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IMHO the bigger issue is that there is only a million or so of them and yet they are supposed to be able to meaningfully contribute to warzones all over the galaxy. So a handful need to be able to conquer a planet, a hundred need to be able to wage interstellar war and a thousand of them need to be a very big deal.

Otherwise they are kinda irrelevant and that would be a problem for the poster boys of the setting.

 Tyran wrote:
IMHO the bigger issue is that there is only a million or so of them and yet they are supposed to be able to meaningfully contribute to warzones all over the galaxy. So a handful need to be able to conquer a planet, a hundred need to be able to wage interstellar war and a thousand of them need to be a very big deal.

Otherwise they are kinda irrelevant and that would be a problem for the poster boys of the setting.

No no no, that's a huge misunderstanding of things. To take a planet you get a force of Marines, plus available assets from local Imperial forces, plus whatever weapon platforms are knocking about in the area, not the least of which is their Sttrike Cruiser with all sorts of ground pounding capabilities, often combined with a high tolerance for colateral damage.

It's not like five dides with bolters show up and superman it.


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 Da Boss wrote:
I honestly feel the marines were perfectly well represented in 3e - vs a guardsman they were far more durable, had a much greater damage output and could be used far more aggressively.

. . .

I always find the "How Tuff is Marines" threads very funny for that reason because certain marine fans have no restraint in how strong they want their boys to be.

Agree and agree. But can't comment on Abnett so I struck that out, no disrespect.

In my view, a single Space Marine in full battle gear is roughly equivalent to a five-man Militarum Tempestus squad in fluff terms. Like any other soldiers, they are trained to fight as squads, so a squad of five Marines is more than the sum of its parts.

The hardware (power armor, bolter and so on) is a huge part of what makes Marines effective, and some of it will need recharging, reloading or maintenance eventually. Realistically, a bolter shell (an egg-sized explosive bullet) should probably be S6, AP -2, D2, while power armor should provide a 2+ save. But that would result in an army with a much too low model count to be profitable for GW (or fun to play).

.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
IMHO the bigger issue is that there is only a million or so of them and yet they are supposed to be able to meaningfully contribute to warzones all over the galaxy. So a handful need to be able to conquer a planet, a hundred need to be able to wage interstellar war and a thousand of them need to be a very big deal.

Otherwise they are kinda irrelevant and that would be a problem for the poster boys of the setting.

No no no, that's a huge misunderstanding of things. To take a planet you get a force of Marines, plus available assets from local Imperial forces, plus whatever weapon platforms are knocking about in the area, not the least of which is their Sttrike Cruiser with all sorts of ground pounding capabilities, often combined with a high tolerance for colateral damage.

It's not like five dides with bolters show up and superman it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Da Boss wrote:
I honestly feel the marines were perfectly well represented in 3e - vs a guardsman they were far more durable, had a much greater damage output and could be used far more aggressively.

. . .

I always find the "How Tuff is Marines" threads very funny for that reason because certain marine fans have no restraint in how strong they want their boys to be.

Agree and agree. But can't comment on Abnett so I struck that out, no disrespect.

Yeah that makes sense. Combined use of arms and forces to crush foes and take a planet. It kinda makes sense to have like... IG as the main army book, with elites section having space marine squads available, or other imperial assets like SoB, Grey Knights, Deathwatch, etc.

When I started 40k, the background stories always did make it seem like there were not many marines, and there was always a struggle to keep their numbers up, with a slow diminishment of the total available because of marine geneseed not always being able to be recovered from fallen marines. Like... ten years of mutation and training to go from a recruit to a scout/marine. I mean the whole process seemed very innefecient if you could always take the same recruits, and even the recruits who die during the mutation/training, and just raise up more regiments of imperial guard. I mean its not like I think marines should be "supermen" on the battlefield, but there is some justified improvement in stats, I certainly wouldn't mind an increase in points so their numbers are fewer on the battlefield.

 Tyran wrote:
IMHO the bigger issue is that there is only a million or so of them and yet they are supposed to be able to meaningfully contribute to warzones all over the galaxy. So a handful need to be able to conquer a planet, a hundred need to be able to wage interstellar war and a thousand of them need to be a very big deal.

Otherwise they are kinda irrelevant and that would be a problem for the poster boys of the setting.

Like I've said in other threads, there are, at most, a few hundred US Navy SEALs in active service at any given time. Yet they have meaningfully contributed to warzones across the world.

