One of my players is using a lascannon and my next mission includes a Hive Tyrant. So just trying to balans the mission and doing the math... (sens its the most logical way to try and kill the beast that way; with the cannon.)

Hive tyrant TB:15 Armor:10 and 120(!) wounds

Lascannon 6d10+10 (5,5x6+10=42) AP:10

42 damage on average minus the TB is 27 wounds per blast.

It means that the thing will probably be standing after 4 hits? and thats the strongest weapon in the game?

am I missing something? ...apart from the fact that there are other players doing ther part. But still somebody gota lure it out in the open, somebody distrakt the hords of termagants, somebody aply first aid to Gerneral von splunknikov and so on...

(sorry about the spelling by the way)

pee said:

Lascannons are not the strongest weapon in the game?

Hive Tyrants are hardcore?

Yeah - you don't want you boss battle being decided by one shot now do you.

Are you saying you want the Hive Tyrant to be taken down with a single shot?

6 dice are a lot, and you can roll some/any 10 ...and due to DW training you always automatically confirm righteous fury against aliens, so you can do even more damage. It´s not likely you can kill one HiveTirant with a lascannon shot but it´s not impossible.

Lascannon rolling 6 dice is a good chance to roll a 10 somewhere.

40k Junkie said:

It's actually quite high, you're looking at about a 46% chance of at least one 10 coming up when rolling 6 d10.

I wouldn't worry about it. I ran the adventure in the back of the core book, and when the Hive Tyrant showed up in the end scene, the librarian flipped his selector to hellfire rounds, and killed it in 2 rounds to the chest. Granted, he rolled RF six times on the first bullet, and only 4 times on the second, but even so, I told him not to bother rolling damage for the other 2 bullets that hit.

I win...Lord of Change one shotted by a space marine using a 5 round burst of Psycannon Bolts and 5 Righteous Furies on the first bullet, 2 on the second, and 3 on the third, then normal for the rest. 294 wounds to a 180 wound creature. I was very upset.

on a Hive Tyrant, just send it in with the Bonesword and watch them die.

My teams Dev just used a standard Heavy Bolter attack and took it in one round. Did the same thing to a Chaos Prince. Somehow i expected both to be more.......bullet resistant?

Don't use the Deathwatch Righteous Fury rule, it's absurd. How are GMs supposed to handle a game with 2 Devastators? Or 3?

As I see it, a lone Hive Tyrant normally should be an opponent for slightly higher ranked Marines. Otherwise you'll have to throw an army list at the kill-team by the time they reach rank 8. That's a bit overboard even for me.

Alex

almost all "baddies" die from a full burst from a devastator.

tbh there is little point using other weapons against the minions

xandarian2 said:

I'm not seeing this at all, except for extremely lucky dice. Otherwise how did a HeavyBolter deal 120pts ( in addition to the 19pts per hit needed to override armor and toughness) of damage in one round?

CptCaine said:

If by extremely lucky you mean hitting with all 10 rounds, on an enormous (+20) target, which seems to happen fairly often as far as I've seen. That's 30 damage dice, enough that three shots cause RF (and using the afformentioned ridiculous DW RF rules) that's three additional hits for 2d10+9 tearing with no reduction for Toughness and armour (as they have already been taken into account by the original shot) for on average about 63 points of damage (ignoring tearing).

You may also notice that you are rolling 9 dice just for the RF damage which is a fairly good chance of RF it's self...

As Alex said DW RF rules are ridiculous and I'd throw them out immediately.

Even without I can see that HB doing over half it's damage in one hit, so the rest of squad should be able to mop it up. The problem is It's balanced so a HB does damage on an average hit (even it's not much) but the shear number of dice rolled are going to cream it.

Face Eater said:

So let's calculate it through for the middle ground RF approach that someone here suggested and that I adopted: re-rolling only all the 10s with RF, adding the re-rolls to damage instead.

Under that rule each D10 doesn't do 5.5 damage average but roundabout 5.5 + 5.5/10 + 5.5/100 + ... (ignoring having to confirm RF here) damage which should be about what? 6.1111111? So under that rule each damage die does additional 0.6 damage. Not too much.

Average damage is then 22.2 not accounting for tearing. I would round that up generously to 26 points of damage on average with Pen 6. If we assume that all 10 shots hit then the damage inflicted will be 26 - (15 + 10 - 6) = 7 per hit. That is 70 points of damage. Not too shabby. Reducing wounds to 0 is doable even with a less susccessful hit.

But can you kill the tyrant too? The tyrant will have a net soak of 19. On the explosive crit table you should do at least 5 to kill, meaning you need to inflict 28 on a roll. Also doable.

