Salutations fellow Inquisitors!

I was hoping you could help me with a small dilemma I have. It concerns the above mentioned Talents: Swift Attack, and Lighting Attack.

Now, I've been running a DH campaign for about six months I believe, and my players have reached their 4th and 5th ranks, meaning some of them have the Swift Attack Talent, and one of them just aquired the Lightning Attack Talent. I was really hoping to get some input on the subject. What do you think of these Talents?

I was thinking of "removing" these two Talents from play, because I'm afraid the will complicate the game. My first worry is that they allow a single player to dish out enough damage to slay a Daemonhost in one turn. My other worry is they will slow down combat. With everyone taking two or three attacks per turn, every round will go really slow, and the same player probably isn't going to get a second turn anyway due to the aforementioned reason.

My question is: Am I right to worry about these things? How has these Talents affected your game? Is there any "balancing" issue which would screw some of the players over if I removed these from play?

I am so VERY grateful for any input you can give me! Thank you in advance!

/KoS

Honestly, I don't see a problem. By spending XP, a melee user can take a full action to swing twice/thrice. For no XP, an autogun wielder can get +20 to hit and the possibility of ten hits at once. An autogun does 1d10+3, a sword does 1d10+SB, which is 1d10+3 for an average strength score. To get into melee, you've got to wade through enemy gunfire to start with, and things that don't shoot tend to be specced for melee pretty heavily.

I'm not sure where you're getting "can kill a daemonhost in one round" from; daemonhosts have TBs of 8+, so even a wimpy daemonhost shrugs off 50% of damage rolls from standard weapons. They have 30 wounds. Now if you've got them running around dual-wielding force swords, that's a different story, but at that point, it's not the talents that are killing them that fast.

Swift and Lightning attack are the two talents that make mid- and late-game melee competitive when others lug bolters around. Removing them cripples any character that relies on melee.

Also, always remember that in order to smite foes, your lightning attacker first has to get into melee. If you really fear for your daemonhosts, just put an ablative layer of meat (aka cultists) around them.

And don't forget goodies like Fear and the Daemonic Presence which make the attacks more difficult to land. I agree with the others, Swift and Lightning attacks are there to even out with semi and full-auto. WFRP gives characters multiple attacks in melee, but it doesn't break the game. Also, it's a Full action to use. Enemies can always use actions like Maneuver or Take Down, etc to force the PC to use up a half action (getting up, moving back into striking range, etc) preventing them from spending a Full action to Swift/Lightning attack.

A good one is for the enemy to make a standard attack, then maneuver the PC one square away. Now the PC has to use a half action to move back adjacent in order to make a melee attack, then only has half-action to attack with.

If you're worried about it just give the enemies more wounds I.E. "What do you mean its not dead i just did 32 wounds to it" GM "well it just clawed your face do it again then we will talk"