The writers just need to remember that Marines are special forces, and use them for special forces missions, not knock-down-drag-out attrition slugfests- that's what the Guard is for. You use Marines for missions that the Guard can't do, where that eliteness is a valuable force-multiplier and not at risk of being casually turned into a smear by your friendly neighborhood Chaos Warhound Titan. 'Conquering a planet' could mean assassinating leadership, extracting VIPs before virus bombing, knocking out anti-space weapons so the Navy can bombard it into compliance, or establishing a beachhead for the Guard. Those are valuable, important capabilities that give Marines reason to exist despite their high individual cost.

They don't need to be able to solo entire armies to be relevant. They just need to be able to do things that nobody else can, and that's achievable without writing them as Mary Sues.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Those stories use marines as a scary, credible threat so that the protagonists can look more impressive for having taken them on.

The reverse should also be true in the Marine stories then. The opposition has to be a credible threat if the Marines are to look more impressive.

Right. That's what I'm advocating for.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
Hear hear. The "objective" power level of a space marine is the tabletop, not some book or video game.

A tactical marine is better than most basic infantry but weaker than a lot of elite infantry. That's where they belong.

Kinda, but I think a more accurate place for them is somewhere in the middle. They are WAY OP in the books, but they are also very underpowered on the table.

I think the time old adage from, what was it 3rd edition, or maybe even earlier? is the most apt one. "Give me one hundred Space Marines, failing that, give me one thousand of any other troop."

That's always felt like the sweet spot to me. Incredibly strong, but nowhere near unassailable or invulnerable. I've always thought that space marines should be pointed, (and to some extent play) like Custodes currently do on the table (just with more ranged capabilities). However, having your basic infantry model be ballpark of 60 points doesn't exactly tend to help move a lot of models, so they are underpowered on the table to the point of having whole companies wiped out in relatively minor engagements so that GW can move more plastic. Ops, my 2k force of 70 marines just got tabled, I guess that company is more-less done for after one fight.

 catbarf wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
IMHO the bigger issue is that there is only a million or so of them and yet they are supposed to be able to meaningfully contribute to warzones all over the galaxy. So a handful need to be able to conquer a planet, a hundred need to be able to wage interstellar war and a thousand of them need to be a very big deal.

Otherwise they are kinda irrelevant and that would be a problem for the poster boys of the setting.

Like I've said in other threads, there are, at most, a few hundred US Navy SEALs in active service at any given time. Yet they have meaningfully contributed to warzones across the world.

The writers just need to remember that Marines are special forces, and use them for special forces missions, not knock-down-drag-out attrition slugfests- that's what the Guard is for. You use Marines for missions that the Guard can't do, where that eliteness is a valuable force-multiplier and not at risk of being casually turned into a smear by your friendly neighborhood Chaos Warhound Titan. 'Conquering a planet' could mean assassinating leadership, extracting VIPs before virus bombing, knocking out anti-space weapons so the Navy can bombard it into compliance, or establishing a beachhead for the Guard. Those are valuable, important capabilities that give Marines reason to exist despite their high individual cost.

They don't need to be able to solo entire armies to be relevant. They just need to be able to do things that nobody else can, and that's achievable without writing them as Mary Sues.

Well put. I do think the tabletop kind of does marines a disservice in this regard. Especially in higher point games. post-heresy marines really shouldn't be lining up and marching towards enemy gunlines. They don't have the numbers for that, and it's kind of a waste of their skills even if they are significantly more durable than a regular human. But to play 10th edition, you need a healthy number of cheap, disposable squads that march out into the open to stand in magic circles, whereas you'd expect your "average" marine force to be relatively few in number and to be hard to draw a bead on. A marine offensive should have them popping up from an unexpected angle (jump packs, drop pods, infiltration, etc.) and then preventing the enemy from lining up their ideal shots through sustained pressure.

Sending a squad of intercessors out into the open so that a trio of leman russes can obliterate them is weird.

In some ways, marines are kind of like harlequins in that they feel like they'd be more at home in something like combat patrol or kill team than in full games of 40k.

-Guardsman- wrote:
In my view, a single Space Marine in full battle gear is roughly equivalent to a five-man Militarum Tempestus squad in fluff terms. Like any other soldiers, they are trained to fight as squads, so a squad of five Marines is more than the sum of its parts.

