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Special weapons being the focus of an infantry squad's firepower has been the case in warfare for over a hundred years now. It's pretty standard in Warhammer as well.
I really don't see the problem, I think 1 weapon with 4 mooks is more interesting than just 5 mooks

Actually I read that as "to make them competitive they had to give them an OP bolter", i.e. bolt rifles. I don't think the difference is that notable anymore but they weren't being internally inconsistent there.


And totally agree, infantry squads are built around a machine gun, issued with man-portable AT and AA launchers, if we had plasma or laser cannons you can bet we'd give 'em those too, so the monoequip squads are silly.

Billicus wrote:Actually I read that as "to make them competitive they had to give them an OP bolter", i.e. bolt rifles. I don't think the difference is that notable anymore but they weren't being internally inconsistent there.


And totally agree, infantry squads are built around a machine gun, issued with man-portable AT and AA launchers, if we had plasma or laser cannons you can bet we'd give 'em those too, so the monoequip squads are silly.

kirotheavenger wrote:Special weapons being the focus of an infantry squad's firepower has been the case in warfare for over a hundred years now. It's pretty standard in Warhammer as well.
I really don't see the problem, I think 1 weapon with 4 mooks is more interesting than just 5 mooks

The bolt rifle is not OP at all, it's a slightly better bolter. The issue is that a basic marine is so unimpressive they needed to give them double the shots purely for existing as a unit. The intercessors do have the grenade launchers as a special weapon which apparently doesn't count either.

Beyond that we acknowledge the bolter isn't fantastic, so would you accept a tactical squad as a 10w t4 3+ 80mm base with a lascannon?

Msu to spam a special weapon is always an issue as it simply means 80% of the unit exists purely to die for the benefit of the thing you want. It shows terrible design largely and there has been 20+ years of the bolter sucking, base marines sucking, but give them a melta gun and suddenly they're interesting and great? No, the melta gun is what you want and the models carrying it are irrelevant.

But massed melta guns in one unit that can only shoot together and also die together are obviously inefficient vs spreading them out amongst a bunch of flexible squads that can also deal with infantry etc. It's why we don't send men into battle with just anti-tank missiles or whatever, it's stupid.

And no, nobody gets excited about the grenade launchers - frag grenades are gak and pointless, krak grenades are sort of okay, but they used to be able to take meltas and plasma etc.

The Grenade Launchers are fine now that they fire in addition to the bolter.

Billicus wrote:
But massed melta guns in one unit that can only shoot together and also die together are obviously inefficient vs spreading them out amongst a bunch of flexible squads that can also deal with infantry etc. It's why we don't send men into battle with just anti-tank missiles or whatever, it's stupid.

And no, nobody gets excited about the grenade launchers - frag grenades are gak and pointless, krak grenades are sort of okay, but they used to be able to take meltas and plasma etc.

Warhammer 40k is not modern real world warfrare. But a 5 man tac squad isn't flexible, 4 bolters don't handle infantry, which is one of the root issues. Granular points actually make this worse when the heavy weapon is the cost of 1-2 of the guys in the squad. But in spite of all this, devastator squads always existed, sternguard were usually fielded with mass combi-weapons of the same load out, melee only units weirdly aren't shunned for a lack of flexibility and so on.

Without nostalgia, I don't think anyone would be able to give a legitimate reason for giving intercessors a heavy weapon that isn't simply "I want a small, cheap unit to sit on an objective and shoot a tank", which isn't overly interesting nor relevant to the marines holding the gun.

Dudeface wrote:

Billicus wrote:
But massed melta guns in one unit that can only shoot together and also die together are obviously inefficient vs spreading them out amongst a bunch of flexible squads that can also deal with infantry etc. It's why we don't send men into battle with just anti-tank missiles or whatever, it's stupid.

And no, nobody gets excited about the grenade launchers - frag grenades are gak and pointless, krak grenades are sort of okay, but they used to be able to take meltas and plasma etc.

Warhammer 40k is not modern real world warfrare. But a 5 man tac squad isn't flexible, 4 bolters don't handle infantry, which is one of the root issues. Granular points actually make this worse when the heavy weapon is the cost of 1-2 of the guys in the squad. But in spite of all this, devastator squads always existed, sternguard were usually fielded with mass combi-weapons of the same load out, melee only units weirdly aren't shunned for a lack of flexibility and so on.

Without nostalgia, I don't think anyone would be able to give a legitimate reason for giving intercessors a heavy weapon that isn't simply "I want a small, cheap unit to sit on an objective and shoot a tank", which isn't overly interesting nor relevant to the marines holding the gun.

