Insane mortal wound output? Sanity check required please.

[The Spitehorde]

Frater, got a strange one to run past you. It was a bit of an eye-opener so made a note of it at the time. It's a bit long winded so I apologise in advance. 

 

Last weekend me and a few buddies played our first game of tenth and decided to welcome 10th with a bang. 2000pts per player (admittedly we still used 9th points values as we all detest what GW have done to points power levels in 10th), 2 players a side. On my side both of us playing World Eaters, the two on the other side playing Guard and Ultramarines. 

 

2nd turn my buddies Blessings of Khorne rolls gave him enough of the right dice to give him both Sustained Hits 1 and Lethal Hits.  He'd paid for the Berzerker Glaive for his Master of Executions, and rolled a 3 on the D3 after charging into a bunch of Ultramarines that turn.

 

That gave him, in total, 5 standard attacks, plus the army rule of 1 for charging, plus 3 for the Berzerker Glaive (total 9). As it was on the charge and he'd rolled a 3 for the Berzerker Glaive that meant his big 'ole axe had a total strength of 8 and damage of 5.  Oh yeah, that axe just happens to have Devastating Wounds and Precision keywords as well. 

 

Soooooo....

 

Of the 9 dice he rolled he came up with 2 misses, 4 sixes, 2 threes, and a 4. The 4 sixes not only generated another 4 hits due to Sustained Hits, but they also automatically wounded due to Lethal Hits. As the FBA has Devastating Wounds those 4 sixes automatically converted to a total of 20 mortal wounds. Ouch. That wasn't the end of it though. 6 of the 7 wound rolls converted, including 2 sixes. That's another 10 mortal wounds. The Ultramarines managed to save 2 of the 4 save rolls they had to make, so 2 went through. That was another 10 wounds. 

 

In total that's one model generating 30 MW and 10 regular wounds. That can't be right, surely? 

 

 

[Rain]

Lethal hits don’t proc DW. They count as successful wounds, not critical wounds.

[The Spitehorde]

That's the bit that's got me querying things. After all, if you roll a 6 with Lethal Hits it automatically wounds, yes? As such it's effectively been wounded with a 6 then DW would appear to kick in. I've had a good look through the errata and rules and can't see owt about that not being the case. Might be something blindingly obvious i've missed (might need a trip to Specsavers in that case), or might have been too much Beerhammer over the weekend. 

 

 

 

[Commander Dawnstar]

It's covered under "Automatically Successful" in the Rules Commentary:

 

[Rain]

It’s inflicts an automatic wound, not an automatic critical wound. Quoting the rule:

 

Weapons with [LETHAL HITS] in their profile are known as Lethal Hits weapons. Each time an attack is made with such a weapon, a Critical Hit automatically wounds the target.

 

So, you can forego the wound roll. It wounds automatically, but it does not critically wound. Devastating Wounds reads:

 

Weapons with [DEVASTATING WOUNDS] in their profile are known as Devastating Wounds weapons. Each time an attack is made with such a weapon, a Critical Wound inflicts a number of mortal wounds on the target equal to the Damage characteristic of that weapon and the attack sequence ends.

 

So, not all wounds caused by a DW weapon are mortals, only critical wounds are mortals. LH causes automatic wounds, not automatic critical wounds. As no critical wound is caused, DW does not come into effect. I don’t really see any other reasonable reading of the RAW.

 

Edit: Looks like @Commander Dawnstar found a cite to this being explicitly clarified. I guess I can see the potential confusion by conflating automatic wounds with critical wounds. All critical wounds are automatic wounds, but not all automatic wounds are critical wounds.

Edited June 29, 2023 by Rain

[The Spitehorde]

Thanks for that @Commander Dawnstar and @Rain . My gut feeling of that can't be right, surely? turned out to be correct. 

[Arkhanist]

3 hours ago, The Spitehorde said:

Of the 9 dice he rolled he came up with 2 misses, 4 sixes, 2 threes, and a 4. The 4 sixes not only generated another 4 hits due to Sustained Hits, but they also automatically wounded due to Lethal Hits.

 

It looks like you all did this part correctly, but to confirm, lethal hits and sustained hits don't 'stack'. Expanding on the rules commentary quote from above to run through the whole process:

 

Quote

Additional Hits: Some rules cause attacks to score additional hits on a Critical Hit (e.g. [SUSTAINED HITS]). If the attacking model is also benefiting from any other rules that trigger on a Critical Hit (e.g. LETHAL HITS]), only the original attack benefits from those rules.  Any additional hits scored as the result of a Critical Hit are automatically successful.

