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The game has changed a lot since the 3rd edition Dark Eldar codex came out, and I feel that poison weapons (especially splinter weapons) have kind of fallen behind. For many editions, the basic rifles of most armies remained largely unchanged. Monstrous Creatures only had a handful of wounds, so only wounding a guardsman on a 4+ was a small price to pay in exchange for treating a carnifex as being essentially only as durable as a handful of tactical marines. Oh, and poison weapons with sufficiently high strength used to reroll to-wound rolls against targets with a lower Toughness than the weapon's Strength.

Nowadays, shuriken weapons are AP-3 on a 6+ to wound, and various bolt weapons tend to either have some amount of AP, more shots than before, have higher strength, or higher damage. Monstrous creatures are now sporting several times as many wounds as they used to, so poison is still worse at bringing them down than it used to be despite ignoring their Toughness values. And the "reroll wounds if your strength is high enough," thing doesn't exist any more. Oh, and many platforms for poison weapons either got nerfed (lhameans) or went up in points by an unexpectedly high amount compared to other units in the game.

It probably sounds like this is a thread for complaining about marines and bemoaning drukhari price increases. It's not. But it does seem like poison weapons have gone from being something of a specialized advantage to almost being something of a liability. Against anything T3 or anything with the vehicle keyword, you'd be better off with a humble unmodified boltgun than with a splinter rifle. Heck, against a T5 vehicle, you'd be better off with a lasgun. So here are some pitches on different ways poisonous weapons might be treated to give them a shot in the arm.

SUGGESTION 1: THE RAW POWER BOOST
What if we just made most poison weapons that wound on a 4+ wound on a 3+? This doesn't do anything for poison weapons that already wound on better than 4+, but it does mean that splinter rifles, pistols, and cannons (as well as several other weapons) would be markedly better at wounding anything but vehicles. You'd break even with a bolt weapon against guardsmen. Your nearly 100 point double cannon venom would go from an average of 4 wounds (before saves) to about 5.3. Kabalite warriors trying to chew through multiwound marines in cover would be pumping out a few extra wounds that marines would have to save against.

I normally don't like suggesting vertical improvements like this, but there is an appeal to its simplicity.

SUGGESTION 2: BOOST THEIR DAMAGE
Rather than making poison weapons wound more easily, what if we just improved their Damage stats in some way? Give more of them something akin to the shaimesh blade rule that inflicts a mortal wound on a to-wound roll of 6+. Simply treat the Damage characteristic as 1 higher against non-vehicle targets. Something along those lines.

The consequence would be that poison weapons would be unchanged against most infantry targets, but they'd specifically be better against multi-wound targets (including their classic preferred targets like bikes and monsters). This change would be a more specialized improvement compared to the 1st suggestion, and it seems appropriate to the fluff. However, it also feels a bit like a direct response to marines getting more wounds, and that's not a great look.

SUGGESTION 3: SPECIAL AMMO
This is the most complicated of my pitches. What if the "Poison Weapon" rule basically let you choose one of several profiles or special rules when you use them; sort of like Death Watch Speciall Issue Ammunition. It's fluffy enough for drukhari to pack several types of poisons for different jobs. You might have the option of using the poison that acts like the default poison does now but inflicts a debuff (-1 to hit?) on units that suffer one or more unsaved wounds from it. You might have a profile that doesn't auto-wound on a 4+ but has a higher damage characteristic. You could have "hellfire poison" that wounds on a 3+ instead of a 4+. The specifics are just spitballs. The main pitch here is that poison's "thing" becomes the ability to choose the right tool for the job.

Thoughts?

The gist of Poison was that it was supposed o be good against monsters and rubbish against vehicles. With the measure of a weapon now leaning more and more toward its damage statistic, I might suggest that a roll of 6+ to wound cause 2 damage, or D3 damage. Alternatively, you could have poisoned weapons auto-wound non-vehicle models on a to hit roll of 6+, with extra damage if you do so, representing that you had hit a weak spot.

Another option is to drop their strength right down to 2, up their rate of fire and then have them have AP-1 and D1 normally, and change this against non-vehicles to AP-3, D2. So they will wound on 6's against anything T4+ but will generally be killing what they wound. Some of the weapons may have better strength, but seldom very high. I'd make the main "features" of the weapons be high rate of fire and good AP and Damage vs non-vehicles.

I like the damage 2 on an unmodified wound roll of 6.

Its easy to remember, not complicated to implement and has the most extra effect on low armour multi wound targets that it should be good against.

I think poisoned weapons shouldn't cause multidamage, because that's the effect of powerful shots and poisoned shots are supposed to cause little damage from a single sting, and I'd go with wounding on 3s (vehicles still on 6s) and a 1 CP stratagem that allows 6 to wound to be resolved with AP-1.

After seeing the necron leaks im assuming with dark eldar get their book in 9th poison is gonna change to the following:

Poison weapon- When rolling to wound with a poison weapon do everything as per normal, however againgst Infantry, Swarms, and Monsters keep a tally of all wound rolls of a 4, 5, or 6 for this round of attacks. After saves have been rolled for the target, compare your tally and the models remaining wounds. If your tally is higher than their remaining wounds then you inflict mortal wounds equal to half of the difference (rounding down).
These mortal wounds can only kill a single model in the target unit and so dont carry over to unhurt models.




So your 10 man unit fires at an already hurt carnifex and brings it down to 3 wounds. You scored a tally of 5 poison marks on it, which is 2 higher than its remaining wounds so it suffers 1 more mortal wound.


Its overly complex, adds more mortal wounds, but is totally unique to your army.