Is there seriously no Bolt Weapon Mastery/Expertise or am I missing something. It's late, and I may or may not be drunk, but the Weapon Specialist in our group tonight was saying there isn't a Bolt Weapon choice, and as he is without a doubt a mega-turbo-power gamer, I believe him, and then I went and thumbed through Hammer of the Emperor.....how on earth did they miss an entire type of weapon, and maybe the most iconic 40k weapon?

Because prior to the 2014 codex bolt weapons were unavailable to guardsmen except for bolt pistols.

Heavy Bolters were always extant.

I refuse to believe that this is related to TT, the boltgun is in the Only War book and the mechanics for a weapon specialist to get one are pretty simple (Our guys play in a regiment where the preferred basic weapon is the Boltgun, so the weapon specialist took one). Add on top of that these rules have been bouncing around for awhile in Deathwatch and Black Crusade, seems a bit silly there isn't a mastery/expertise for them.

My question becomes: Is there not a Expertise/Mastery for a good reason balance wise? Or is this just a oversight copy/paste error?

I don't own Black crusade so I don't know if these mastery/expertise talents exist in those books or DH 2.0

I honestly think they just haven't bothered developing any such yet.

Well, you could take Bolter Drill from BC. Give it the Ballistic Skill and Defense aptitudes.

Nope there is no bolt expertise/mastery, it will probably be included in the next book with commisar, psycher and storm trooper advanced specialities, I just hope they will announce it soon, my sgt./commander could use something for his bolt gun.

Heavy Bolters were always extant.

Heavy bolters were, but I think the talents apply mainly to small arms (?).

Boltguns are not a Guard weapon (or weren't until earlier this year!). You can also get bows and arrows as standard kit, but there aren't any talents for that either.

Bows and arrows count as solid projectile IIRC. So yeah, there's talents for that.

Bows and arrows count as solid projectile IIRC. So yeah, there's talents for that.

AFAIK, Bows and Arrows count as Low-Tech.

The system is a bit wonky and they have never really gotten the primitive side of things down properly.

Ah, I think they were SP in Black Crusade.

Ah, I think they were SP in Black Crusade.

Yeah, in Pre-BC, they were Primitive, in BC they came up with the "Primary" idea for previously Primitive melee weapons, and made the Primitive ranged weapons SP (or similar). In Only War, we're back to the Primitive for all, but it's called Low-Tech instead.

Really, I still can't wrap my head around what they're trying to do.