10 wounds, worse than 9?

[chapter master 454]

So not sure where to throw this but I do want to make this thread as to discuss something so...mods throw this wherever you think best because it really doesn't belong to any one faction or place that I can see.

 

Break points are a good thing, we need them to have definition between things. However one thing I will point to is that a key break point in 40k is kind of a big deal in that it makes you weaker if you only barely hit or get above it. I want to talk about the concept of 10 wounds being the point where you get a damage table and lose any rights to character targeting protection.

 

Interesting topic to discuss and one of the offenders that is power armoured is the big blue commander himself, Gulliman. The monster of a unit stands in at 9 wounds, RIGHT below that key threshold. This was mentioned and pointed to when shown to be a big deal as he was riding the rail of the limit. Many even may point to it as one of the reasons he is so effective in castle strategies (that have that god-like aura certainly but he wouldn't be able to do that so well and safely if he had 10 wounds).

 

Yet another unit within space marines is the Redemptor. The shiny new dreadnought with so many guns it makes ork meks feel insecure about their deff dreads! However one gripe people have is (it doesn't ignore heavy penalty) that is it has more than 10 wounds, 13 to be exact. Now that is a respectable amount of wounds but one issue in the list of the redemptor that does stand out when compared to other dreads is they don't degrade where as you shoot the redemptor in the foot enough it starts to lose steam and threat value while a normal dreadnought will retain full power of ranged and close combat power right down to the last wound. Granted however, the difference is 5 wounds, there are 13 on the redemptor and 8 on a vanilla but when you have to go through all 8 wounds to stop the thing fully vs. a redemptor who begins to stumble and struggle to do anything once you have knocked the sum of 7 wounds off it, it begins to stumble where as if you did the same to a dreadnought it doesn't care.

A point of notable issues here is the contemptors who sit exactly on 10 wounds. A prime point for me to express a little thought for it.

What would you think of the contemptor dreadnought if we were to "nerf" its wound count to 9? And

What would you think of Gulliman if we were to "buff" his wound count to 10?

 

The fun thing is I believe it is a serious issue that can actually be a point of reducing a model's point cost. Due to how the damage table actually aids in countering a model, when you only just hit the threshold you are put at a detriment due to being able to be hamstrung from taking less than complete damage.

 

Naturally however there is a point where you leave the bad zone and actually begin to gain ground. The redemptor does to some extent have enough wounds to barely justify itself though could be argued that the damage table is just the bottom part of the list that pushes the dreadnought down even further (to be fair, I like the model and the amount of guns. I hate the lore for them though with a burning passion that makes salamander flamers look like radiators!)

 

So where would a unit begin to start feeling like they benefit from having 10+ wounds because having solid 10 is just a bad deal. 11 wounds would certainly also likely suffer the same fate but begins to get somewhere (rhinos don't suffer really because they aren't meant to be threats, they are transports and effectively ablative wounds for the squad inside so normally they get destroyed just to get the insides out) but once we hit 12-13 we could argue the benefit of over 10 wounds and once we get to 14 I think we can agree we are not longer in the realm of being hamstrung as bad.

Possible theory over this is to do with how many wounds you need to dish out to start hindering the effectiveness. Since damage tables start at half wounds (rounding down) this means at 10 you only need to take 5 wounds to start degrading, 11 means 6 instead of 5 but still fairly low and again that goes for 12. However once we hit 13 we start to see the need for 7 wounds to degrade and then we hit 14 and it could be argued we now have hit the point where the high wound count becomes good. To throw out a possible theory it may be to do with how easy it is to deal 5-6 damage to a target, being possible with 1 lascannon (you know, the measurement we all use when talking anti-tank!).

 

What are your thoughts on the matter?

[sairence]

Being under the 10 wound treshold for characters is definitely a massive deal. Thinking of my Leman Russ tank commanders, they are no more durable than a regular tank. Same wounds, same save same Toughness. They have a massive increase in firepower though, making them stand out as a target. And not all deployment zones will be far enough apart to stay out of range, which can make bringing them tricky.

 

Now, not to give the wrong impression...tank commanders are great and I love using them. And a Leman Russ is still not easy to bring down. If they were under 10 wounds though, they'd be unkillable gods of long range firepower.

