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I run my GUO a lot, and it's irksome how vulnerable he is to chip damage. Sure, wounding on 6s (unless you have access to a +1 to-wound or Lethal Hits or Anti-[Monster/Psyker] or...) but with only a 4+ Invulnerable save, that means a lot of those that wound will go through.

So, I propose the following:

Greater Daemons (Bloodthirsters, Great Unclean Ones, Keepers Of Secrets, and Lords Of Change) get either +1 to their Invulnerable saves against anything with an original damage characteristic of 1, or they can reroll saves against anything with an original damage characteristic of 1.

I haven't fought against mono daemons much this edition, so be dubious of my feedback here. That said, I'm a little concerned that if someone is in a position where they feel the need to point a bunch of D1 weapons at a Great Unclean One, they're probably kind of desperate to hurt it already. So I'd be hesitant to make those desperation tactics significantly less effective.

It sounds like this is sort of similar to the classic debate about lasguns hurting land raiders, right? The lasguns are already bad at that job, but some people don't like that the land raider can be hurt by lasguns at all. At some point, if you weaken lasgun damage thoroughly enough, you're basically telling people they may as well just not bother rolling their attacks at all.

I'm also coming at this having spent some time recently putting together some theory hammer GSC lists where most of the army's offense comes down to stacking lots of buffs on massed S3 D1 shooting, so I might be biased.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I haven't fought against mono daemons much this edition, so be dubious of my feedback here. That said, I'm a little concerned that if someone is in a position where they feel the need to point a bunch of D1 weapons at a Great Unclean One, they're probably kind of desperate to hurt it already. So I'd be hesitant to make those desperation tactics significantly less effective.

It sounds like this is sort of similar to the classic debate about lasguns hurting land raiders, right? The lasguns are already bad at that job, but some people don't like that the land raider can be hurt by lasguns at all. At some point, if you weaken lasgun damage thoroughly enough, you're basically telling people they may as well just not bother rolling their attacks at all.

I'm also coming at this having spent some time recently putting together some theory hammer GSC lists where most of the army's offense comes down to stacking lots of buffs on massed S3 D1 shooting, so I might be biased.

For comparison, a GUO is T13 W20 FNP 6+, for 24 effective wounds on a 4++ save.
C'Tan are now T11 W16 FNP 5+, for 24 effective wounds on a 3+/4++ save with -1 Damage.

With the exception of S12 weapons (which, admittedly, Lascannons are and are common) there's virtually no case a GUO is more durable than a C'Tan Shard. And then you've got stuff like the Keeper Of Secrets, which is T10 W18.

It also helps with Lethals/+1 to-wound shenanigans. Since, 30 Intercessors (firing Bolt Rifles and Krak Grenades while benefitting from Oath of Moment) have a nearly one in four chance of dumpstering a GUO in one shooting phase.
It only takes 35 Intercessors with their army rule to have a better than 50/50 chance of one-rounding a GUO.

Edit: Lemme run the numbers with +1 to save and reroll saves against the D1 shots. See how much of a difference it makes.

3++ against D1 makes those odds less than 2% and a little over 5%.
To have a better than 50% chance, you'd need 50 Intercessors.

Rerollable 4++ makes that one tenth of a percent and then seven tenths of a percent.
To have a better than 50% chance, you'd need 65 Intercessors in one shooting phase.

I don't know. It's late, so my brain isn't firing on fall cylinders, and I don't want to be dismissive. But also, the GUO is 250(?) points to something like the Nightbringer's 315-ish. And 35 intercessors is something like 560 points.

And while the weird things to-wound modifiers do to 40k math are probably worth discussing in their own right... I'm not sure how much of a problem it is for units worth more than twice the GUO's cost utilizing a special rule that's particularly good at helping them punch above their weight to have a ~ 50% chance of killing it.

And while I'm still not saying you're wrong to want to make chip damage less effective, the GUO being T13 does mean that he's taking a statistically significant fewer number of wounds from lascannons than most other units. So if he's relatively good at shaking off anti-big-stuff weapons like lascannons, that makes me wonder if bolters being able to take up the slack is maybe a feature rather than a bug?

Not saying that I want to see GUOs being one-rounded by bolters every game; just that your opponent using more than a quarter of their 2k army plus Oath of Moment to bring down one GUO doesn't strike me as egregious at first glance.

Out of curiosity, what does the math of those 35 intercessors into something like an imperial knight look like? I'm wondering if maybe we should be looking at just making GUOs both more expensive and more powerful/durable to help them feel appropriately grandiose.