You're right that, mechanically, the way 40k works as a game it's just better to have mono-squads
But I personally don't find that mechanically interesting or thematically compelling compared to more dynamic and realistic loadouts with integral support weapons.
Mechanically it can be better as well. Having heavy weapons more distributed (like they were for Firstborn) Can limit your opponent's ability to alpha-strike remove all of a particular threat, and just generally it limits the amount of firepower any one squad can level.
I personally *hate* the "this is a mook squad that is good for sitting on an objective and doing literally nothing else" it's just boring.
The only time I recall MSU Tactical Squads ever being meta is when they all got a free Razorback, and it wasn't the lone plasmagun making them meta.

Honestly, other than "it's mechanically easier for me to optimise my firepower from mono-squads" I don't see a justification.

Has anyone seen if Boarding Actions is still a thing in 11th?

I can find a lot of conflicting reports online, but nothing solid.

Why is infantry being equipped to at least give tanks and heavy things pause for thought "not interesting"? Or somehow less interesting than them not? And 4 bolters might not be killing many MEQ but they threaten basic infantry. That's more to do with the incredible lethality of everything else than a problem with bolters. And yeah, "the rifle armed troops are only good for hiding on a backyard objective" is hardly compelling stuff, is it?

What does all this bolter stuff have to do with 11 edition?

Billicus wrote:
And yeah, "the rifle armed troops are only good for hiding on a backyard objective" is hardly compelling stuff, is it?

Worse than that - "the rifle armed troops whom canonically make up 80% of the fighting strength are only good for hiding on a backyard objective, and as such only appear as 10% of tabletop troops"

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Has anyone seen if Boarding Actions is still a thing in 11th?

I can find a lot of conflicting reports online, but nothing solid.

During the Q&A session someone specifically asked about it and they confirmed that it's "still a thing", as well as apocalypse and other expansion rules.

Considering how similar 10th and 11th are, you can probably use the boarding action rules with almost no changes, though balancing might be off.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Has anyone seen if Boarding Actions is still a thing in 11th?

I can find a lot of conflicting reports online, but nothing solid.

They explicitly said that the 10th ed Boarding Action book was still valid for 11th in the FAQ livestream.

https://youtu.be/QEJQomLZy68?si=aZUCSFkPxWzDRbBm&t=920 to be exact.

kirotheavenger wrote:stuff

Billicus wrote:Words

Then fix the underlying problem, make intercessors mechanically engaging without making them a forgettable heavy weapon caddy.

The other issue here is that the marine range is so big that there are stealth units, indirect units and long ranged units to hold the rear. There are more up-gunned or survivable units to take the mid field. There are more mobile and offensively capable clearers to push the enemy units.

Intercessors are boring because marines have no reason to take them if we're honest. I don't think sprinkling in an anti-tank gun fixes any of this tbh.

Intercessors have sticky objectives and grotesque amounts of any infantry fire for their cost. Their mid 10th errata makes a squad of them very much worth taking.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kirotheavenger wrote:

You're right that, mechanically, the way 40k works as a game it's just better to have mono-squads

Deathwatch has basically been a decade of proving this point out.

 LunarSol wrote:
Intercessors have sticky objectives and grotesque amounts of any infantry fire for their cost. Their mid 10th errata makes a squad of them very much worth taking.

Sure, but making the unit arbitrarily shoot twice as much seems like a pretty desperate and unfluffy fix, and having to do that shows how utterly terribly balanced they were initially.

Dudeface wrote:
Warhammer 40k is not modern real world warfrare. But a 5 man tac squad isn't flexible, 4 bolters don't handle infantry, which is one of the root issues.

Perhaps making the most common infantry in the game twice as resilient to bolters and other small-arms fire wasn't actually the best idea.

 BorderCountess wrote:

 Platuan4th wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Core rules feel weird to read, but I think they've written stuff with a much more robust skeleton for just generally tightening up various rules interactions

They need to tighten up those coherency rules so the shenanigans that the 100% legally coherent unit of 7 at the back and 2 up at the extreme of "within 9 inches" creates are eliminated.

This is one of those situations where even if it's technically legal, you know damn well you're gonna get kicked in the bitz for doing it.

To be fair, the flip side is that if your opponent is doing this, then when removing models make sure they abide by rule when they're NOT in coherency, which destroys additional models potentially:

REGAINING COHERENCY

In the End of Turn step of each player’s turn, if one or more units
on the battlefield are not in coherency, those units’ controlling
players must remove models from them, one at a time, until
they are in coherency again. Models removed in this way are
destroyed, but they do not trigger rules that apply when a
model is destroyed.

 Crimson wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
Intercessors have sticky objectives and grotesque amounts of any infantry fire for their cost. Their mid 10th errata makes a squad of them very much worth taking.

Sure, but making the unit arbitrarily shoot twice as much seems like a pretty desperate and unfluffy fix, and having to do that shows how utterly terribly balanced they were initially.

That's basically always been a thing. Trying to make basic marines the baseline the game is designed around has pretty much always made them kind of useless.

