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       The question I pose people is: Would you rather shoot low AP weapons and kill your opponent's army OR would you shoot lots of high AP weapons and force your opponent to make saves eventually failing something.

     This discussaion came about with a good friend of mine who is a great player but only has a handful of lascannons to take care of vehicles while the rest of his army packs plenty of heavy bolters. The school of thought is that by causing more wounds and forcing your opponent to roll handfuls of dice, you force him to fail more often rather than just plainly denying the save.

   Your thoughts?

It's impossible to deal with this issue generally. A scatter laser is usually better than a starcannon for the points, but a grenade launcher is never better than a plasma gun. Subscribing to a "school of thought" regarding AP is just asking to develop habits that will lead to inefficiency.

I would disagree with your comment. Grenade launchers vs Geq, hit on 3+/4+, wound on 2+, no armour save. Plasma guns vs Geq hit on 3+/4+ wound on 2+, no armour save, gets hot on a 1, costs +2 points. I discount doubler tap as its not worth the risk IMHO unless you are facing termies or something similar.
Plasma guns are better because you get lots of Meq armies, if I knew I was facing orks or Geq I would go for grenade launchers every time. This assumes you can tailor against a specific opponent though.

When I say "usually" and "never", I am referring to list construction in an all-comers context, not effectiveness against specific targets (i.e. it is usually a good idea to purchase a scatter rather than a star cannon, and never a good idea to purchase a gren launcher rather than a plasgun).

To be truly effective it?s best to have a mixture of both. In the case of eldar the question is very prominent when you chose between the star cannon and the scatter laser. Both are good at doing what they do and not so good at doing what the other does. In general I find that I pack more scatter lasers (more shots, high AP) over the star cannon (fewer shots, lower AP). The primary reason behind this is cover. On a totally open battlefield, the only deciding factor would be what your opponent's armor saves are. However when terrain comes into play, the low AP is often marginalized by cover saves (particularly 4+ ones). In these cases, the high rate of fire from the high AP weapons makes it more likely that they will fail a save, even if they are rolling 3+ for them rather than the 4+ a lower AP weapon would require. On the flip side, you?ll be glad you packed a few AP2 weapons when terminators show up. Since these guys have 2+/5+I saves, they tend not to worry too much about staying in cover, so you can often get your points worth out of them laying into them with your AP2 (or 1) weapons. The low AP weapons are also good on anything with 3+ saves that you can catch out in the open.

So in the end, it pays to keep both around, but I would error on the side of high rate of fire high AP over low rate of fire and low AP weapons.

I tend to agree. My marines are never in the open if i can at all help it. you always try to mitigate the low AP weapons.
Or conversely, i dont cry rivers if i cant get all my gaurd into cover, especially when you are facing high AP shots becuase they lack the volume to really do anything to you.

the high ROF, low ap weapons dont care if the target is in cover or not, therefore their efficiency is rarely reduced.

But you do need the occasional low ap weapon to take on tough targets like termies, as phoenix said, or armor.

Not having low ap weapons gives your opponent more freedom on where to set up and move though.

If I have a unit of guided reapers, most people won't walk into any open area they can see, while seeing 3 guided ww's with scatterlasers won't cause most opponents to care about cover even if both will kill about the same amount of MEQs.