Also wondering if intercessors might be a wonky enemy to be using for purposes of this discussion. I know they're common, but the +1 to-wound from Oath really does make them weirdly effective into things they probably shouldn't be good against.

GW doesn't know how FNP math works, they think it's just like an extra wound or something. Total waste of time to roll FNP on C'tan.

 JNAProductions wrote:
I run my GUO a lot, and it's irksome how vulnerable he is to chip damage. Sure, wounding on 6s (unless you have access to a +1 to-wound or Lethal Hits or Anti-[Monster/Psyker] or...) but with only a 4+ Invulnerable save, that means a lot of those that wound will go through.

So, I propose the following:

Greater Daemons (Bloodthirsters, Great Unclean Ones, Keepers Of Secrets, and Lords Of Change) get either +1 to their Invulnerable saves against anything with an original damage characteristic of 1, or they can reroll saves against anything with an original damage characteristic of 1.

A few wounds going through is irrelevant, GUO has 20 wounds and 6+ FNP. The return on investment is already abyssmal and anti-infantry guns barely hurt anything well in 10th. Also, GUO is meant to be kind of weak to these smaller guns, otherwise just give it an armour save, but it's just a fat ball of lard, no reason for it to not be hurt by small arms. By introducing this rule you are removing the Bloodthirster's armour's entire reason for existing, you kind of have to give Bloodthirsters a 2+ Sv for this to work IMO.

 vict0988 wrote:
GW doesn't know how FNP math works, they think it's just like an extra wound or something. Total waste of time to roll FNP on C'tan.

 JNAProductions wrote:
I run my GUO a lot, and it's irksome how vulnerable he is to chip damage. Sure, wounding on 6s (unless you have access to a +1 to-wound or Lethal Hits or Anti-[Monster/Psyker] or...) but with only a 4+ Invulnerable save, that means a lot of those that wound will go through.

So, I propose the following:

Greater Daemons (Bloodthirsters, Great Unclean Ones, Keepers Of Secrets, and Lords Of Change) get either +1 to their Invulnerable saves against anything with an original damage characteristic of 1, or they can reroll saves against anything with an original damage characteristic of 1.

A few wounds going through is irrelevant, GUO has 20 wounds and 6+ FNP. The return on investment is already abyssmal and anti-infantry guns barely hurt anything well in 10th. Also, GUO is meant to be kind of weak to these smaller guns, otherwise just give it an armour save, but it's just a fat ball of lard, no reason for it to not be hurt by small arms. By introducing this rule you are removing the Bloodthirster's armour's entire reason for existing, you kind of have to give Bloodthirsters a 2+ Sv for this to work IMO.

So... Give the Bloodthirster a 2+ armor. The Avatar Of Khaine has a 2+/4++ and halves damage, so unless you consider that broken, it wouldn't be broken on the Thirster.

Edit: Actually, comparing the Avatar Of Khaine to a Bloodthirster, it REALLY looks like the Thirster could use a buff. It's more expensive and the only bonus durability it has is W18 instead of W14, but with the Avatar's better defenses elsewhere...

FWIW, the avatar is considered kind of meh. The latest price reduction makes it casually playable, but it's a unit that eldar players wouldn't mind seeing buffed in some way. Mostly because it's just kind of hard to deliver successfully.

Which isn't to say that giving Bloodthirsters a 2+ would be a bad thing.

Again, I find myself wondering if part of the issue here is that we kind of want these models to function more like knight-tier units. Which would be fine, and the corresponding price increase would give us some wiggle room for buffing them more dramatically.

But I feel like anything short of a knight in 10th edition is just kind of prone to dying quickly, and dying quickly is sort of contrary to the lore of these things that are supposed to be night-unstoppable menacing behemoths. Bringing it back to the GUO, is it fair to say that it's fine and fluffy for bolters to be able to slowly chip away at a GUO but that the GUO tending to die too quickly overall is the real issue? I could be wrong, but I suspect intercessors aren't regularly doing the lion's share of the damage to your GUOs.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
FWIW, the avatar is considered kind of meh. The latest price reduction makes it casually playable, but it's a unit that eldar players wouldn't mind seeing buffed in some way. Mostly because it's just kind of hard to deliver successfully.

Which isn't to say that giving Bloodthirsters a 2+ would be a bad thing.

