Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

JNAProductions wrote:

Tiberias wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

Tiberias wrote:
Yeah, we're having the same problem as in our last conversation jidmah. You don't even take the time to properly read others posts. I'd didn't claim everyone is getting S9 anti tank, I said we don't know how everything will change when all 9th ed codices are around especially considering alle the extra rules GW likes to tack on units nowadays, so not having S9 antitank MIGHT not be an issue for "insert army that doesn't have a 9th Ed codex yet". Also, as has been pointed out already: nobody said everything should be S9, the main topic was that the cap at T8 was a bit arbitrary considering S can go past 10 now. Stop shifting goalposts.

How about you stop the ad hominem attacks first? You haven't addressed my point even once, only attacked me personally or tried to handwave the argument.

Do you think it's ok for units to be T9 or higher when entire armies will definitely not have tools to handle them?

Don't start crying ad hominem when I call you out on being unpleasent and condescending when you actually are unpleasent and condescending. I did adress your point, but will gladly reiterate: yes, I think it is perfectly fine for certain units (not every big unit like greater demons, mortarion what have you like you insinuated) to have T9 even when some armies do not have S9 anti tank ranged weapons since, with the prevalence of tacking on lots of additional special rules on units, not having S9 ranged anti tank MIGHT not be an issue for faction XY depending on the context of their codex. Maybe one faction who does not have or get S9 ranged anti tank, gets a unit or a stratagem that lets them better wound vehicles, or autowound them on 5+ to hit. This is why I said it greatly depends on how the rest of the 9th ed codices shape up to be.

Does that adequatly answer your question?

Edit: also what does "not having the tools to handle them" even mean exactly? Is the only metric that measures this how S9 ranged anti tank is distributed? What about stratagems or god forbid, melee?

Nurgle Daemons have one unit with native access to S9+, and that's the Soul Grinder with Warpclaw.

Otherwise, you have two options:

Daemon Prince with Axe supported by a Poxbringer
GUO with Bilesword or Doomsday Bell on top bracket supported by a Poxbringer

Sure, but unless I missed something chaos demons don't have 9th ed codex yet. Which is why I keep coming back to the point that deciding whether a landraider being T9 is a good idea or not would depend on the content of the remaining codices yet to be released. I am definitely not in favor of just bumping everyones toughness, but maybe on a select few units it could have been worth it.

Castozor wrote:That's a lot of if and maybe's when we already know for sure DG won't have the answers for T9 vehicles.
I'm not against T9 or even higher T vehicles but Jidmah is right when he says that ship has sailed for this edition. What am I supposed to do with my codex, DS Deathshroud and pray they make their 9" charge?

Yeah but most of the discussion initially was just a hypothetical "what if". Nobody said that T9 on a lot of stuff should be implemented right now.

So how much longer would I have to play with an 8th edition Codex? This isn't a 7th->8th edition change, where literally everything gets revamped. I can play my Daemons, right now, with their current Dex. (Well... Covid.)

A bunch of the Fortifications were T9 and 10. The Bastion and some others are/were T9, the Aquilla Strongpoints T10.

Not sure if those are field-able any more.

Polonius wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
It's worth noting that not every army has S9+ weapons readily available.

Yeah, this isn't a tough case. For many armies, S8 is their go-to anti tank. having all of it wound on 5s (especialy with an invulnerable) would be really tough for armies like Eldar to deal with.

Part of it is that GW has boxed itself into this corner where Grots are expected to interact meaningfully with Knights, so that the rules need to assume one army can bring a superheavy or landraider at a small point game.

Tyel wrote:Isn't the real problem with T9 more that it makes S5-7 just as good as S8? Which has connotations for how you balance S8 with points (some factions having no choice, others having plenty etc).

The way the wounding works, T3/T4/T5 has a good sort of interaction with S3/S4/S5/S6. T6/T7/T8 then has reasonable interaction with S6/S7/S8/S9+.

Saying "we can have T9" and then "we can have S10" seems like a solution looking for a problem.

I think these posts sum up my thoughts pretty well. Putting T9+ stuff all over the place is going to have a big impact on my craftworlders and drukhari whose S9+ is limited to only a handful of relatively weird units. I don't think I should have to fish for 5+ to-wound with my bright lances if I didn't happen to field wraith guard of void raven bombers. You could probably get away with raising the T of some units to 9+ if you also increased the strength of certain anti-tank guns, but then you risk messing with the medium strength interactions Tyel describes.

It is frustrating game design to see your shots, even your high-quality shots, bounce off the enemy and do nothing. Failing to wound a land raider 2/3rds of the time with my bright lances would be annoying as heck. If you want to see vehicles be more durable, I suggest a better way to improve durability is simply to increase their number of wounds. The vehicle becomes harder to kill against all weapons, but the attacker has a sense of progress as they consistently chip wounds off of their target.

