Would +1W Solve our Resiliency Problem?

[KingYertle]

As astutely pointed out by our resident Heretical Historian LSM, Plague Marines have had a significant resiliency boost over regular marines for 9 of the 10 editions of 40k.  So my question to our Bubonic Brain Trust, would giving DG Infantry +1W solve our resiliency complaints?

 

3W Plague Marines would be a chore for 1D weapons to chew through, and provide a significant survivability boost vs the plethora of D2 anti-marine weaponry.  High damage weapons still make them go splat, but I am ok with that.  IMO this fits nicely with the Lore of Death Guard.  Its not even that unique, as we would be on par with the corpse-worshipping gravis marines.  It's less of an impact than -1D, especially for terminators, but they would still benefit vs D3 weapons, and again it isn't unique as it puts them on the same base wounds as 4W assault terminators with shields.

 

For vehicles, and this might be a Hot Take, but I think they are OK as is.    A bump to T10 would be welcomed, but the 5++ save is strong and I prefer they stay at the 100pt or less threshold.  The only datasheet I think needs a revamp is the Hellbrute.  The hellbrute provides the mobile heavy weapon platform our army lacks and aesthetically the Hellbrute kit looks great alongside Death Guard.  But they deserve to be 10W and gain the 5++ Daemon save.

 

Personally I long the return our 5+++ FNP, for the simple fact that rolling the FNP while calling out for Papa Nurgle's Blessing brought the FUN to playing Death Guard.  When the Index had Disgustingly Resilient as a Strat, I expected this to be our version of Armor of Contempt and be available across all DG detachments.  The fact that it is missing from our Grotmas Detachment has me hopeful DR makes its triumphant return in our Codex, but I am trying really hard not to set myself up for disappointment.  

[Indy Techwisp]

While 3w Plague Marines would definatley hit the right level of "PitA to kill" that DG want, I think this would be a horrible idea in practice simply due to 4w Deathshroud Terminators.

 

More generally tho, it breaks the Marine format and I think none of us want a situation where Marines of all types Power Creep up to 3w across the board simply because one type broke the threshold (looking at you Original 2w Primaris Marines).

[HeadlessCross]

D1 weapons aren't the problem for Death Guard resilience, necessarily. 

 

The real problem is that toughness values and the To Wound Chart aren't being effectively used. I think most people would agree with me that Lasguns shouldn't wound regular Marines and Plague Marines at the same rate. The game needs to move to D12, but thats an unpopular belief unfortunately. 

[CastellanDeMolay]

Agreed with both of the above. +1 Wound feels like too much; even in 8th when PM had 1W and DR, a 1/3 chance to ignore damage was effectively 1.3 Wounds, which was already a lot. A whole 50% durability buff is surely going too far. The main problem with damage Vs durability since 8th is that the range of profiles has been expanded, but the dice are still D6 and GW is trying to make the game less swingy while keeping the IGOUGO turn structure. What we should be trying to achieve is to make DG more resilient in a way that doesn't create a perverse trend. GW have previously tried increasing damage numbers, or making powerful weapons more consistent, which made the game more lethal, which resulted in them increasing the Wounds characteristic on a lot of models, which made the game more granular at the cost of increasing book-keeping and throwing out the effectiveness of some weapons with fixed damage values higher than 1. I don't think we want to create weird exceptions to the rules either, Ghazghkull's per-phase Wound-cap in 9th was disruptive in absolutely the worst possible way, and the Void Dragon's rule which was effectively a tailored counter to this was even worse. 

 

I think the best thing would be to leverage the existing core mechanics in ways that increase the consistency of usefulness of DG models. When we talk about resilience, we're talking about consistency: models sticking around to do the things they do instead of being removed/Battle shocked/etc. To that end there are a few ways to achieve it:

-1 to hit rolls: This doesn't play into the fantasy of the army all that well and should probably be reserved for a selective buff/debuff that layers on top of actual resilience, but it does effectively reduce incoming damage by something like 16.67% It behaves very consistently against low-damage, small arms fire, but becomes increasingly swingy against lower RoF and/or higher damage weapons, where all of any damage gets negated by each missed shot. 

-1 to wound rolls: This works well enough with the fantasy of the army, and arguably balances the difference made against weak and strong shooting a bit better than affecting hit rolls, since weaker weapons will just suffer a straight 33-50% damage reduction, while more powerful weapons that were wounding on 2s or 3s will only suffer a 20-25% reduction. Honestly, looking at the numbers, this also feels a bit too strong on multiwound models. 

Ignore first point of AP: I don't like this one because it doesn't interact with the weakest weapons in the game, and makes them more points-efficient than more powerful weapons. Even changing it to +1 to armour saves means some models wouldn't improve beyond their existing 2+. Messing with saves tends to push up against the limits of the D6 system more easily than the other rolls. 

FNP 6+: The extra dice rolls this would entail if it's baseline across all power/terminator armoured models are undesirable, but It's probably the most "fair" in terms of impact against high and low end weaponry. It's the most consistent, because it adds a fourth stage to the filtering process instead of distorting results in one of the prior stages. 

 

Consistency doesn't necessarily mean they need to be resistant to taking damage. I can think of one alternative that could work with the fantasy of the army and allow models to be useful for longer: 

Shoots/Fights on death: DG aren't indestructible, but their bloated and swollen bodies and their insensitivity to pain allows them to continue fighting through wounds more grievous than other Astartes could endure. We could represent this with army-wide Fights/Shoots on death without robbing opponents of the effectiveness of their weapons, while still showing that the DG can endure even lethal wounds long enough to make one last attack before finally being put-down. This adds a bunch of extra process and slows down the game, but I think I like the balance it strikes between fantasy and efficacy. 