Again, I find myself wondering if part of the issue here is that we kind of want these models to function more like knight-tier units. Which would be fine, and the corresponding price increase would give us some wiggle room for buffing them more dramatically.

But I feel like anything short of a knight in 10th edition is just kind of prone to dying quickly, and dying quickly is sort of contrary to the lore of these things that are supposed to be night-unstoppable menacing behemoths. Bringing it back to the GUO, is it fair to say that it's fine and fluffy for bolters to be able to slowly chip away at a GUO but that the GUO tending to die too quickly overall is the real issue? I could be wrong, but I suspect intercessors aren't regularly doing the lion's share of the damage to your GUOs.

Since switching from the original detachment and its 4+ FNP Enhancement to the Plague Legion, usually the only reason my GUO survives to Round Three is that I also take a Daemon Prince with the 18" Lone Op Aura Enhancement.

And the Avatar Of Khaine is considered mediocre? That's... I find that kinda ridiculous. I don't disbelieve you, it just makes me feel like I'm starting to play at a handicap with only my Index and Grotsmas Detachment.

Edit: It'd be kinda nice to have a dedicated Daemon Prince sized model for each Chaos God. A step between Heralds and Greater Daemons. Make them around 200 points, and then make the Greater Daemons 400 points and badass to match.

Yeah. Khaine is generally considered to do an okay job once you get him into melee with a good target. Like, he hits reasonably hard. It's just that he's surprisingly easy to kill. Lascannons wound him on 3s. He doesn't have fly, so you have to walk his big base around walls, which makes him slightly slower than you'd expect and harder to hide behind said walls in the first place. He takes -1 to-hit once his wounds are low enough. He has fewer wounds than a land raider to start with (although halving damage makes that only sort of true.)

It's not like he dies to a stiff breeze or anything, but you can only be so cagey with him for so long without basically doing your opponent a favor by not getting aggressive with your 300 point model. And when you do get aggressive, you're probably exposing him to quite a few big guns.

Part of it is also that craftworlders kind of sort of don't have a lot of similar weight class aggressive units to move up with him. Our tanks are kind of meh right now. Prisms are okay, falcons were mostly relevant because of their ability to repeatedly hand out rerolls which they can't really do post-nerf. Our other vehicles are sort of bad or squishy. All of which is to say that there's a good chance that your opponent won't have a lot of especially pressing alternative targets for their lascannons. So they can comfortably light up the avatar without worrying that they're letting some other big stompy monster through instead.

Like, the eldar player might be running wraith lords (which are okay but hit on 4+) or some wraith knights (which are overcosted and then your whole army is just a few big, expensive models), but generally the avatar is the clear best target for every heavy weapon in the enemy army once he's exposed.

Maybe the issue is the flattening of wounds after double strength.

I know the idea of impossible to wound is not popular for a variety of good reasons.

But maybe you can have an indirect buff for tougher units against weak strength without denying it entirely.

For example, if the toughness of the target is more than double, the target gains +1 armour save, or rerolls 1s, or each critical armour save ignores an additional wound of equal strength.

So T8 vs S4 wounds on 6+, but T9 vs S4 wounds on 6+ and grants an additional ability like above.

Without crunching any numbers to back this up, I feel like making low-strength weapons even worse at hurting high durability targets quickly turns into a scenario where you may as well not bother wasting your time rolling.

In JNA's example with the intercessors (plus oath), we're talking about 560 points worth of models with full to-hit rerolls and +1 to-wound having, " a better than 50/50 chance of one-rounding a GUO." (Which I assume to mean a close to 50% chance.) Keeping in mind that Oath of Moment effectively makes those bolters S7 in the context of attacking a T13 GUO. Also keeping in mind that 560 is almost twice the points cost of said GUO.

In other words, that's a scenario involving a bunch of units that are unusually good at punching up, and they still needed basically double the GUO's points cost worth of dudes to have a better chance of taking him out than a coin toss.

With no disrespect intended towards JNA, I'm not sure if chip damage is actually a problem that needs to be solved. And if it is, I suspect the issue is more with the abundance of mechanics that disregard the value of toughness stats (such as Lethal Hits, +1 to-wound rules, etc.)

Certainly this only something to consider if there's an actual problem.

I would consider whether them dying as easily as they are, an intentional feature of the rules in that case.

I prefer universal changes that affect units equally when the problem is general rather than specific. Piling one specific unit with rules or changes to offset a general issue like 'chip damage' is imo not a long-term solution.