The hardware (power armor, bolter and so on) is a huge part of what makes Marines effective, and some of it will need recharging, reloading or maintenance eventually. Realistically, a bolter shell (an egg-sized explosive bullet) should probably be S6, AP -2, D2, while power armor should provide a 2+ save. But that would result in an army with a much too low model count to be profitable for GW (or fun to play).

.

Why?

Power Armor is tough, but so is necrodermis and Nid's armored chitin.
A Bolter is a good weapon, but it doesn't literally flay you atom by atom or fire scads of monomolecular shurikens.

 Tawnis wrote:

That's always felt like the sweet spot to me. Incredibly strong, but nowhere near unassailable or invulnerable. I've always thought that space marines should be pointed, (and to some extent play) like Custodes currently do on the table (just with more ranged capabilities). However, having your basic infantry model be ballpark of 60 points doesn't exactly tend to help move a lot of models, so they are underpowered on the table to the point of having whole companies wiped out in relatively minor engagements so that GW can move more plastic. Ops, my 2k force of 70 marines just got tabled, I guess that company is more-less done for after one fight.

100% this. Part of why custodes bug me as an army is that it feels like they're basically occupying the niche that marines *should be* occupying. That's not necessarily to say that I want marines to have custodes tier stats, but I think giving them a custodes level price tag and then skill-based abilities that let them punch above their weight would be very fluffy.

It really feels like marines are cursed to not feel like marines on the table because they're too popular to be designed around a lower model count. Then again, 3-man primaris units were kind of a move in the right direction?

Wyldhunt wrote:Well put. I do think the tabletop kind of does marines a disservice in this regard. Especially in higher point games. post-heresy marines really shouldn't be lining up and marching towards enemy gunlines. They don't have the numbers for that, and it's kind of a waste of their skills even if they are significantly more durable than a regular human. But to play 10th edition, you need a healthy number of cheap, disposable squads that march out into the open to stand in magic circles, whereas you'd expect your "average" marine force to be relatively few in number and to be hard to draw a bead on. A marine offensive should have them popping up from an unexpected angle (jump packs, drop pods, infiltration, etc.) and then preventing the enemy from lining up their ideal shots through sustained pressure.

Sending a squad of intercessors out into the open so that a trio of leman russes can obliterate them is weird.

In some ways, marines are kind of like harlequins in that they feel like they'd be more at home in something like combat patrol or kill team than in full games of 40k.

I find Marines 'work' in Epic: Armageddon, despite the significantly greater scale of that game, because it lets them lean into the stuff they're supposed to be good at. A well-commanded Marine army can run rings around the Guard or Orks, staying out of reach of the biggest and scariest stuff, applying overwhelming force to a narrow frontage.

This is because:
1. E:A has a command rating mechanic to model C&C, making Marines actually better-coordinated and able to operate at a higher tempo.
2. E:A has boards the same size as 40K, but much lower typical ranges, so maneuver is essential to being able to actually shoot things.
3. Marines get organic transport in the form of army-wide Rhinos, giving them high operational mobility.
4. Marines are especially resilient to morale effects, which makes them much harder to pin down with fire.

A 40K game is a cage match where transports are really just pillboxes because the mobility is superfluous, ranges are so long that the only way to get away from a Marine-mulching superheavy is to hide out of LOS, everyone else is functionally just as fearlessly willing to fight to the death, and nonexistent C&C means a Tactical Marine and an Ork Nob are functionally equivalent. Of course they aren't going to feel 'right' in that environment. If you have a modern combat game where a company of SEALs deploys 100yds away from a platoon of T90s I bet they won't feel much like SEALs, either.

There's a disconnect between what Marines are supposed to be, and what 40K actually supports through its rules and general design.

Hah, nothing has made me want to play Epic: Armageddon more than this post.

But do I REALLY need another scale?!

 catbarf wrote:

A 40K game is a cage match where transports are really just pillboxes because the mobility is superfluous.

Not really? Transports are more important than they've been since 8th came around and removed the AV rules.

 RaptorusRex wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

A 40K game is a cage match where transports are really just pillboxes because the mobility is superfluous.

Not really? Transports are more important than they've been since 8th came around and removed the AV rules.