 

Given the above, I don't think there's an especially good option to make DG seem more "bulky" than other armies that doesn't either go too far, or skew in strange directions due to the limitations of using a D6 for every roll in the game. There just isn't that much granularity in the numbers to make a properly balanced solution that isn't something selective like a Stratagem or an Enhancement. 

[Dark Legionnare]

On 2/10/2025 at 2:41 PM, HeadlessCross said:

D1 weapons aren't the problem for Death Guard resilience, necessarily. 

 

The real problem is that toughness values and the To Wound Chart aren't being effectively used. I think most people would agree with me that Lasguns shouldn't wound regular Marines and Plague Marines at the same rate. The game needs to move to D12, but thats an unpopular belief unfortunately. 

I've convinced a lot of the shop guys to do "7th without the garbage" as I've coined it and tweaked. We've all been having an absolute blast. And in this vein, people LOVE the durability of PM's and nurgle stuff. They feel like proper Death Guard lore.  Guard guy wounding with 6's on lasguns is always smiling "Man, they're so hardy, but not insurmountable, I love it. This is what guardsmen shooting in PM's should feel like"

5+++ terminators piling out of landraider. Still can die to a lucky shot and FNP roll fail, but it's rewarding for them to feel like heavy firepower is needed to deal with bigger threats.

Anecdotal in this case, but the same message of "They just don't feel tough in 10th" is writ large here too.  I've also been a big proponent of D10 or D12 for years now too. Bud back in college rana couple test games with the former at 1000 points and it was tons of fun.

Edited February 26 by Dark Legionnare

[Dread]

Disgustingly resilience i.e. 5+ feel no pain. Fixed

[CastellanDeMolay]

On 3/12/2025 at 5:13 AM, Dread said:

Disgustingly resilience i.e. 5+ feel no pain. Fixed

As Thomas Sowell said "there are no solutions, only trade-offs". FNP is as effective against catastrophically powerful weapons as it is against small arms, which doesn't gel perfectly with the fantasy. Death Guard are supposed to be able to shrug off debilitating wounds, not instantly lethal ones. FNP is, by my reckoning, the least bad option currently, but changes to the core rules, like how damage is calculated or the range of variability in dice results, could make other options better. 

 

-1 Damage was bad because it provided protection from more powerful weapons, but not weaker ones. However, if damage was calculated as the difference between the target dice roll to wound and the final modified result of the roll then some small arms could punch up a bit more, increasing the relative value of a rule like this. 

Similarly, +1 Toughness doesn't mean a lot now because a 6 To Wound always succeeds, but on a larger dice that target score could be pushed upwards, either via a table or making the target score X+, plus or minus the difference between the attack's Strength and the target's Toughness. (Where X is the average roll rounded to the nearest significant figure)

 

The core problem I see with the current model of the game is that nothing is truly tough, because GW have removed restrictions on army building, enabling any and all kinds of weird skew lists, whilst simultaneously expanding the scope of the game to include ever larger and more powerful units, while not wanting to invalidate anyone's collection of D6. All of the weaker units (infantry) have been compressed somewhat in terms of the likelihood of being dealt damage to make room for the bigger tougher things, and to avoid some armies being unkillable due to having outlier high-Toughness values they've enabled everything to chip away at anything over the course of a game. Previous editions had a similar design problem, in that Troops were just bad units that could hold objectives, which essentially split the game in two, Troops sitting on objectives hoping to not die, and the real armies fighting each other. 

 

I for one do prefer the newer style of a more lethal game with more granularity in the damage model at the lower end, (Infantry Vs heavy infantry) compared with the older model of most models only having binary states of alive and dead due to their single wound, but where armour saves worked consistently or not at all due to the simplified Armour Piercing rules, which created a lower chance for models to be wounded, but almost every wound was fatal since only Characters and Monsters tended to have multiple wounds. There are however too many holdovers from previous editions for this to work elegantly. Mantic's Firefight hits a lot closer to the mark with their use of D8s, and their willingness to restrict force composition (Mandatory 1 Command unit, and each Troop units unlocks another Command or Specialist unit, and every two other units unlocks a Support unit) which prevents lists from skewing into absurdity in matched-play. 

 

FNP is honestly a bit of a band-aid over some pretty fundamental issues with the core design of the game. 

[Dr. Clock]

On 3/12/2025 at 1:13 AM, Dread said:

Disgustingly resilience i.e. 5+ feel no pain.

While agreeing that this would indeed achieve the objective of 'making PM tougher', I think it'd just be a bit of a drag from a play perspective in that you end up having to roll all multi-damage wounds separately, which is just going to slow things down even more. Basically I'd prefer something like a rez mechanic where the unit special rule is 'return 1 plague marine to this unit at the beginning of each player turn' or something so it's just cleaner from a rules perspective.

 

I'll still agree that it'd be nice to see something between Plague Marine and Terminators - Death Guard Chosen with 3W would be a cool non-Battleline unit, for instance, but I don't really favor cult marine line infantry units deviating too far from the basic CSM profile. 'Marines +1' is one thing... 'Marines +1 +1' will erode the game pretty quick.

 

So yeah - I understand that it seems like there's a big resilience problem when your lore is all about resilience and that just ends up as a flat +1T, but marines of all stripes can make the case for their game rules being 'underpowered' if going off lore alone. So this is less a DG problem and more a game symmetry problem. The game is going to start to fail as you get closer to situations where one side needs to bring 5 times the number of (infantry) minis as the other.

 

Cheers,

 

The Good Doctor.