Adding wounds uses existing mechanics, doesn't risk jumbling the S/T interactions of various units, and is effective against all forms of weapons.

As a Nurgle daemons player I definitely have means to deal with T9, and even higher T values would not be that bad. If anything we are in a better spot because thanks to our buffs our basic infantry can be wounding anything on a 5+ (for 2 damage, or 4 damage on a 6). We can also debuff enemy toughness or have 6s to hit wound automatically. Nurgle daemons can show up with literally no anti-tank and still murder tanks just fine.

I think we're dancing around the reality, which is that the only T9, even in 8th, was Forgeworld, while main studio codexes stayed limited to T8 (at least, to the best I can remember).

The studio kept legacy stregnths for many heavy weapons, so Lascannons still are S9, etc. This allowed them to create an ecosystem where there were clear ratios between the common Chassis and common heavy weapons. So bumping from T7 (medium tanks) to T8 (heavy tanks) affects S7 and S8, but not S9 (or oddly S5 or 6). This is one reason, I'd guess, that Knights and primarchs aside, that invulnerable saves are pretty uncommon on T8.

To bump from T8 to T9 woud further reduce S8 as an effective anti-tank weapon, hurt S9, but would AGAIN not hurt S4-7. Now, what is one of the things we learned early in 8th edition? That volume of fire is better than bigger shots, and for many armies the best anti-tank isn't even S8, it's high volume S6/7 shooting. This is due both to math and the high number of invulnerable saves which make AP3+ mostly for show.

So, here's the problem with T9: it makes armies built around S8/9 shooting even worse than they are, does nothing to protect the model against S4-7, and thus makes it really hard to price. Against some armies (dark eldar) T9 would be amazing! Against Tau, T9 is at worst a mild inconvenience.

So, why is there no T9? Probably because it only makes things harder to kill from a very distinct spread of weapons (S8/9), and would therefore be unreliable and difficult to balance.

Those reasoning would be a lot more convincing if at the same time there were not additional rules to both increase the lethality and increase defenses.

A good use of S/T would have avoided stuff like Doctrines or the cap to maximum wounds

 Cybtroll wrote:
Those reasoning would be a lot more convincing if at the same time there were not additional rules to both increase the lethality and increase defenses.

A good use of S/T would have avoided stuff like Doctrines or the cap to maximum wounds

I don't think there has ever been a version of 40k, at least not since second edition, that tried to rely solely on the stat block to define units or weapons. S/T is the basis for the mechanics of the game, but has never, and probably never will, be the the bulk of the system..

There's a reason half the armies in the game can have T7, 3+ save vehicles and they are all distinct.

T9 does make a unit tougher against some weapons, but it leads to weird situations like a heavy bolter doing more damage than a krak missile, which is what happens when the goofy S/T chart gets really wide at the higher levels.

Id like to point out, that im not advocating for Toughness 9, im just asking why it doesnt exist, as it seemed odd that some weapons go far beyond strength 9, yet the toughness remained the same.

Like take the Kustom Stompa. it can hit with strength 20. Why can it even fething do that when nothing has toughness 9 and beyond? So strength on close combat weapons, at least tends to go well and beyond strength 8 for some reason.

As i get it, few models can do something iffy to reach toughness 9? dunno. still weird.

The people advocating for an increased toughness range are suggesting much more than 9, it isn't like we think going from max T8 gamewide to max T9 gamewide is a fix to the problem; it would just be moving it around.

Also again, Chaos Knights.

Every single fielded unit can be T9 all game long. There's a penalty, but one that can mitigated somewhat trivially.

They aren't exactly riding rough-shod over any armies. In fairness there are reasons for that that go beyond strength and toughness debates, but I'm not meeting players in even casual games, that are having any more appreciable difficulty dealing with a Knight at T9.

It's been a thing since their codex released in 8th. Zero complaints from the community that I've ever come across with regard to that.

But this wasn't what was being discussed anyway. It was the under utilisation of the toughness mechanic to represent durability in favour of 'special rules'. Literally no-one was advocating making x,y and z T9 in the current 9th edition system, despite the giant straw effigy seemingly being constructed.

Beltane was weeks ago. Edward Woodward got away boys.

If you want harder heavy vehicles give them more wounds. That way you need heavy weapons with high damage values to destroy them. And it doesnt affect how effective heavy weapons are agaisnt weaker stuff because it doesnt matter that a bright lance does 3+d3 or 5+d3 damage agaisnt a 1-2-3 wound model.

Increasing wounds alone seems like that would just lead to more escalation, though - dedicated AT would need increased damage to keep up and be effective, and (knowing GW) the damage will end up being enough that vehicles become too weak to AT, necessitating more wounds, and round and round we go. That's basically what's happening with SM going to 2W right now, isn't it?