Nah. I agree with catbarf's sentiment here. For my (index) eldar, wave serpents almost end up slowing my units down. Their base movement is higher than that of my infantry, but having to fly up and back down to clear a wall means it's often faster to just disembark the infantry and let them jog forward rather than moving the transport and disembarking out of it. In effect, wave serpents have basically just been bunkers that I can launch infantry units out of. Similarly, my drukhari don't really use their raiders and venoms as a way to close the gap with the enemy (unless I'm using the pounce strat from Sky Splinter Assault); they use venoms to hide from return fire by disembarking and then re-embarking around a corner in the fight phase, and they use raiders as a way to not get shot/a way to hand out Lance. Or they just shoot out of the transport, but the way that works in 10th is that the embarked squad is essentially just extra guns for the transport. It's pretty rare that you zip a raider forward and then disembark in the same turn unless you're using an assault-out-of-disembark strat.

In my experience, transports this edition are seldom useful for their mobility. They're useful because they either have a special ability to buff or protect their passengers, or because they're just a good gunboat for their points. No one is doing a rhino rush this edition because for the points you could just take more marines.

Heck, sometimes transports are active liabilities. Starting the turn in a wave serpent means my (index) farseer can't fortune her friends, for instance.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Well put. I do think the tabletop kind of does marines a disservice in this regard. Especially in higher point games. post-heresy marines really shouldn't be lining up and marching towards enemy gunlines. They don't have the numbers for that, and it's kind of a waste of their skills even if they are significantly more durable than a regular human.

In fairness, though, you could say that about a lot of armies.

Why are Dark Eldar launching a raid against a company of Leman Russ tanks and artillery?

Why are Grey Knights fighting battles with absolutely no daemonic presence to speak of?

 vipoid wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Well put. I do think the tabletop kind of does marines a disservice in this regard. Especially in higher point games. post-heresy marines really shouldn't be lining up and marching towards enemy gunlines. They don't have the numbers for that, and it's kind of a waste of their skills even if they are significantly more durable than a regular human.

In fairness, though, you could say that about a lot of armies.

Why are Dark Eldar launching a raid against a company of Leman Russ tanks and artillery?

Why are Grey Knights fighting battles with absolutely no daemonic presence to speak of?

Sure. 40k's tabletop experience probably does a bad job of representing a lot of armies' fluff. Sending my space elves to stand around on magic circles definitely feels weird.

But I do think it applies to marines as well for the reasons mentioned above. If you squint and pretend custodes are marine-sized/shaped, the playstyle of custodes is probably closer to what the fluff would lead you to expect of marines than the actual playstyle(s) allowed by the marine rules. Low model count backed up by a couple of walkers and tanks. Durable against incoming damage. Hits hard. Feels every loss.

Then again, the existence/nature of custodes is such that custodes are kind of doomed to feel like more marine-y marines in a lot of ways.

 vipoid wrote:

Why are Grey Knights fighting battles with absolutely no daemonic presence to speak of?

Probably there is a buried Chaos artefact somewhere nearby.

That's literally the lore of the first part of Shadowbrink, in which the Grey Knights were quarantining an indestructible warp archeotect in the path of Hive Fleet Leviathan.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Sure. 40k's tabletop experience probably does a bad job of representing a lot of armies' fluff. Sending my space elves to stand around on magic circles definitely feels weird.

Seems reasonable enough to me that they have to do "something" on objectives, or why are they on the battlefield at all?

But I was going to say I agree with you on transports. The whole "jump out, have your turn, jump back in via various mechanisms to avoid being shot" feels mega-gamey. It might make sense for 40k "as a game", but I don't think its a good feeling of what a mechanised force actually would be like.

I guess I don't like anything that makes the turn-based nature of 40k feel explicit. Models aren't actually trapped in stasis for 10 seconds or whatever when the other player is taking their turn.

 JNAProductions wrote:

-Guardsman- wrote:
In my view, a single Space Marine in full battle gear is roughly equivalent to a five-man Militarum Tempestus squad in fluff terms. Like any other soldiers, they are trained to fight as squads, so a squad of five Marines is more than the sum of its parts.

The hardware (power armor, bolter and so on) is a huge part of what makes Marines effective, and some of it will need recharging, reloading or maintenance eventually. Realistically, a bolter shell (an egg-sized explosive bullet) should probably be S6, AP -2, D2, while power armor should provide a 2+ save. But that would result in an army with a much too low model count to be profitable for GW (or fun to play).

.

Why?

