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Choppas were lost in favour of Furious Charge, making even the lowly Ork Boy S4 on the charge. Which if memory served worked out about the same against MEQ.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I’m also going to speak in favour of Weapon Traits. At least as a concept.

Take Thallaxi in 2nd Ed Heresy.

Their Lightning Guns are no slouch and are frankly one of the best basic weapons in the game.

But one in three can have a Multi-Melta, Phased Plasma Fusil, or a Photon Thruster.

Multi-Melta is self explanatory. Phased Plasma Fusil was a rare straight AP3 Plasma Weapon, not far off 3rd Ed’s dreaded Star Cannon, but with Gets Hot!. The Photon Thruster is a stripped down Dark Lance. Its stats aren’t great, not hitting as hard as the Plasma but still having Gets Hot!, but does at least offer Blind.

And it’s Blind that tipped me in favour of the Photon Thruster. It has a reasonable shot at outright squashing a Marine (and so most infantry). But it’s the chance to Blind the target unit that is Chef’s Kiss.

So Weapons Traits can be the way to make otherwise niche or middling stat weapons appealing options.

Note the can there. As like so many of life’s good ideas, it’s all in the execution.

For instance of a bad one in 3rd style editions? Pinning.

Now, to shutdown an opposing unit for a turn sounds grand. Except, typically, you didn’t get many Pinning weapons, which didn’t come with many shots, typically lacked reliable AP, and most armies and units either had straight out reliable enough Ld, or a way round it entirely (Synapse, Mob Rule) to prevent a unit failing the resulting test. Oh, and often only appeared in small units.

There, the execution was right off. Pinning could’ve been a powerful tool, but the rules conspired to render it pretty much moot.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There, the execution was right off. Pinning could’ve been a powerful tool, but the rules conspired to render it pretty much moot.

It was more common in earlier editions where you had things like the ranger disruption tables and dark eldar terrorfexes.

Reliable pinning was too punitive to be used en-mass. seems that rather than weaken the effect GW just reduced the causes - in 3e you could pin half the opponents army off the bat with rangers or run drive-bys with terrorfexes... the latter actually had improved pinning rules (-1 Ld if below half strength, another -1 Ld for multi-hits. DE stacked this up with Ld reduction wargear and squad vets were optional).
This meant that playing infantry against DE could lead to multiple LD 4-5 pinning tests from 18" away, every turn, where you were either going to be losing a decent chunk of your units or simply immune with not much inbetween.

Memnoch wrote:
5th Edition brought in armour save modifications for every weapon ironically.

Melee AP was 6th edition, neutering half of the melee named characters as they could no longer harm their counterparts or leading to unaddressed debates over whether Dante was hitting with an axe (init 1, AP2) or axe-shaped sword (init 6, AP3)