It's a byproduct of the game not being representative of the setting.

For obvious reasons, the game can't - and probably shouldn't - demand that units be fielded in a rareness proportionate to their lore.

But that means that things like C'tan and Avatars of Khaine, instead of being terrifying galactic legends whose presence can tip the balance of a war, are perfectly standard opponents you should expect to fight every time you have a battle. There have been times in 40k where Thousand Sons players basically did not -ever- go to battle without bringing Magnus himself along!

In such an environment, Intercessors are not adequate troops. They are fodder. Slightly beefier fodder, yes, but still fodder being trod underfoot.

Intercessors are perfectly capable of trouncing most things they're likely to actually fight. Ork Boyz, heretic infantry, Tyranid gaunts and so on, no problem.

But those are not the main threat you deal with in tabletop. Not even remotely. There's a reason Retributors never pick Heavy Bolters in this game. Light infantry are not the danger in this game, everything kills light infantry.

Combined with, as LunarSol astutely pointed out, Space Marines being ubiquitous among the playerbase and therefore the de facto average/default by virtue of their sheer popularity, everything comes prepared to kill them, because if something can't fight Space Marines, no one will take it!

And there is an argument to be made that primarchs, C'tans, divine avatars etc should not be a normal part of the game.

Basically they're the literal "legends" that should be "agreed upon beforehand" stuff, not the out of production basic units.

Yeah, that stuff belongs in the Apocalypse format, which should come back.

Question: are there any rumour roundup sites these days that still actually *write down* rumours when shared? They all just seem to post links to youtube videos now, and listening to someone barble on for ten minutes when they could write the actual info out in five sentences is what I'd like to avoid by going to places other than youtube.

 Crimson wrote:
And there is an argument to be made that primarchs, C'tans, divine avatars etc should not be a normal part of the game.

Basically they're the literal "legends" that should be "agreed upon beforehand" stuff, not the out of production basic units.

Maybe there was an argument for that originally, but it's never happening now. The Pandora's box has been opened. And besides, GW is primarily a miniatures company. They want you to have reason to buy that big expensive C'tan.

The best you can hope for is for GW to make them purposely overcosted and bad, like Baneblades, Titans and aircraft. but even that feels unlikely. C'tan, while supernaturally powerful, are not physically large enough to have the same issues those models do.

(With that said, if I recall right, even in 5th edition, before the era of Knights and feature creep, Tacticals were still not favoured. You'd take some Scouts to cheaply fill your mandatory troops slots, then take actual powerhouse units for the rest.)

I mean they made it so tacticals got a free flamer and missile launcher to make players feel incentivized to take a full squad of them back in early 5th. Even then they got power crept out in their own codex by units like Pedro Kantor making Sternguard scoring like troops.

Then other SM variants just starting doing Tacticals+1, like Grey Hunters getting Chainswords+Bolt Pistol and 2 special weapons instead of just one, or Blood Angels getting Assault Marines as troops.

It's basically just the perpetual problem of the arms race in 40k of GW not being able to find the sweet spot of enough survivability vs damage output since they keep changing design philosophies mid-way each edition.

GW may try and fix it with things like a day 1 patch of hidden (if Goonhammer are right on Gone to Ground, as its very much not in the PDF GW published).

But... I can't help feeling this has been a big experiment of "can 40k work without L-shaped ruins" and the answer is going to be "no".

Units are just too lethal. Its too easy to toe into area terrain and get crazy fire lanes across the whole centre of the table as a result. What you want is lots of dense/solid terrain that you can relatively safely position behind. AKA L-shaped ruins.

My prediction is that we are going to have a few months of people getting tabled very quickly, and GW either fixes it, or tournaments will fix it for them.

It's a regular problem with games

GW games have literal action/interaction beyond just straight killing stuff.
Which means you basically want to load up on the bare minimum of objective scoring troops and as much killy-stuff as possible to do the actual fighting.

That's actually why mono-squads are bad imo, it maximises the firepower differential between the haves and have-nots.
A Devastator Squad had only 2-4x the firepower of a Tactical Squad.

The leaked Vanguard Vets datasheet has the plasma pistol down as D3 attacks, that's quite interesting. Supercharge is still 1.

 YodhrinsForge wrote:
Question: are there any rumour roundup sites these days that still actually *write down* rumours when shared? They all just seem to post links to youtube videos now, and listening to someone barble on for ten minutes when they could write the actual info out in five sentences is what I'd like to avoid by going to places other than youtube.

Two options:

2) Look at comment #27 on a Reddit thread about the video, where they will do a time-stamped breakdown of the video.

1) Pay $8/month to one of a handfull of Patreons, and get the same service on comment #3

Feels like a gap in the market for someone doing it the old ad-supported way on a blog or whatever but not taking the piss like Spikey Bits