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I got to talking with a friend about why the new character rule in 8th is ...meh? and its basically the reason why soup lists exist (protect your characters). So we looked and looked and looked into different codexes and thought "Why not just give everyone a sniper?" And this could just be a new elite unit or something like scout snipers. See Astra Militarium running like 10 characters BAM bring snipers and deny first rank/second rank fire etc. Thoughts?

I'm not sure I see what your goal is. The first part of your posts makes it sound like you feel that the character rule is too weak, and the second part seems to be a suggestion to make it easier to kill characters than it currently is?

Most factions do have access to some form of snipers or other character targeting. The imperium has various sniper units. Tyranids have the kellermorph and allied in sniper rifles. Chaos has psychic powers. Drukhari have a few weird guns and a coven strat. Asuryani have rangers, sniper special characters, autarchs with a certain warlord trait, and Mind War. Etc. Are there any factions you feel don't have access to some sort of sniper or sniper equivalent?

Also, I'm not sure it's accurate to say that protecting characters is the reason that soup exists. You take cheap batallions like the loyal 32 for the command points. You take a spearhead of ravagers and an archon for the ravagers more than for the archon. Generally speaking, soup tends to be about generating more CP, filling your main faction's weaknesses, and cherry picking the best units from several factions.

Soup protecting characters is specifically the current Chaos tournament meta (Plaguebearer blobs in front of your characters), which exists because GW extensively buffed the Chaos Marine characters in their new Codex and left their units alone, it's more a consequence of the internal balance of that book than the character rule.