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ARMOUR OF CONTEMPT
Each time an attack is allocated to an Adeptus Astartes,
Sanctic Astartes, Heretic Astartes or Adepta Sororitas
model, worsen the Armour Penetration characteristic of
that attack by 1.

This rule does not apply to any of the following:

• Models equipped with a storm shield, a relic shield
or a combat shield (or a Relic that replaces one of
these shields).

• Models with either the Sacresant Shield or Force
Shielding ability (Celestian Sacresant and Nemesis
Dreadknight units).

• Models that are under the effects of any other rule
that worsens or reduces the Armour Penetration
characteristic of an attack.

‘Hammer of the Emperor:

If every <Regiment> unit in your army is drawn from the same regiment, then
each time a <Regiment> model from your army makes a
ranged attack, an unmodified hit roll of 6 automatically
wounds the target. Note that units listed as Advisors
and Auxilla do not prevent other Astra Militarum units
from your army from gaining this rule, but Advisors and
Auxilla units never benefit from this rule.’

Which one is stronger?

Both are unnecessary bloat that only exists to address the fact that GW would rather pile band-aid patches onto things rather than admit that they've been handing out far too many buffs and might need to start backing off on the statlines.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Both are unnecessary bloat that only exists to address the fact that GW would rather pile band-aid patches onto things rather than admit that they've been handing out far too many buffs and might need to start backing off on the statlines.

This will not become a GW bash thread there are several of those, I want to know which one do you think is stronger and why?

6s to-hit autowounding adds one extra wound per 36 shots for each pip of the die that wounds FAIL on.
Wounding on a 2+ adds 1 per 36.
Wounding on a 3+ adds 2 per 36.
So on and so forth.

Armor Of Contempt is a flat AP reduction. Math is easier to figure out on that.

I think Armour of Contempt represents a massive power shift which is likely to completely alter the competitive meta. "Power armour" lists saw a sharp decline in players through 2022 and I think this will bring them back - which alters how tournament progression looks and the weighting of these matchups versus your total win percentage.

I don't know what the "best" faction will be to take advantage of this but I'd be incredibly surprised if there isn't a good combo there.

Hammer of the Emperor is harder to call because it kind matters in certain situations and doesn't in others. We've seen the laments of lasguns into tanks for instance. But tanks have not really been an overwhelming feature of the meta. You go shoot some T3 elves - with lasguns or battle cannons, and it doesn't make that much difference because you were wounding on 4s, 3s or 2s anyway.

With that said, its hard mentally to imagine what 20ish guardsmen squads, all with a complement of special/heavy weapons and efficient order allocation looks like.

People say "just kill them lol" - but if they are doing 50%~ more damage than they were... that's significant. Those units that would be killing them and holding objectives will die so aren't there next turn. If Armour of Contempt forces the meta to become more dedicated anti-Marine (rather than getting there by default) these chaff carpet lists where you have more bodies than they have attacks may start to gain ground. Especially when they are not toothless.

With my IG army, I have played two games this weekend, both against different marine lists. The first was 2k, the second 1.5k.

We used the new 'balance' datasheet rules, with the Armour of Contempt and Hammer of the Emperor rules. I have to say, I feel the Armour of Contempt rules to be far and above the more powerful rule.

I managed to score a few autowounds in both games but it did not make up for or even come close to matching the drop in effective firepower due to the reduction in penetration which all my heavier weapons faced.

Marine armoured vehicles passing saves against Lascannons on a 4+, heavy bolters and autocannons shrugged off and even plasma guns nowhere near as threatening as they were before.

Ignoring the balance side of things, one almost feels that if the marines needed to be tankier, it would have been easier and less clunky to play with if they were just given 2+ armour.

One only matters for a single faction I never played against and that is considered one of the weakest factions in the game, the other applies to a pretty wide range of the most popular factions.
One is a minor offense boost, the other a defensive boost that applies to most units in the respektive factions and works against most weapons. For me it's pretty clear.

Armour of contempt will have an impact in every game, hammer of the emperor & the other IG changes combined will only make a difference if you build around it by either spamming foot guard or finding a cheap high rate of fire platform and spamming that (gatling taurox prime if scions also count as a regiment?). Armour of contempt is stronger by a mile.