[Wassa]

I play guard, and I often wished Pask and the Tank Commanders had 9 wounds. They would be so brutal they would be OP.

Instead they have 12, which allows them to get targeted by enemy Lascannons. 

 

I think to some extent, you need to protect squishy characters, but the rules as they are, are a bit stupid.

You can't shoot them unless you have snipers, and you would need lots of them to hit/wound/dodge saves to actually kill the character. Absolutely useless against character Deadnoughts.

Psychic abilities seem amazing against them because they can target them. Thousand Sons or Grey Knights are great for this.

Combat is odd as if they're a combat character, like Straken, or this new Severaina Raine (sp?) Commissar, but then the enemy just targets them in combat and then they're dead...

[Panzer]

A clear yes. 10 wounds is in every way worse than 9 regardless of whether it's a character or not since it's also the threshold for getting a degrading profile.

I wish my Ghostkeel had only 9 wounds instead of 10.

 

I think for non-characters you want them to have at least 12 wounds if they go above 9 and for characters you want them to have either a lot more wounds or some strong defensive mechanics like a good invul and/or armour paired with FnP and/or regeneration and similar things to equal out the loss of character protection.

[Ahzek451]

At least, for non-character units I wish they would take the following into account: if a model is going to break into degrading profiles by having 10-12 wounds, then at least reduce the degrading profiles or make them less harsh. They all have 3 areas of degrading right? Well maybe just have 2 for these models.

[Vykes]

Aye, 10 wounds is worse in almost every way (and every reasonable way*) than 9.  Targeting rules are first and foremost, but as sfPanzer mentioned, it's that degredation threshold for units.  My Contemptor dreadnoughts aren't characters, and they are nice, but they start to get shut down pretty quick after a few dings while mister boxnaught is perfectly fine all day long.  

 

Post Scriptum: I do think that Chapter Master 454 is right in the assertion that the degrading factor goes a long way into balancing the model itself, but some get kinda weird.  A contemptor would be a lot better than a typical 'naught' and might need some extra points added right back (to the level of the pre CA change) to counteract it, for instance.  While the Redemptor's 13 HP is actually in a really nice spot. 

 

But this really starts to hurt when expensive characters and targeting rules get tossed into the mix, and some of the lower HP ones like Pask are very much in there.  I didn't really realize how squishy that little 10-12 threshold is until I brought a Vindicator laser destroyer to bear and knocked out a Russ a turn with its 2 shot flat 6 damage. The weird one is that characters seem to really need to be HP 13 to avoid that sort of RNG issue (and a lot of weapons easily mutliply to 12, with two good las cannon shots or two melta shots, 10-12 is gone.  13 might be crippled but it's still there). It creates this dead zone where 10-12 for me is basically death while 9 is frustration. 

 

I will mention that there is at least one dreadnought character who feels the pain, Red Scorpion's cullen  

*The only time I can think of that 10 was ever better than 9 was letting 3 autocannon shots slip past my contemptor's armour. 

[Subtleknife]

Definitely, I think the primarchs really showcase this. RG has a whole army, in theory, to tank wounds for him and thus he can survive into late game. His brothers are lucky to make it to turn two before being shot off the board.

 

One the things I am not keen on in 8th is the way vehs just feel like high wound single models. I wish armour of some kind was involved again.

[Jorin Helm-splitter]

Its really difficult question to answer it even varies by fraction imo. Eldar skimmers speed diminishes slower than other fractions (bottom rung is about half move, where as for most imperial units its about a 3rd of the intial speed). Which makes their transports more effective.

 

So to simplify things I'm only going to worry about the imperium units. IMO 13 wounds is the sweet spot.

 

For even wound models the second tier is at half wounds, compared to half wounds rounded down for units with an odd amount of wounds. This means that it takes the same amount of damage to make a 12 wound vehicle and a 11 wound vehicle to degrade (6 for the second tier, and another 4 to reach the bottom tier). To expand on that point, its really important that it takes 6 damage to make them degrade, because it means a lot of weapons can achieve that in one shot. Whereas they'd be one damage off on a 13-14 wound model. 

 

It is worth pointing out that the redemptor is the only 13 wound model I can think of between the imperium fractions atm. I bring this point up because I don't think the damage table hurts this models effectiveness as much as its intial design. Its just really hard to leverage a dread that needs to get into close combat while also being penalized for moving . 