And if your kill-team has two devastators (will you want to not permit that as a GM?) the hive tyrant becomes swiss cheese tyrant.

I still consider nerfing the Heavy Bolter. In 40K, the bolter has Rapid Fire and the heavy bolter Heavy 3. So one could argue that the HB ROF should be lower. I do not recommend decreasing the damage much because if you add D10 to plasma and meltagun you have a damage progression comparable to S in the TT. Keep in mind the effect of a single HB hit, a single Plasma hit, a single melta hit up to a single lascannon hit. Compare the damages in DW.

So how about a ROF of 7 or (if you really want to limit max damage of the HB) of 6 instead? It would be still be 1.5 x Bolter Full-Auto ROF and 3 x Bolter Semi-Auto ROF. Would fit the TT well. In that case, even on a great attack, the tyrant would get hit for 42 points of damage (not accounting for special ammo). Not too little either given the tyrant can't dodge. If we assume a WS of 50 and total modifiers of the attack to reach the max cap of +50, there's a 50 percent chance of maximum number of shots hitting.

Still very deadly, I'd say.

Alex

A Hive Tyrant is not the end-all monster of Tyranids. The average carnifex is much tougher to kill (and very hard to keep dead, in some cases). If they really need a challenge, pit them against a Heirodule or Heirophant.

In any case, as long as the fight is entertaining and exciting, how fast an enemy dies doesn't really matter. Nerfing rules because you don't like them more often than not just results in frustrated players. Try improving the quality of the encounter instead of hamstringing the weapons and the Marines; you'll have more satisfied players and more interesting set pieces.

Direach said:

Not my experience.

Direach said:

No, I think it's necessary to smooth some of the rough edges of the system and to customize it, so that I can stage the encounters the way I want to.

Alex

Ahem for Hive Tyrants, all you need is your trusty Heavy Bolter. +20 for auto fire, +10 range, + 20 or something for size. You are bound to score multiple hits on the poor thing and eat through his wounds like there is no tomorrow.

Use the Lascannon when you are faced against a Tank.

The Righteous Fury rules for Deathwatch are still the same for rogue trader are they not? The only differance is the fact that space marines have Ballistics Skill up the wazoo compounded by the fact that most enemies they face are simply throwing + modifiers at them. Fighting a hive tyrant? Please- have +30 to hit. Full Auto? Have another 20. Short range? +10. so +60 to hit. This is going to result in ANY marine who rolled average on their BS to automatically hit. Give the bolter three dice, rather than in RT where you had 1d10 damage, Tearing, and suddenly the Righteous Fury system get to be a little too insane.

edit: someone already mentioned the amount of + mods

This is going to result in plenty of hits for ranged. The problem is not only soley due to ranged and melee can pull this off too- especially with talents like flesh render- however ranged attacks still seem more problematic.

The only way to bypass this is to really throw in some negative modifiers. Fighting at long range is just suicide when trying to run up to a marine squad, but things like fog, snow, smoke, and darkness are the only chances to throw the tyrant a bone. Too bad the space marines though ahead, and get the dark sight trait to eliminate darkness from their Auto-senses helmet.

Scrapping the RF system in favour of DH's seems like a good place to start if you're going to tweak rules. With a heavy bolter there's just too many chances to roll insane damage, especially combined with marine BS, the many modifiers to hit and the auto-confirm from Deathwatch training versus xenos.

If your players protest to the DH righteous fury change, there's nothing wrong with having your enemies rolling out with some heavy bolters. Traitor guard heavy weapons teams, chaos space marines with heavy bolters, an eldar shurikan platform. These might make for more fearsome enemies....

ak-73 said:

2d10 tearing is actually about 13.475 damage. If you RF you add another 2d10+10 tearing (23.475 damage above any toughness or armor, and you have a 17.1% chance to increase this even further by another 23.475, etc.), RAW. Makes it much better than even what you figured out. Don't even look at hellfire rounds with a storm bolter.

Mostly why people are saying the quick and dirty way to fix is to use the RF from DH/RT.

Suijin said:

The RF from RT is the same as deathwatch. It wasn't as bad as most shots would only roll 1d10 for damage, possibly with tearing. Now we have 2d10's for damage with tearing. Now- do NPC's Righteous fury? Because now- a horde tossing out 3d10+2 damage, with a righteous fury has a chance of simply knocking off half of a space marines wounds.

Traditionally, enemies need to be particularly important to RF (theres a trait called touched by the fates that they technically should have). Of course, this is purely GM discretion.