 Insularum wrote:
Armour of contempt will have an impact in every game, hammer of the emperor & the other IG changes combined will only make a difference if you build around it by either spamming foot guard or finding a cheap high rate of fire platform and spamming that (gatling taurox prime if scions also count as a regiment?). Armour of contempt is stronger by a mile.

Scions do get it. Militarum Tempestus is their <Regiment>.

Jarms48 wrote:

 Insularum wrote:
Armour of contempt will have an impact in every game, hammer of the emperor & the other IG changes combined will only make a difference if you build around it by either spamming foot guard or finding a cheap high rate of fire platform and spamming that (gatling taurox prime if scions also count as a regiment?). Armour of contempt is stronger by a mile.

Scions do get it. Militarum Tempestus is their <Regiment>.

If your army is all Scions. If you bring a single Scion squad with your Cadians (or whomever), nobody gets it.
But yeah. You can do things at the listbuilding stage to max it out.

But contempt pretty much affects everyone who plays the game (barring 'I only play with Bill and Ted and none of us play those factions' outliers). Hammer only matters if you've got a local guard player who's been holding on for one more day. Every single day of 9th.

And you get to feel sad when Hammer's 6-fishing autowounds still run into successful armor saves.... while Contempt is busy handing out more successful armor saves. Insult to injury there, I feel.

Armour of Contempt is the bigger buff.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Both are unnecessary bloat that only exists to address the fact that GW would rather pile band-aid patches onto things rather than admit that they've been handing out far too many buffs and might need to start backing off on the statlines.

You are 100% correct of course, but that doesn't really answer the OP's question.

AoC is the bigger boost. Both are stupid.

 CKO wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Both are unnecessary bloat that only exists to address the fact that GW would rather pile band-aid patches onto things rather than admit that they've been handing out far too many buffs and might need to start backing off on the statlines.

This will not become a GW bash thread there are several of those, I want to know which one do you think is stronger and why?

AoC. Making lasguns auto-wound does squat because of AP-/D1, and the to-wound roll isn't usually where special and heavy weapons struggle. That said the fact that one is stronger than the other doesn't change the fact that neither should exist.

AoC is both a more powerful buff and much more distorting on the game. Bypassing the wound roll doesn't do much besides raising DPS in a relatively static way. AoC vastly changes the math and relative value on a wide range of attacks.

AoC makes the enemy’s stuff worse at killing you. Across the board. It’s way, way better a buff.

It's not even close, armour of contempt is one of the strongest defensive buffs going when you have such good base saves to start with.

Armour of contempt, hands down. That's an armywide buff, to armies that were already mid tiers, with a significant impact on the meta while hammer of the emperor gives some units from the worst army in the game a boost that doesn't really change anything in terms of meta or even the tier for the AM, which remains pretty low.

Man it's really funny seeing how everyone's attitudes have changed comparing mahrieens getting +1 Armor Save (basically) versus orks getting the old dakka dakka dakka

And for the record, Armor of Contempt is probably the strongest speshul rule that Games Workshop has ever not-printed but given out.
I can't wait until Spike uses Armor of Contempt but doesn't tell Timmy it also applies to his purple marines.

 Eonfuzz wrote:
Man it's really funny seeing how everyone's attitudes have changed comparing mahrieens getting +1 Armor Save (basically) versus orks getting the old dakka dakka dakka

What do you mean?

 vipoid wrote:
What do you mean?

I think it's another attempt at "Dakka said this, and now Dakka is saying this thing that contradicts their previous statement" which attempts to paint Dakka as some sort of hive mind.

Attacks that automatically hit or wound do not benefit from Hammer of the Emperor.

For attacks hitting on 2+ and wounding on 2+/3+/4+/5+/6+ HotE multiplies damage by 1,04/1,1/1,2/1,4/2.

For attacks hitting on 3+ and wounding on 2+/3+/4+/5+/6+ HotE multiplies damage by 1,05/1,125/1,25/1,5/2,25.

For attacks hitting on 4+ and wounding on 2+/3+/4+/5+/6+ HotE multiplies damage by 1,07/1,17/1,33/1,67/2,67.

For attacks hitting on 5+ and wounding on 2+/3+/4+/5+/6+ HotE multiplies damage by 1,1/1,25/1,5/2/3,5.

For attacks hitting on 6+ and wounding on 2+/3+/4+/5+/6+ HotE multiplies damage by 1,2/1,4/2/3/6.

Armour of Contempt does not benefit models with storm shields or in cases where the invulnerable save is more than good enough or where the save is more than good enough (1+ Sv vs AP-1 or any Sv vs AP- weapons).

