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After reading plenty of marine saves being not what they should, hordes being optimal etc I had a thought.
How about if an infantry or biker unit roll a value two lower than their save value they take an additional unsaved wound from the same weapon? For example a marine would have to roll a 1 but an Ork would take additional damage on a 4 or lower.
I think this rule would need further balancing but in principle it might help elite armies redress the balance against the hordes they face.

Would just rebalancing AP values do the same thing, but better and cleaner?

As in, drop most of the low-AP weapons to AP0?

This would just make the games even bloodier and incredibly short, not to mention it would make high AP weapons ridiculously punishing. Something with AP-3 would be two autokills. Hell, something with AP0 would have a 2/3rds shot of killing two Ork Boyz.
You'd basically be doubling the damage that all light infantry take.

The thing is that most people who complaining about hordes being too durable is not so much that they are too durable, it's that 8th edition mechanics and points costs mean any weapons that are efficient against infantry at 4ppm smash anything more expensive.

The rolls would unmodified and be separate from ap values, I did think about incorporating them but it would get too complicated and punishing like you say.
I wouldn't want to dismiss ap on the weapons either, I didn't want to punish better weapons, just debuff lightly armoured hordes.
As you can tell this was just a rough outline of an idea, I was just trying to get some ideas percolating.

kingheff wrote:
The rolls would unmodified and be separate from ap values, I did think about incorporating them but it would get too complicated and punishing like you say.
I wouldn't want to dismiss ap on the weapons either, I didn't want to punish better weapons, just debuff lightly armoured hordes.
As you can tell this was just a rough outline of an idea, I was just trying to get some ideas percolating.

That's... Better? I guess? But still has the problem that it makes things massively too punishing for most hordes. Anything with 6+ or 7+ saves would become unplayable.

Honestly, what we really need is for there to be more weapons that are specifically and exclusively useful against hordes, by scaling the damage or volume of fire to the size of the unit you're attacking.

I guess maybe armour saves of 5+ get the lightly armoured keyword.
Lightly armoured: On an unmodified armour save roll of 1 this unit suffers a mortal wound in addition to any other damages suffered.

kingheff wrote:
I guess maybe armour saves of 5+ get the lightly armoured keyword.
Lightly armoured: On an unmodified armour save roll of 1 this unit suffers a mortal wound in addition to any other damages suffered.

Mortal wounds are flung around way too much in this edition.

With the game playing the way it does, with everything dying in droves, it seems more prevalent that heavily armoured units get a boost to survival, rather than light units get a drop to theirs.

I feel that having a special rule of some sort for vehicles which makes them a bit harder to damage than infantry (let's be honest, a landraider should have better armour than a terminator!) would be good, and then this rule could be applied smatteringly to units with good saves and the fluff to back up their durability.

The difficulty in working this is that the save system is based on a single D6, and it can't really change - there's no way you could roll this many pairs of 2D6, and keep track of them all. The only system to improve it would be to add a re-roll for 1+ saves, like the old fantasy 7+ to hit business:

1+sv = 2+ save, 6+ re-roll
0+ sv = 2+ save, 5+ reroll
-1+ sv = 2+ save, 4+ reroll

etc

this would allow a landraider to have a -1+ save as standard, which can obviously be modified by AP. Then, you can give proper anti-tank a much higher AP, so that they have an advantage over massed attacks.

if this was brought in, then we could do an overhaul of saves, aP and points in general, with a larger scale for saves than we have now. I would be inclined to boost everyones saves (so the worst is a 5+) and then boost the AP of powerful weapons to compensate, leaving high volume low strength firepower as low AP (EG lasguns stay AP-).

This way, lasguns will barely ever hurt a landraider, but a meltagun with AP-7 will still melt a hole in it if it hits, and will destroy infantry as well if you waste it on them. Marines would be 2+, but weapons like autocannons and such will have better AP, and be comparable to how they are now at dealing with them. small arms fire will be less effective at killing marines, and still the same vs orks.