[toaae]

One interaction I don't like is that characters under 10W are untargetable, regardless of what the character is. The Blood Angel Librarian Dread is perfect example of what I mean: It is a Furioso Dread, but because it has the character keyword, it is somehow harder for the enemy to target than every other dread on the field. While that works out for us BA players that might actually want to take it, it makes no sense. Recently, I've seen a lot of gruff online about how the Lord Discordant is over 10 wounds and therefore can be targeted, and all I can think of is if that thing was on the table across from me, and I was told I couldn't shoot it because it was a character, I'd feel like the game is really dumb.

The character targeting rule is a replacement for the old Independant character rule. But it also covers units that were never/would never have been ICs in the past. Pass out more durability, drop points, or whatever, but vehicles and monsters should not be untargetable just for being characters.

 

As for damage profiles, I feel they are a weak replacement for the old vehicle damage tables. For some units, they don't matter, for others, they are overly punishing.

[chapter master 454]

Characters are certainly a central point of contention of the game. After all, how do we make them balanced and actually interesting to play with but also against.

 

In design, one must not consider just the user but also those who are on the receiving end and if it is a fun experience (I know it sounds weird but it does work trust me). After all, it is never fun when there isn't any counter play.

 

However in the same vain...not exactly fun when your sweet character gets lit up by 4 lascannons, 3 full squadrons of predators and a vindicare decides to just take a shot at the corpse to claim he got the kill. After all, I point to the big primarchs for this and it shows how sad it is really because unless you attempt to play hide and seek with lascannons then they won't get anywhere...again...woo such fun gameplay where I have to focus on trying to dick you out of line of sight because otherwise you will dump everything on my character.

 

It is hard to work with really because any solution really becomes quite grinding. How do we gate targeting characters but not make it so limiting that captain smash gets a free pass to level all with his reign of terror! I mean, one idea could be a global stratagem like the basic 3 we have in the game right now. Something that would allow a squad to fire upon a character freely but at a steep CP cost but then again that results in some really silly tactics (like...since where did 4 lascannon devastators become character snipers? Thought those boys were for tanks...).

 

Possibly a solution may be some form of stratagem in reverse, something that makes even 10+ wound characters untargetable for the first turn like a "normal" character but must abide by those rules. But then we have to ask about dreadnoughts and the like. Possibly one idea could be that characters above ten wounds can hide but only if a similar unit is nearby like for the librarian dreadnought, it can only be hidden if another dreadnought is closer and within a certain distance. I don't know just throwing things at the wall here.

[Morticon]

Question I'm confused about, what does the Redemptor / Contemptor being 9 Wounds matter?

 

Neither are characters and as a result are just as targetable as a regular dread with 8 wounds. 

 

[toaae]

Question I'm confused about, what does the Redemptor / Contemptor being 9 Wounds matter?

 

Neither are characters and as a result are just as targetable as a regular dread with 8 wounds.

 

 

The idea is they wouldn't have damage tables, so they would be more effective after taking, say, 7 wounds than they currently are.

[Morticon]

I feel!! 

For the contemptor its fine by me, because only by the time i get to 2 wounds (when he'd be dead if he was a regular dread), do I see degradation on his profile beyond a standard dread. 

For the redemptor, what is the degradation limit? 7 wounds? That's workable.  I'd probably take that. 

[Halfpint100]

Characters are certainly a central point of contention of the game. After all, how do we make them balanced and actually interesting to play with but also against.

 

In design, one must not consider just the user but also those who are on the receiving end and if it is a fun experience (I know it sounds weird but it does work trust me). After all, it is never fun when there isn't any counter play.

 

However in the same vain...not exactly fun when your sweet character gets lit up by 4 lascannons, 3 full squadrons of predators and a vindicare decides to just take a shot at the corpse to claim he got the kill. After all, I point to the big primarchs for this and it shows how sad it is really because unless you attempt to play hide and seek with lascannons then they won't get anywhere...again...woo such fun gameplay where I have to focus on trying to dick you out of line of sight because otherwise you will dump everything on my character.