I think it does make sense to use toughness as a balancing stat for big vehicles and monsters. Rather than just throwing around invul saves to everything.

I did see a good point in another thread that many xeno armies simply don't have weapons stronger than S8 on their standard, non-LOW units. Which is pretty fair. Though GW could simply buff some of their weapons.

 waefre_1 wrote:
Increasing wounds alone seems like that would just lead to more escalation, though - dedicated AT would need increased damage to keep up and be effective, and (knowing GW) the damage will end up being enough that vehicles become too weak to AT, necessitating more wounds, and round and round we go. That's basically what's happening with SM going to 2W right now, isn't it?

Dedicated AT has been increased already. You notice how many things went from D6 to D3+3? Even Meltas got a boost to their minimum damage count at shorter ranges.

This, presumably, was done to enhance their abilities as tank killers, but given that the best anti-tank weapons are mid-strength mid-damage multi-shot weapons, it didn't matter.

The reason why I advocate fora better use of the S/T stat block is that everything else to represent durability (Invulnerable saves, FnP, special cap to Wounds etc) all increase rule bloat, do not scale up properly (inv and fnp specifically) and increase bookkeeping (more Wounds).
Even armour saves scale badly, resulting in an inversion of the supposed values (-1 is worth more that and additional -1 from -3 to -4).

S/T is already there, it work (somewhat) but can be definitely much more effective.

I think it's a matter of design philosophy. GW wrote rules that seems cool at a first glance (hence why they need to add "cool new rules" any release, and why they market as such even their botches - see the Fallen in WD). They seems to do not understand the long term value of rules that works properly.

 Cybtroll wrote:
The reason why I advocate fora better use of the S/T stat block is that everything else to represent durability (Invulnerable saves, FnP, special cap to Wounds etc) all increase rule bloat, do not scale up properly (inv and fnp specifically) and increase bookkeeping (more Wounds).
Even armour saves scale badly, resulting in an inversion of the supposed values (-1 is worth more that and additional -1 from -3 to -4).

S/T is already there, it work (somewhat) but can be definitely much more effective.

I think it's a matter of design philosophy. GW wrote rules that seems cool at a first glance (hence why they need to add "cool new rules" any release, and why they market as such even their botches - see the Fallen in WD). They seems to do not understand the long term value of rules that works properly.

I agree that S and T need to be utilized more widely, but I disagree with everything else.

Offensive stats are hit skill, strength, AP, damage and number of shots.
If you just use just toughness and armor saves as defensive mechanics, too many weapon just become all-rounders. We have had editions in the past where everyone was just spamming auto/assault cannons and their xenos equivalents or everyone was just bringing plasma and nothing else.
-1 to hit, -1 to damage, invulnerable saves, toughness, armor (or the lack thereof), wound counts and other defensive rules are all affecting these offensive statistics in different ways. In a perfect game, you have a wide spread of defensive profiles, forcing people to bring more well-rounded and diverse armies because otherwise they might just run into a hard-counter to their plasma/melta/autocannon spam.

The two defensive rules that really do little to this are FNP and the max wound cap.
FNP essentially just adds X% wounds to a model has no business being put on the datasheet of any rank and file model with more than 3 wounds where it could just be replaced with more wounds. It should only be used when models can gain and lose FNP (because tracking that through wounds would be a PITA) or when you want to provide a model with explicit defenses against mortal wounds.
The wound cap on the other hand is an elegant solution to a problem as old as 40k. Big, dangerous melee threats have no way of crossing the board without getting blown to smithereens. This rule gives them a chance to do so without being unstoppable. As long as it only gets rolled out to a select few top tier melee only threats like Thrakka, C'Tan or Bloodthirsters, it's not causing issues. Since it solves an actual problem, you can hardly talk about bloat here. Really one of the better things GW has done.

If you reduce the amount of shots on the pure anti tank weapons like meltas but at the same time make them have higher strenght, ap and damage while also increasing toughness, save and wounds on vehicles/monsters you make it so no weapon is an allrounder.

We havent gone far enough on toughness,saves and wounds which make mass dmg ap 1 dmg 1 weapons, mortal wounds, autocannons and plasmas work against everything. -1 to hit, transhuman effects, invulnerable saves, half/-1 damage etc affect the bigger guns more than the mid tier guns already. Those rules just make it worse when changes to the base profiles alone could help differentiate weapons and targets more than it already does without punishing the wrong weapon types.

Might be leftover from earlier editions where having high toughness would make some models outright immune to weapons. Presumably most things were left T7 or lower so that your average bolter still had a chance of wounding anything short of a wraithlord.

The factions I'd expect to have high toughness models--tyranid MC's, wraith constructs from Eldar, etc.--have yet to receive a codex this edition as well.