Points would need an overhaul, focussing on increases rather than decreases, and then up the points for a game. That way hordes can be hordes. If you decrease cheap units, is will make them too much - if a guardsman is 4 points, the least you can remove is 25% of their points! unless you go for 1/2 points, like old fantasy did.

A land raider does have better armor then a terminator. It has a higher toughness attribute that majes it much harder to wound to begin with.

 Lance845 wrote:
A land raider does have better armor then a terminator. It has a higher toughness attribute that majes it much harder to wound to begin with.

It's true that it's harder to wound than a terminator, but toughness and save are two different things. To a grot, a terminator is as easy to wound as a landraider, and that's just wrong.

I'm not such a fan of this "equal rights" of "everything can wound everything". I do think that there should be something which makes it more difficult to damage units which are seriously out of your league.

My main point is that there are only 6 saves available at the moment - and there's not enough difference between the worst, representing the tough, leather like skin of an ork, and the best, which is apparently to represent armour that's thickness is measured in feet, of the most advanced plating mankind has created in 38,000 years.

The idea that the armour plating on a space marine, advanced as it is, is only one better than that of a landraider, is testament to the fact that all the best saves are being crammed into the "2+" bracket, because there's nowhere better to go.

Ice_can wrote:
The thing is that most people who complaining about hordes being too durable is not so much that they are too durable, it's that 8th edition mechanics and points costs mean any weapons that are efficient against infantry at 4ppm smash anything more expensive.

There's also the problem that the game has so many Apocalypse units, throwing around ridiculously strong weapons.

The first effect of this is that those weapons basically delete everything that isn't another super-heavy. So when they're aimed at a unit it makes basically no difference wither they're guardsmen or marines - all that matters is wound-count.

The second effect is that it skews the meta far towards the anti-tank side, which further hurts marines as those weapons are also effective against elite infantry.

This is further compounded by basic weapons (along with most dedicated anti-infantry weapons like flamers) being mediocre against Infantry and awful against anything tougher. So we have an issue whereby the anti-tank weapons still do well against a lot of infantry, but anti-infantry weapons are worthless against anything but infantry.

If these things are going to be fixed, I think you would really need to start with the core rules of the game.

To add insult to injury, to expand Vipoid's point, anti-elite-infantry weapons often outperform antitank weapons at tank hunting - so kitting to kill the big stuff skews even *more* towards killing Marines than it should.

The problem is that infantry and vehicles have too low of a spread in their number of wounds.

Vehicles and big models (ogrin, chrisis, grotesques and up) should have about 50% more wounds while dedicated anti tank weapons also do get about 50% damage output.
Points should increase a little too.

Also cut out as much D2 weapons as you possibly can and rewrite marines as 2 wound army.

This way you solve both the titan meta as well as the power armor problem. The two things 40k is plagued by the most atm.

You would end up with big models not really caring about small arms fire wounding them on 6s, since they have proportionally more wounds per point.

Small models become cheaper compared to pure anti titan lists.

Marines take their rightful place as a superhuman force resilient to lasguns while still melting to lascannons.

Now you have an actual Rock (Heavy guns/vehicles) paper (cheap hordes) and scissors (Marines) game.

Granted in a D6 system this or any other fix will always feel half baked due to not being detailed enough.
But getting people to break with habits and try something new is easier said than done. I can understand why GW can't afford to try to go to D10.

 some bloke wrote:

kingheff wrote:
I guess maybe armour saves of 5+ get the lightly armoured keyword.
Lightly armoured: On an unmodified armour save roll of 1 this unit suffers a mortal wound in addition to any other damages suffered.

Mortal wounds are flung around way too much in this edition.

With the game playing the way it does, with everything dying in droves, it seems more prevalent that heavily armoured units get a boost to survival, rather than light units get a drop to theirs.

I feel that having a special rule of some sort for vehicles which makes them a bit harder to damage than infantry (let's be honest, a landraider should have better armour than a terminator!) would be good, and then this rule could be applied smatteringly to units with good saves and the fluff to back up their durability.

