Yes, techpriests are powerful. Probably the most powerful class short of a well-optimised psyker. Techpriests are quite capable of acquiring TB 7, power armour, and 15 limbs full of guns and industrial attachments.

No, they are not that powerful as OP's example. The techpriest is getting unbalanced advantges in terms of vastly superior equipment and heavy rules-bending (if not outright snapping) in terms of just what sort of punishment they can dish out. See all those earlier posts for how many bonus attacks they should get. Also note that since Step Aside (which they may or may not qualify for now) only allows a Dodge action to be performed with the bonus reaction, the techpriest's total reactions are:

1 Dodge action
plus
1 Dodge OR Parry OR Logis Implant OR 1 Dendrite attack (offhand so no swift/lightning attacks) OR 1 other thing which would take a reaction that may or may not actually exist.

I hate to sound authoritarian but that's all there really is on the issue. If your GM is happy disregarding that he should do so knowing full well that the rules do not work that way and he is stepping into his own interpretation, which is not the baseline all players come into the game expecting. Also, favouritism. Just putting that out there.

I have been checking through the rulebook to verify all of this and cant find anything that allows Mechadendrites to be used as off hand weapons. The only thing i did find was that (in the errata) the Ballistic Mechadendrite (only) can be fired using a reaction - which indicates to me that the others cant be used in this way.

By this calculation, and by the fact that the Techpriest doesnt have any 2 weapon fighting skills, am i right in assuming that using lightning attack can only be used with any one weapon she has (so Omnissian Axe OR Breacher, etc?

S.K.

And i realised right after that any one handed weapon can be an off hand weapon

Doh! - why is there no edit function!!!

S.K.

Solomon Kane said:

That sounds correct. If that Tech Priest doesn't have any of the Two weapon skills or ambidextrous then she's stuck with using one weapon per round. She can also use a ballistic mechadendrite with a reaction. That's it. You're correct; melee weapons on mechadendrites don't get any special bonuses.

If she was possessed by a daemon in the past, she will be again. It's probably still in her. Threat level Malleus Majoris. Jettison it into space from a docking bay the next time you're in orbit and about to warp elsewhere.

Alternately, if the GM isn't listening to the players and doesn't seem to give a ****, find someone else to step up to the role and start up a new game if you aren't having fun. This seems like far more than a game mechanics issue.

One thing I learnt when I began to play Dark Heresy, you don't wanna go to combat. Right now we are a techpriest (me, quite surprisingly with the Sollex background from the Inquisitor's handbook) and a Cadian guardsman (the psyker is the GM's character, for the times he is playing instead of GM'ing). We played two mayor adventures, and I managed in both of them to fire weapons only narratively (it also helped the fact that we have an inquisitorial badge, and few repairs in showing it when the timing seems right).

Are techpriests overpowered? Well... ask yourself a question: you are in a spaceship with thousands of people aboard, and the only ones who really understand how the computers (excuse me, cogitators) works are the techpriests. It's not because they are techpriests, but because no one else have such a greater access to lost knowledge about technology (I "took over" more than one Star Destroyer in previous Star Wars campaings. Computer skills inside a computer-controlled artificial environment tend to be unforgiving... And you know, Thrawn already has a solution: turn of the **** computer if you thin a hacker is on board!!).

Are techpriests useless in investigation missions? That depends. A lot of information is kept in paper, you know, and that means no hacking allowed. But not everyone can afford to use all that space for archives. And in the worst case, a Techpriest can be the "mission operator", or even the support team (they can be good drivers, after all).

The first thing you have to do with your character is to think outside the book: are you a guardsmen? Then you have "friends": all the guardsmen in the imperium have to be a little friendly to each other, because they are not going to get much friendship from the comissars, you know XD. That means, vets are also friendly to you... and that means an edge in investigation. You need to define your "territory", and trying to play in it, instead of playing outside of it. Are you going to a social event as a tech-priest and you have no chance of avoiding it? Then observe everybody, and give short answers when asked. Are you an adept? Then by all means, don't go to the catacombs where you know there are geneastealers (you might get less XP because you are avoiding a risk... but you should get extra for roleplaying: an adept's place is not killing stuff with his hands, but telling the killers where to strike and the enemie's tactics).

And of course, if the favoured player is the girlfriend of the GM, save your character sheets and run to another table before you all begin to hate her and look down on him.