I really like the Kill Team system of rolling cover and long range into the to-hit roll, and it would contribute significantly to the goal of reducing shooting lethality, but the entire game would need a balance pass (see: Orks) and I doubt GW's going to do that for the next edition.

Re: screens being too effective / Guardsmen being too tough, I'm also going to throw some blame onto the morale system (or lack thereof). It used to be that you just had to kill three Guardsmen to force a morale test that they had a decent chance of failing, causing the entire squad to flee out of position and opening up a hole. Now inflicting 3 casualties can't result in more than 2 extra casualties (with a 1-in-6 chance of doing so), and the remainder stay right where they were. Making those cheap, crappy screen units stop sticking around once they start taking casualties would greatly diminish their value as meatshields.

I'm sorry, I possibly wasn't clear, I didn't mean that terminators were more resilient to low ap weapons in older editions, but that they had no interest in taking cover against them which they now have incentive for in 8th. Yes, as before, I agree the extra wound makes up for the change in ap.

Also agree on the Kill Team cover and range system being better, but requiring a rebalancing of armies. So not happening any time soon.

Only partially. There are plenty of -1 and -2 AP weapons with multiple damage.

You can go through the last ten years of this forum and find threads of people complaining that terminators die to lasguns and up.

The solution is just to give terminators yet another wound - but GW don't want to sell terminators, so I suspect that ship has sailed.

On the above Primaris/Ork scenario. The Orks would try charging in turn 2 if they rolled reasonably well on the turn 1 advance. If they don't make the charge, the Primaris would charge them - because 12 Primaris expect to kill about 11 Orks and so clear the squad (while generally finding it easier to get everyone into combat than 30 Orks would.)

Tyel wrote:
You can go through the last ten years of this forum and find threads of people complaining that terminators die to lasguns and up.

The solution is just to give terminators yet another wound - but GW don't want to sell terminators, so I suspect that ship has sailed.

On the above Primaris/Ork scenario. The Orks would try charging in turn 2 if they rolled reasonably well on the turn 1 advance. If they don't make the charge, the Primaris would charge them - because 12 Primaris expect to kill about 11 Orks and so clear the squad (while generally finding it easier to get everyone into combat than 30 Orks would.)

I assumed dead average rolls and that the Primaris were holding an objective they didn't want to move from.

The Orks would have needed an 8" or 9" charge, no rerolls (the scenario is ignoring all special rules) and would have eaten overwatch for trying it.

Yea I think we've kinda highlighted that the base stats on the Intercessors are pretty crazy even before all the other helpful rules! They're one of the premier units in game at the moment so that's probably expected.

The deadliness of tactical marines hasn't really increased since 3rd edition, and neither has the survivabiliy of ork boys which is probably why they are pretty comparable.

Edit: I suppose the next question would be; how much less deadly would the intercessor shooting need to be to result in a scenario where enough orks make it into melee to have a roughly evenly matched combat?
I'm using boys as an example as I believe they are one of the few footslogging melee units still being taken, but it would be intresting to see comparisons with other units too.

I'm curious about what magnitude of change would be necessary. If reducing Intercessor leathality by 10% would be enough then hey maybe thats not so bad. If you would need to reduce it by 75% or something then we could truely appreciate the huge changes that would be necessary for footslogging melee to be relevant!

Thanks for running the numbers, that was informative.

I haven't played any orks outside of gorkamorka so I didn't think of using them as an example.