Power Armor is tough, but so is necrodermis and Nid's armored chitin.
A Bolter is a good weapon, but it doesn't literally flay you atom by atom or fire scads of monomolecular shurikens.

Bolters and power armor are primitive trash compared to the tech Eldar and Necrons are said to have. Or even a lot of what the Tau and Squats have.

This thread completely proves Hellebore's point. How is it that this super invulnerable power armor gets pierced by lasguns when it's being worn by a Chaos Marine? Easy: that's what power armor is when it isn't a plot device for marinewank. It's good armor but it doesn't make you invulnerable even to basic small arms. Your perception of it is skewed because Brother Maincharacter never dies while wearing it in his book. Commissar Gaunt never gets his head blown off in his book either, that doesn't mean he's unkillable.

In fact if you want to see what a de-protagonized Space Marine is like, it's pretty much a Chaos Marine as portrayed in a standard Imperial PoV novel. A dangerous enemy but one that can still be killed by a few regular humans with standard-issue guns and some luck. Chaos Marines are explicitly equal or superior to Space Marines in equipment and fighting experience, Helllebore's "protagonism" is the only difference in their portrayal. And the difference in their portrayal is huge, even absurd.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
If you squint and pretend custodes are marine-sized/shaped, the playstyle of custodes is probably closer to what the fluff would lead you to expect of marines than the actual playstyle(s) allowed by the marine rules. Low model count backed up by a couple of walkers and tanks. Durable against incoming damage. Hits hard. Feels every loss.

I think the solution there is to play smaller battles. Cramming in 2k point armies on a shrunken tabletop isn't doing the lore any favors for anybody.

But also, when you say "durability" we have to put that into context. Durable against what? when your opponents are fielding Reaper Missile Launchers, Hive Tyrants, Battle Cannons, Ion Blasters etc, Marines should be dying.


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 Orkeosaurus wrote:

In fact if you want to see what a de-protagonized Space Marine is like, it's pretty much a Chaos Marine as portrayed in a standard Imperial PoV novel. A dangerous enemy but one that can still be killed by a few regular humans with standard-issue guns and some luck. Chaos Marines are explicitly equal or superior to Space Marines in equipment and fighting experience, Helllebore's "protagonism" is the only difference in their portrayal. And the difference in their portrayal is huge, even absurd.

^Yah, this.

Tyel wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Sure. 40k's tabletop experience probably does a bad job of representing a lot of armies' fluff. Sending my space elves to stand around on magic circles definitely feels weird.

Seems reasonable enough to me that they have to do "something" on objectives, or why are they on the battlefield at all?

The weird part is that, when you look at the battlefield at the end of the game and see that your opponent is nearly tabled, it feels like whatever you're doing on those objectives probably could have waited five minutes for you to wrap up the battle first. We need to deploy some psychic bobble in this location to allow the seers to scan for a mcguffin? Cool. Tell the seers to wait until we've killed the last of these orks first.

While the end of game scoring made for a much worse game, it did at least have this going for it. Walking onto objectives at the end of the game once the threat was largely dealt with felt a lot more in-character than throwing precious guardians into the grinder to plant a flag or whatever.

But I was going to say I agree with you on transports. The whole "jump out, have your turn, jump back in via various mechanisms to avoid being shot" feels mega-gamey. It might make sense for 40k "as a game", but I don't think its a good feeling of what a mechanised force actually would be like.

I guess I don't like anything that makes the turn-based nature of 40k feel explicit. Models aren't actually trapped in stasis for 10 seconds or whatever when the other player is taking their turn.

vipoid wrote:Why are Grey Knights fighting battles with absolutely no daemonic presence to speak of?

I remember when playing Grey Knights entitled your opponent to take a Greater Daemon possessing one of their HQ choices.

GW used to put some effort into this.

Orkeosaurus wrote:Bolters and power armor are primitive trash compared to the tech Eldar and Necrons are said to have. Or even a lot of what the Tau and Squats have.

Which is interesting if you think about it: Imperial weapons are primitive compared to some of these factions. Imperial vehicles are primitive. Imperial spacecraft are primitive. Imperial relics of the DAoT at best rival the sorts of wonders these high-tech factions employ on a regular basis.

But the Imperium can also produce armor which is nigh-impervious to those races' weapons, and bio-engineered wearers that beat the crap out of entire armies? No longer inferior, not even equal, but actually delivering warriors who are flat-out superior to the strongest advances of those elder races?