The difficulty in working this is that the save system is based on a single D6, and it can't really change - there's no way you could roll this many pairs of 2D6, and keep track of them all. The only system to improve it would be to add a re-roll for 1+ saves, like the old fantasy 7+ to hit business:

1+sv = 2+ save, 6+ re-roll
0+ sv = 2+ save, 5+ reroll
-1+ sv = 2+ save, 4+ reroll

etc

this would allow a landraider to have a -1+ save as standard, which can obviously be modified by AP. Then, you can give proper anti-tank a much higher AP, so that they have an advantage over massed attacks.

if this was brought in, then we could do an overhaul of saves, aP and points in general, with a larger scale for saves than we have now. I would be inclined to boost everyones saves (so the worst is a 5+) and then boost the AP of powerful weapons to compensate, leaving high volume low strength firepower as low AP (EG lasguns stay AP-).

This way, lasguns will barely ever hurt a landraider, but a meltagun with AP-7 will still melt a hole in it if it hits, and will destroy infantry as well if you waste it on them. Marines would be 2+, but weapons like autocannons and such will have better AP, and be comparable to how they are now at dealing with them. small arms fire will be less effective at killing marines, and still the same vs orks.

Points would need an overhaul, focussing on increases rather than decreases, and then up the points for a game. That way hordes can be hordes. If you decrease cheap units, is will make them too much - if a guardsman is 4 points, the least you can remove is 25% of their points! unless you go for 1/2 points, like old fantasy did.

I agree on the negative save idea being useful for a wider spread, but at that point GW needs to just suck it up and bite the bullet by switching to a D10 system. You could even keep ultra low and negative saves for REALLY tough stuff and just get rid of all the layers of saves (armor save/invuln save/disgustingly resilient/FNP). This would help out with the awkward everything wounds everything, if strength is below half toughness there is no effect, make a more meaningful spread in weapons and stats.

I also agree on your last point on increasing points, but do so dramatically. With a 4pt gaurdsman and other models with such a low value its hard to modulate as you get huge percentage changes, but if a gaurdsman was *arbitrarily* 30pts it would be much easier to parse out the differences between similar costed units and other basic infantry. Infinity does this with their points system to get much better granularity and balance.

A drastic switch to a more fine-grained system (D10 dice) would have little effect on actual balance, given how little GW seems to care about balancing the current system.
Keep in mind good ol´ Occams razor: don´t do drastic stuff, if small changes already help. Only do that if you run into a problem which can´t be solved otherwise.

As for those improvements, I agree with combatcotton, that "tougher" units simply need more wounds and "anti-tough" weapons accordingly more damage.
Also, some stat changes would help much: it can´t be that the armor of a tank is only as good as that of a marine (nobody with DS0 really cares about marine armor, just bring more guns).

If you want to change the armor system, it could help a lot to simply uncap the minimum armor. Your actual roll still can´t improve past 2+, but 2+ isn´t too bad. What´s bad is that any kind of AP will ruin your day.
If you give tough guys (eg. a landraider) a 0+ armor, he still has to roll 2+, but you need at least AP3 in order to counter his armor, meaning you "filter out the rabble" at the low end of the anti-armor scale and high amounts of AP become much more important and meaningfull. It also means that you can be much more conservative with invulnerables.

Edit: Also, talking about drastic system changes, one change that would help a lot in improving the rules would be if GW stops trying to make money out of selling the rules. Limiting rule updates to a several-year cycle and asking for money for every update is a very effective lock against the kind of trial-error-adjustyournumbers which you need to balance a complex game like 40k (just compare to the update frequency of some computer games...)

... sorry on that last comment, I know it´s a bit off-topic and rage-ey but I had to get rid of this.

I still would like more granularity and a D10 but I get what your saying.

That last point you make though is a good one. GW pigeon holes themselves into sticking with rules and balance that’s people don’t like until they can manage to market new changes and updates. If they just had free rules, a living book, or even a centralized rule repository they could jus update discrepancies and test new stuff at a much more frequent rate.