+1 to Sv multiplies damage taken for 2+/3+/4+/5+/6+/7+ by 1/0,5/0,67/0,75/0,8/0,83.

If you attack Space Marines with a 3+ Sv with an AP-1 weapon you go from a 4+ Sv to now a 3+ Sv because of the rule, so you multiply damage by 0,67.

My gut told me that armour of contempt was better, but after doing all this math I think HotE is more impactful. Those weren't the only changes made in the balance dataslate so I don't feel confident making any predictions.

 vict0988 wrote:
...My gut told me that armour of contempt was better, but after doing all this math I think HotE is more impactful...

Carry it through. You're multiplying damage by large values in some cases, sure, but the damage you're multiplying is tiny. Consider a lasgun against a Rhino. You're tripling your odds of doing damage, sure, but your odds of doing damage were 2.7% in the first place (1/2*1/6*1/3). Bumping that up to 7.4% (1/3*1/6*1/3 + 1/6*1/3) isn't going to make a lasgun a more meaningful anti-tank weapon.

AoC is by far the stronger rule. HotE would have been a great buff to Guard, and would have actually got Guard back into the game. Then AoC came along and knocked Guard back down. So overall, Guard is flat-to-down with this dataslate.

AoC was actually a great buff. It puts powered armor marines right back where they need to be in terms of durability for their points with all the codexes that have been released over the past year. The sad thing was that this kind of buff was required, when it was actually the ridiculous power creep over the past year that caused PA armies to need this buff in the first place.

Another other choice would have been to reduce the AP and/or damage of almost every other weapon in the game by 1, but that in turn would require a complete points rebalance as well. Another option would have been to just adjust the points values of every PA unit in the game, but GW is really reluctant to change points values. (Case in point, a Guard Basilisk is only worth 40 points compared to any modern codex units, but remains at 115).

So, the next effect is that armies will be pushed (like in 7th edition) to spam higher AP weapons, like plasma guns and melta guns, or weapons with tons of AP0 shots. But this isn't a game problem, this is a player problem trying to kill everything with 100% efficiency 100% of the time.

The next problem that is readily apparent is that Tyranids are already poised to displace Eldar as the latest boogeyman, and it's unclear if the AoC change will have any impact on the nigh-unkillable Flyrant & Fexes. I just watched a Custodes army get tabled in 3 turns because of MW spam. PA armies just aren't going to stand up to that kind of output.

brainpsyk wrote:
AoC is by far the stronger rule. HotE would have been a great buff to Guard, and would have actually got Guard back into the game. Then AoC came along and knocked Guard back down. So overall, Guard is flat-to-down with this dataslate.

AoC was actually a great buff. It puts powered armor marines right back where they need to be in terms of durability for their points with all the codexes that have been released over the past year. The sad thing was that this kind of buff was required, when it was actually the ridiculous power creep over the past year that caused PA armies to need this buff in the first place.

Another other choice would have been to reduce the AP of almost every other weapon in the game by 1, but that in turn would require a complete points rebalance as well. Another option would have been to just adjust the points values of every PA unit in the game, but GW is really reluctant to change points values. (Case in point, a Guard Basilisk is only worth 40 points compared to any modern codex units, but remains at 115).

So, this is a simple but inelegant fix.

Erm... 40 points for a Basilisk?

Look, I don't deny Guard are bad. But that's less than 4 points per T7 3+ wound. You could strip the guns off it and it'd STILL be worth bringing 9 at 40 PPM.

Seriously-that'd be more durable per point than anything I can field as a Nurgle player. And I'm assuming you meant to keep the gun at 40 points.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Erm... 40 points for a Basilisk?

Look, I don't deny Guard are bad. But that's less than 4 points per T7 3+ wound. You could strip the guns off it and it'd STILL be worth bringing 9 at 40 PPM.

Seriously-that'd be more durable per point than anything I can field as a Nurgle player. And I'm assuming you meant to keep the gun at 40 points.

Yep, it's T6, not T7, @BS4 that does d3 damage. With 2d6 pick highest for number of shots, that comes out to *one* shot that hits/wounds/penetrates a Onager Dunecrawler (T7, 3+/5++). A DB PBC, even after AoC & the indirect nerf has almost 4x the output and 25% more durability per point than the Basilisk.