It doesn't add up.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
his is kind of getting into the "people build lists to kill marines" issue. But like, if I shoot a reaper launcher at a marine, the marine feels kind of squishy. A squad of reapers is going to be permanently removing a squad of marines from the galaxy after a couple volleys. But those same reapers shooting into custodes? They'll still chip away at the custodes reasonably quickly for their points, but the custodes aren't getting obliterated by each failed save. The end result is that custodes *feel* durable while marines only really *feel* durable against D1 weapons.

Right, but then the inevitable response is that some people say "well Marines should *feel better*" and suggest that Marines should be more survivable vs. Reaper Launchers etc. Which they shouldn't.

That or people play Space Marine 2 and think every Marine should be as Titus is portrayed, fogetting that numerous Marines are killed in various cutscenes by various opponents.

An aspect of marine survivability that's just not represented on the tabletop is their method of warfare. The same is true of Eldar and other armies, they don't tend to die in the droves you see on the table.

Because no one goes to war in a line against a force of equal arms with a perfectly balanced force composition.

A reaper launcher should completely kill a marine, but the chances of marines actually inserting into a battle line where a squad of reapers are, is very small. Similarly, a squad of Eldar guardians should be killed by a wall of bolter fire, but the chances of their farseers dropping them into a battle like that is really small.


Marine survival comes in large part because their day job 90% of the time is not being in front of anti marine guns, rather than because they can bounce battle cannon shells off their pecs.



The problem is that every army would be attempting to fight a battle on the most favourable of terms for themselves, so Eldar would be ambushing marine HQs without their support, while marines would be drop podding on a tau command bunker. 90% of all battles fought by every army would be against Orks or Tyranids. The few times marines do meet reapers they would be annihilated. The few times Eldar are caught in a surprise assault by Marines they might lose.

And at no time would any army actually be fighting with anything but overwhelming force against smaller enemy formations.


Every army suffers from the 1 in a million chance battle that happens 9 times out of 10 on the table top.

I think the game used to have Marine durability bang on.
50% chance to hit, 33% chance to wound, 33% chance to fail the save.
It took 18 lasgun shots to down a marine. That meant pretty much an entire squad at close range to kill a single marine with shooting. At longer ranges it took two squads firing to bring down a single marine.

But people felt that wasn't an accurate level of toughness and wanted more?

Because the real issue with marine durability was never the lasguns - it's the squad weapons. And in a game where Marines are the most popular choice of army, everyone was tooling their armies to take down marines. So you took plasma guns on your guys who could take them.
50% chance to hit, 83% chance to wound, no save. Now your single plasma gunner has a similar damage output to the entire rest of the squad. Slap a plasma pistol on your Sarge and you're out damaging the squad. That's where the feels bad comes from.

And now that marines have 2 wounds, the same thing is true. People take the guns that are the best at chewing through two wound models, so 2 wounds doesn't feel like 2 wounds.

I used to play Horde Orks. If every marine army I fought had nothing but heavy bolters, flamers and whirlwinds I'd have been feeling pretty hard done by, too.

^There are many issues creating the "feels bad", but one of the most obvious has to be the price and availability of the squad weapons. This is where things really started to fail in 5th edition, because like you say Marines only dropping after 18 Lasgun shots is fine, and even that squad weapon kill ratio should be fine. But when you can start deploying whole units of "squad weapon scale" firepower without pricing them well or limiting their number in other ways, you get major problems surfacing.

Technically marines are now even more resistant to lasguns than they used to be.

It's still 50/33/33, but now with 2 wounds it takes 36 lasgun shots to kill a marine.

They've moved to require more special weapons in the armies, with the standard rifle being an incidental attack. Or special detachment rules or strategems that change the probabilities.

The game now needs these add ons to make whole squads viable. Lasguns gaining lethal hits in one guard detachment changes the wound probability.

 Hellebore wrote:
Technically marines are now even more resistant to lasguns than they used to be.

It's still 50/33/33, but now with 2 wounds it takes 36 lasgun shots to kill a marine.

They've moved to require more special weapons in the armies, with the standard rifle being an incidental attack. Or special detachment rules or strategems that change the probabilities.

The game now needs these add ons to make whole squads viable. Lasguns gaining lethal hits in one guard detachment changes the wound probability.