 

When a dice roll is automatically successful, the following applies:
■ If a roll is automatically successful, do not roll the dice. Any rules that take effect on a particular dice result or roll result do not take effect if the roll they refer to is automatically successful.
■ If a Hit roll is automatically successful, move straight to the Wound roll. Such a Hit roll is not a Critical Hit, and does not trigger any effects that are triggered by a Critical Hit.
■ If a Wound roll is automatically successful, move straight to the allocation of that attack. Such a Wound roll is not a Critical Wound, and does not trigger any effects that are triggered by a Critical Wound.

 

 

So of the original hit rolls; 4 sixes, and 3 normal hits. The 4 sixes are critical hits, which generates 4 more automatically successful hits due to Sustained Hits. Lethal Hits also triggers on the 4 critical hits, making them automatically wound. So that's 7 wound rolls, and 4 automatically successful wounds to allocate. The latter are NOT critical wounds, and thus do not trigger Devastating Wounds as discussed above, but proceed straight to saves once allocated. Any sixes rolled of the 7 normal wounds will be a critical wound, and thus devastating wounds kicks in and they become mortal, bypassing saves.

 

3 hours ago, The Spitehorde said:

 

 

 

6 of the 7 wound rolls converted, including 2 sixes. That's another 10 mortal wounds. The Ultramarines managed to save 2 of the 4 save rolls they had to make, so 2 went through. That was another 10 wounds.

 

So 4 of the 7 normal wound rolls were successful, and the 2 sixes are critical wounds, and due to Devastating Wounds become mortal. There are also 4 automatically successful wounds from Lethal Hits that were not rolled for saves that should have been.

 

Of the 4 saves that were rolled, 2 were failed, leaving a grand total of 2 damaging attacks and 2 mortal wounds attacks, plus the 4 saves that should have been rolled. For simplicity, we'll assume the same results as the 4 saves that were (i.e. 2 fails), giving 2 more damaging attacks. Given the Damage was boosted to 5 via the Berzerker Glaive, that's 4 attacks doing 5D each, and 2x5=10 mortal wounds. The extra damage from the 4 normal hits does not roll over to additional targets, but mortal wounds do. Per the core rules,

 

Quote

Unlike damage inflicted by normal attacks, excess damage from mortal wounds is not lost if the damage can be allocated to another model. Instead, keep allocating damage to another model in the target unit until either all the damage has been allocated or the target unit is destroyed.

 

So assuming normal 2W marines were the target unit, that's 4 dead from the 4 normal attacks doing 5D each, and 5 dead from the 10 mortal wounds, for up to 9 killed in total.

 

So definitely still Ouch! That D3 roll of 3 on the bezerker glaive was brutal, especially when given to a character with an existing Devastating Wounds weapon. Though he also burned both Blessings of Khorne for the turn on the guy to get Lethal Hits and Sustained Hits which definitely helped.

 

 

Edited June 29, 2023 by Arkhanist

[The Spitehorde]

I'm fast coming to the conclusion that GW's description of 10th as "simplified, not simple" is somewhat wide of the mark...

 

 

 

 

[TrawlingCleaner]

=][= I've moved this over to the Official Rules section as it's a better fit here, being a rules query =][=

[Arkhanist]

3 hours ago, The Spitehorde said:

I'm fast coming to the conclusion that GW's description of 10th as "simplified, not simple" is somewhat wide of the mark...

 

 

 

 

 

It's easy peasy, just don't take any units with any special rules, or any characters in units, or apply any faction effects! Simples!

[jaxom]

4 hours ago, The Spitehorde said:

I'm fast coming to the conclusion that GW's description of 10th as "simplified, not simple" is somewhat wide of the mark...

 

 

 

 

The only thing(s) simplified is how they decided to structure information and cut out unnecessary math, and even that is somewhat subjective. The rules and extent of what they cover and how they can interact has not changed, hence “not simple”

[TheArtilleryman]

47 minutes ago, jaxom said:

The only thing(s) simplified is how they decided to structure information and cut out unnecessary math, and even that is somewhat subjective. The rules and extent of what they cover and how they can interact has not changed, hence “not simple”

Definitely not. And the wording they have started using in recent editions is just bizarre e.g. “each time an attack is allocated to this model, each time you roll a dice….” … each time you re-read the same paragraph over again to

make sure that this time you understand it …