 

It is hard to work with really because any solution really becomes quite grinding. How do we gate targeting characters but not make it so limiting that captain smash gets a free pass to level all with his reign of terror! I mean, one idea could be a global stratagem like the basic 3 we have in the game right now. Something that would allow a squad to fire upon a character freely but at a steep CP cost but then again that results in some really silly tactics (like...since where did 4 lascannon devastators become character snipers? Thought those boys were for tanks...).

 

Possibly a solution may be some form of stratagem in reverse, something that makes even 10+ wound characters untargetable for the first turn like a "normal" character but must abide by those rules. But then we have to ask about dreadnoughts and the like. Possibly one idea could be that characters above ten wounds can hide but only if a similar unit is nearby like for the librarian dreadnought, it can only be hidden if another dreadnought is closer and within a certain distance. I don't know just throwing things at the wall here.

 

That reverse character stratagem would make mortarian and magnus too OP and make very little sense, they are huge. I should be able to shoot them all the time. I agree with the vehicle character rules as well, it doesnt make sense that this furioso dread can be shot, but this one right next to it cannot be because its pilot was a librarian. But then again, when have the rules ever perfectly made sense? 

[Slasher956]

Add toughness to the character targeting rule then.... if less than 10 wounds and T6 or less then you can be hidden/ un targeted.

[Interrogator Stobz]

Once they ditch the current character targeting rules I can play 40k again, as it stands I won't because they are terrible.

My last game I had a Titan that could see everything but only target pox walkers, all the princes were hiding in plain sight. Absolutely sucked the fun out of the game.

A fix could be a combo of 8th and earlier editions, keep the bubbles and make them join units for protection, the opfor kills the whole unit and they're allowed to target the character. If they're squishy then hide them, this is a gun game.

As for degrading profiles, they're fine but armour should count more than it does, and to balance that anti tank weapons should do more damage if they manage to penetrate the armour

My 2c

[Azekai]

Once they ditch the current character targeting rules I can play 40k again, as it stands I won't because they are terrible.

My last game I had a Titan that could see everything but only target pox walkers, all the princes were hiding in plain sight. Absolutely sucked the fun out of the game.

A fix could be a combo of 8th and earlier editions, keep the bubbles and make them join units for protection, the opfor kills the whole unit and they're allowed to target the character. If they're squishy then hide them, this is a gun game.

The game is already heavily balanced in favor of point and click shooting. When you complain about the character targeting rules, it really sounds like you were incapable of killing the chaff. Knights and titans are already powerful. Preventing them from sniping out characters (even potentially monstrous ones) with impunity is just fine. 

[Arson Fire]

Ever since 8th dropped I've wondered why character targeting isn't based solely on a keyword, instead of keyword + wound count.

It seems weird to me that the designers have to wrestle with their own ruleset to make some units.  You end up with various characters who have a wound count approaching but not more than 9, and also rules to let them stand back up after death, or to halve damage taken, or whatever.  Where the designers probably just wanted to give them a larger number of wounds but still benefit from character targeting.

Not to mention certain models being untargetable which probably shouldn't be, like various character dreadnoughts, or the necron command barge.

 

They should have just added a Concealable keyword to units they wished to have character targeting rules, and left wound count as a completely independent stat representing how much damage something can take.  Tying the two concepts together just limits design space.

[Interrogator Stobz]

 

 

Once they ditch the current character targeting rules I can play 40k again, as it stands I won't because they are terrible.

My last game I had a Titan that could see everything but only target pox walkers, all the princes were hiding in plain sight. Absolutely sucked the fun out of the game.

A fix could be a combo of 8th and earlier editions, keep the bubbles and make them join units for protection, the opfor kills the whole unit and they're allowed to target the character. If they're squishy then hide them, this is a gun game.

The game is already heavily balanced in favor of point and click shooting. When you complain about the character targeting rules, it really sounds like you were incapable of killing the chaff. Knights and titans are already powerful. Preventing them from sniping out characters (even potentially monstrous ones) with impunity is just fine.

Feel free to disagree, but when a 2000 point unit can only target chaff and therefore kill about 100 points a turn with some of the biggest guns in the game something is wrong. FYI there were lots of other things in our collective side, my example is just a clear weakness in the rules. I gave a solution in my statement of opinion above that addressed your point in case you missed it.

If players cannot protect their characters by placing them safely out of sight or in transports then it should, in a shooting game, be their issue not the shooters.