I don't know. Is that more of a survivability issue, or a game scale/points issue? I feel like taking down a couple marines a turn with lasguns and then having your special weapons be the workhorses in that matchup is fine. Especially if lasguns are reasonably effective against, say, a gaunt horde. The issue is when there are 50-100 marine bodies that you have to get through that you really feel the pressure to lean into special weapons. But if you're only up against, say, 20 marines, killing a couple marines a turn with all your lasguns might be alright.

I'm probably just finding myself wishing for more game modes balanced around 500-1000 points again.

 Hellebore wrote:
Technically marines are now even more resistant to lasguns than they used to be.

It's still 50/33/33, but now with 2 wounds it takes 36 lasgun shots to kill a marine.

They've moved to require more special weapons in the armies, with the standard rifle being an incidental attack. Or special detachment rules or strategems that change the probabilities.

Ah, averages.... Let's not tell my opponent from this afternoon any of that.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
Technically marines are now even more resistant to lasguns than they used to be.

It's still 50/33/33, but now with 2 wounds it takes 36 lasgun shots to kill a marine.

They've moved to require more special weapons in the armies, with the standard rifle being an incidental attack. Or special detachment rules or strategems that change the probabilities.

The game now needs these add ons to make whole squads viable. Lasguns gaining lethal hits in one guard detachment changes the wound probability.

I don't know. Is that more of a survivability issue, or a game scale/points issue? I feel like taking down a couple marines a turn with lasguns and then having your special weapons be the workhorses in that matchup is fine. Especially if lasguns are reasonably effective against, say, a gaunt horde. The issue is when there are 50-100 marine bodies that you have to get through that you really feel the pressure to lean into special weapons. But if you're only up against, say, 20 marines, killing a couple marines a turn with all your lasguns might be alright.

I'm probably just finding myself wishing for more game modes balanced around 500-1000 points again.

It is and always has been a lethality issue. Even in 3rd ed GW took way past release to figure out that a Terminator's 2+ save wasn't worth the paper it's written on. The fix was an invulnerable save that helped fairly reasonably against AP2 weapons, but Terminators were still in the position that you paid 40 points for a model that was instead brought downed with volume of fire easily enough. That problem extended to power armored Marines eventually because GW never got all balance issues worked out to begin with and pressure to increase army sizes to sell more models translated to better means of removing models to keep game time down. As standouts assault cannons got a silly boost in 4th ed, devourers on monstrous creatures became problematic and the with Eldar jetbikes all equipping scatter lasers at the latest the proliferation of one size fits all solutions was cemented.

The force organization chart was already insufficient at keeping issues with overwhelming fire power at bay when the second 3rd ed Chaos Marine codex released, only suffered more with alternate force organizations becoming more common before and ally options adding issues after 6th ed, and was effectively gone by 8th ed. All while units received ever more special and heavy weapon options and super heavies were introduced to regular games.

Survivability was an issue reserved to a select few units enhanced by buff stacking or able to game specific rules like no one else. Ludicrous survivability only existed because a fix for other issues elevated a few units in ways the rules designers didn't intend.

The issue with two wounds on Marines decreasing the viability of small arms compared to special and heavy weapons is that the overall design goals didn't change to account for this shift. GW still wanted to sell Marines in large quantities and game length still needed to be kept in check, so all two wounds on Marines achieved was a matching increase in D2 weapons in the game. It's the same thinking that got us mortal wounds. Weapons are supposed to feel effective, so with 8th ed a great many got AP -1 or better. Now armor becomes less useful, so a lot of units get invulnerable saves to make up for it. Now weapons don't do enough damage anymore, so we need damage that circumvents invulnerable saves. And from there it didn't take long to get special saves that work against mortal wounds. Another example is how they improved cover saves in 5th ed and then handed out ignores cover weapons like candy to fight it instead of dialing back the original change.

This is one of the basic flaws GW builds into their games. For every way of mitigation, immediately or down the line they implement a way to mitigate the mitigation. And then a mitigation of the mitigation of the mitigation, until they've created a multi-layered system that creates haves and have-nots almost at random. Under such conditions it's basically impossible to get Marines to feel right. They either over-perform against one group of weapons or under-perform against another because getting Marine survivability right is neither the design goal nor something the system is built around but a tacked on fix to a specific problem of a badly cobbled together system whose primary goal is to sell more Marines.