The Basilisk is in contention for the worst unit in the entire game. It's got 1 job, it's overly expensive for that job, and it can't even do that job.

brainpsyk wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Erm... 40 points for a Basilisk?

Look, I don't deny Guard are bad. But that's less than 4 points per T7 3+ wound. You could strip the guns off it and it'd STILL be worth bringing 9 at 40 PPM.

Seriously-that'd be more durable per point than anything I can field as a Nurgle player. And I'm assuming you meant to keep the gun at 40 points.

Yep, it's T6, not T7, @BS4 that does d3 damage. With 2d6 pick highest for number of shots, that comes out to *one* shot that hits/wounds/penetrates a Onager Dunecrawler (T7, 3+/5++). A DB PBC, even after AoC & the indirect nerf has almost 4x the output and 25% more durability per point than the Basilisk.

The Basilisk is in contention for the worst unit in the entire game. It's got 1 job, it's overly expensive for that job, and it can't even do that job.

Right, it's not good at its artillery job.
But making it 40 points makes it so durable for its points, it'd have the new job of just body-blocking stuff and existing. Firepower is just a bonus.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Right, it's not good at its artillery job.
But making it 40 points makes it so durable for its points, it'd have the new job of just body-blocking stuff and existing. Firepower is just a bonus.

So you're saying at 40 points a Basilisk still wouldn't be worth shooting? I agree with that

brainpsyk wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Erm... 40 points for a Basilisk?

Look, I don't deny Guard are bad. But that's less than 4 points per T7 3+ wound. You could strip the guns off it and it'd STILL be worth bringing 9 at 40 PPM.

Seriously-that'd be more durable per point than anything I can field as a Nurgle player. And I'm assuming you meant to keep the gun at 40 points.

Yep, it's T6, not T7, @BS4 that does d3 damage. With 2d6 pick highest for number of shots, that comes out to *one* shot that hits/wounds/penetrates a Onager Dunecrawler (T7, 3+/5++). A DB PBC, even after AoC & the indirect nerf has almost 4x the output and 25% more durability per point than the Basilisk.

The Basilisk is in contention for the worst unit in the entire game. It's got 1 job, it's overly expensive for that job, and it can't even do that job.

Are you comparing a PBC hitting with its other weapons or something? It's out of los firing 3.5 shots, hitting 1.75, wounds ~once of which half are saved for 1 damage mathematically. That outs it squarely in contention with a Basilisk at best But pbc can do other stuff which I fully expect them to do and not be an oolos battery.

brainpsyk wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Right, it's not good at its artillery job.
But making it 40 points makes it so durable for its points, it'd have the new job of just body-blocking stuff and existing. Firepower is just a bonus.

So you're saying at 40 points a Basilisk still wouldn't be worth shooting? I agree with that

It'd be worth shooting.

Just over 2 hits on average.
With the new rule, 1 and a quarter failed saves against a Marine, for a reasonably consistent one MEQ dead per turn.

In other words, ignoring the Heavy Bolter or Flamer, it'd make its points back in shooting in just two turns against a common opponent. Toss in the Heavy Bolters for an extra chance of bopping another model-not great, but certainly not impossible.

And your opponent still has 11 T6 3+ wounds to chew through.

Hell, you said to compare to Onager-let's do that.

AoC is going to be really bad for the game overall, even if it addresses an immediate problem. It's just such a lazy change. The problem was that high AP was becoming too common, but the fix mostly impacts AP 1, by making it literally worthless vs half the armies in the game. And the biggest impact is going to probably be on AP 2 shooting into terminators in cover, where they'll still get their 2+ save. Needing AP 3 to realistically hurt terminators in cover (or AP4 with indirect) is going to fundamentally change the game. It's not quite the screamer-star from 7th, but it is going to have similar impacts.

It also makes storm shields pretty worthless on terminators, which is dumb from a game design point of view AND dumb from a fluff point of view. And what possible sense does it make that normal space marine terminators have better armor than allarus custodians? This is what happens when you put this kind of band-aid into the game, it warps all sorts of things in dumb and unjustifiable ways.

It's just a really badly designed rule, and people are going to start realizing it once the initial euphoria wears off.

The solution to AP being dolled out too generously was to go back and retune AP values, not to just make AP1 worthless. But that would have taken work. This just takes 5 minutes. It's a classic GW band-aid solution that ends up making things worse in the long run in favor of an easy short-term solution.