Also, have lots of terrain, it makes the game more tactical and less point and shoot that way.

[Panzer]

 

 

Once they ditch the current character targeting rules I can play 40k again, as it stands I won't because they are terrible.

My last game I had a Titan that could see everything but only target pox walkers, all the princes were hiding in plain sight. Absolutely sucked the fun out of the game.

A fix could be a combo of 8th and earlier editions, keep the bubbles and make them join units for protection, the opfor kills the whole unit and they're allowed to target the character. If they're squishy then hide them, this is a gun game.

The game is already heavily balanced in favor of point and click shooting. When you complain about the character targeting rules, it really sounds like you were incapable of killing the chaff. Knights and titans are already powerful. Preventing them from sniping out characters (even potentially monstrous ones) with impunity is just fine.

Feel free to disagree, but when a 2000 point unit can only target chaff and therefore kill about 100 points a turn with some of the biggest guns in the game something is wrong. FYI there were lots of other things in our collective side, my example is just a clear weakness in the rules. I gave a solution in my statement of opinion above that addressed your point in case you missed it.

If players cannot protect their characters by placing them safely out of sight or in transports then it should, in a shooting game, be their issue not the shooters.

Also, have lots of terrain, it makes the game more tactical and less point and shoot that way.

 

Then I'm going to disagree. If you feel like your 2000p unit can only shoot at 100p of chaff then I'd say you're playing a horrible list and probably should have invested in some support units that enable your big guns to actually do their work. Or do you find the existance of transports wrong just because your anti-infantry shooting can't touch the unit hiding inside the transport as well?

In a game as devastating as 40k with all that long range shooting something like the character rule is necessary to actually make characters worth their points. It would be great if it were like in AoS where characters aren't untargetable but instead the unit shooting at characters gets a to-hit penalty, however AoS has WAY less shooting while in 40k a -1 to-hit against characters wouldn't help protecting them at all.

If the big guns could target characters any character worth taking would be gone turn 1-2 the same way you have to basically spam vehicles to avoid having them wiped by an opponents alpha strike .... except that characters are meant to stick around for longer than a random Predator or whatever.

 

As for your suggestion ... join him a unit? Yeah great idea ... because there are so many units that can actually survive any half serious attempt from your opponent to wipe it.  Maybe if units that are supposed to be durable like Terminators&Co were actually durable but that's not the case.

[Interrogator Stobz]

...and then the characters die, like the squishy things they are. They are too protected and some people are too precious about them. In the Grimdark future they will not be missed.

[Panzer]

Well that's your opinion. In my grimdark future they stick around and watch the peons around them die. ;)

[Interrogator Stobz]

Fair enough, we don't need to change each other's opinions on it.

[chapter master 454]

To be fair, this issue really just grinds on a very select few characters as most can reasonable get their meatshields in front of them...did I say meatshields I mean their loyal soldiers to aid in ensuring their continued success!

 

Key ones are like the lord discordant who isn't exactly a big deal but hey, he's freely targetable but when we look over at characters like Cawl or Gulliman and these guys are pretty big considering (especially cawl who seems to be just as big as the lord) but then we get units like librarian dreadnoughts who should stand out but don't...somehow despite other dreads do. However those are the fringe cases as most times characters in 40k aren't much larger than the units they lead (even in tyranids their characters can reasonably hide due to have other similar sized units often in the army. How are you going to, in the heat of a fire fight, distinguish that that bug has a bigger brain than the others).

 

Really, the other big point I wanted to raise with the thread and remind people of is the idea that if a unit has 10 wounds, if it were to be pointed compared to a 9 wound version of itself, it would have to be pointed cheaper to be reasonable. Basically, I am saying if a contemptor dreadnought in stats lost 1 wound and became a 9 wound dread it would actually be worth more due to no damage table.

[Panzer]

 

Really, the other big point I wanted to raise with the thread and remind people of is the idea that if a unit has 10 wounds, if it were to be pointed compared to a 9 wound version of itself, it would have to be pointed cheaper to be reasonable. Basically, I am saying if a contemptor dreadnought in stats lost 1 wound and became a 9 wound dread it would actually be worth more due to no damage table.

 

Agreed. 10-12 wounds should be cheaper than 9 imo. At least for characters since for non-characters it depends on how punishing the degrading profile is.