In the other 40k games twohanded weapons are somewhat underwhelming, compared to dual wielding.
In BC that seems to get even worse.

Most two-handed weapons are unbalanced or even unwieldy, making lightning attack impossible. So on top of their other drawbacks you have a worse chance to hit someone who tries to parry and can land fewer hits if someone doesn't parry or dodge.

Those other drawbacks I am speaking of are:

• Can not be quickdrawn
• Can not be used with dual wielding
• Can not be used to parry or are worse at it

They do slightly more damage but not enough to set of the drawbacks.

For example there is a 2handed poweraxe (2D10+4 pen6) and a 1handed poweraxe (1D10+7 pen6) in this case both unbalanced.
The Powersword (1D10+5 pen5) is balanced.

So while the first two seem cool choices if you don't have lightning attack or aim to use a lot of all out attacks for most melee oriented chars the powersword seems much better, considering lightning attack.

Could making unbalanced weapons harder to parry (in addition to the penalty to parry yourself) even that out?
Or do you think it is balanced as it is?

For me at least having two melee weapons, one with lightning attack, one with a single additional attack seems much stronger than having one big weapon with only one attack (two with furyous assault).

What's the difference between lightning attack from other games and BC ?

@Lucius

In BC, Lightning attack works like Full Auto: You make a single attack roll (IIRC at a slight penalty) and get one hit per DoS.

@Topic

At least in the previous games, my experience was rather different: With dual-wielding, you gain one attack per round, but "pay" for that with a -10 to all attacks and a few hundred XP in talents. On the other hand side, a great weapon has a flat D10 more damage than most other weapons, likely inflicting a higher total than the one additional attack would have.

By the way, what's the problem with being unable to parry when you can still dodge?

They do slightly more damage but not enough to set of the drawbacks.

Regarding the two-handed power weapon and the power sword, I'd call 5.5 damage per strike more than "slightly", especially when you take the nearly doubled amount of Criticals into account.

In BC you can not use lightning attack with unbalanced and unwieldy weapons, that's a big factor.

And when I played a melee guardsman in DH I never came across a greatweapon worth sacrificing my second hand. You can do too many things with your off hand.

In most hard battles I could prepare for I equipped a chainsword shield combo, sometimes using the shield as additional weapon.
In others I used my hand flamer to decimate the enemies before finishing the rest with the chainsword.

I guess it really depends on how big a Str. Bonus you have.
If you have the choice between 1 Attack at 2D10+7 or a lightning attack at 1D10+8 the first will probably win.
But if it is 1 attack at 2D10+13 or a lightning attack with 1D10+14 I'd go with the latter, because the higher the static damage gets the less relevant is the additional D10.

And that's not even counting the offhand possibilities.

Refering to dodge instead of parry: Sure you can dodge. But if you are a melee char then your dodge will be significantly lower than your parry in most cases. More so since it is now a skill that can be bought at +20, too.

But if you like greatweapons and don't see the drawbacks as such, even better.

And when I played a melee guardsman in DH I never came across a greatweapon worth sacrificing my second hand. You can do too many things with your off hand.

I totally agree with the last sentence - however, at least with reliable weapons, you can usually afford to carry the greatsword in your offhand, squeeze off a few shots with your las-/SP-/bolt-/whateverpistol and then just drop it when it comes to melee.

I'd rather get a potential 11-20 attacks every round from Warp Time than 1 attack that does an average of 5.5 extra, myself...

First off, I believe that in BC Swift Attack allows additional hits up to your WS Bonus just like Lightning attack. So it is easier to get the hits with Lightning attack, but not necessarily more damage witha good roll or sufficient bonuses. Further, lightning attacks cannot be done while charging, but swift attack can, so much of the time that crucial first round of attacks will look the same regardless, meaning the chap with the big hammer wins the first round damage-wise. Additionally, I believe that crushing blow gives half your WS Bonus as additional damage rather than a flat +2. This is a good change, but scales better with multiple attacks. Consider giving full WS Bonus to two handed weapons. I am doing this for ranged in my campaign, with slower firing weapons getting full BS bonus from Mighty Shot and high RoF ones only getting half as per RAW.

Secondly, Warp Time is kinda broken. I was so pleased that they had managed to hone down the number of psychic powers in DW enough that psykers were not unreasonably better than everyone else by rank 4 and a large part of that was the greater penalties for sustaining powers relative to DH/Asc but even more important was that the power selection was limited from character to character and overall. This meant there wasn't a power for every situation. Too many powers with poor editing inevitably results in stuff like Warp Time. Combined with Crushing Blow and Swift Attack and enough melee talents you will in fact land 11-20 hits with a force weapon, which are already plenty strong enough. They really need to get their act together and stop writing game-breaking powers.

Yeah Warptime needs a BIG nerf (sigh, learn to balance these powers FFG).

My experience in DH was that great weapons owned face compared to dual wielding, at least at lower levels.

You can still use Unbalanced weapons while doing Swift attack which makes it almost a fair deal compared to using the lighter weapons with Lightning attack (although the lightning attack bit is still more powerful).

Ofcourse here is the big question, according to Swift attack (and I suspect Lightning attack) you can not make 2 swift attacks/lightning attacks if you dual wield (but you can make 1 extra attack with your offhand), however reading the text for fighting with 2 weapons seems to contradict this. If you can not make 2 lightning attacks then they seem somewhat balanced, but if you can make 2 lightning attacks then there is no reason to ever fight any other way than dual wielding.

I agree the text is confusing, but I would go with only one lightning attack as it seems far more balanced. I did sort of like the idea of multiple arms granting storm to the lightning attack, a house rule I saw suggested somewhere on the forums.

What does warp time do?

Jaedar said:

Its a psychic power/spell that gives you Unnatural Weapons skill, Agility and Balistic skill = your Psy rating.

As usual this power is fine if you are Psy rating 2 but (also as usual) it goes totally bonkers at psy rating 6+ (or so), because at that level you are certain to score a ton of hits if you use full auto or Lightning attack and dodge a ton of attacks against you as well so once again a psyker is a much better fighter than even the most tricked out melee character.

Im gonna suggest to our GM that he nerf this power.

How does Unnatural Weapon skill and Ballistics work? Say you get +4 to it how does that actually affect your weapon skill roll?

nethru said:

It doesnt increase you skill, so you dont get a higher chance of succeeding but:

"whenever someone
with an Unnatural Characteristic succeeds on a Test utilizing that
Characteristic, they gain a number of bonus Degrees of Success
equal to half of their Unnatural Characteristic."

So with Unnatural Weapon Skill (6) you would get 3 bonus degrees of success if you hit with your attack, with lightning attack that equals 3 extra attacks that hit (to a max number of hits equal to your weapon skill).

Crate said:

Well thanks to Dark Heresy and Dark Heresy Ascension we know how the Emperor, despite "just" being a human psyker, was capable of whooping any given primarch...

Deinos said:

Indeed.

Psykers should be extremely powerful, but they should also be on a razor's edge; I like the (now-official) mechanic of not letting Fate/Infamy to be burned to save your Psyker from Perils.

Deinos said:

Well there is a difference between being the major character in the fluff (and basically a god) and just another member of the PC coven/squad/team. If a psyker is just as good at fighting as a khorne worshipping character (and then able to do alot of other different things) then there is something wrong IMO, it just leads people to make psykers simply because they are better. The dangers of being a psyker are still not severe enough IMO.

Regarding the new mechanic where you cant use infamy to get out of Perils of the Warp situations, well you can still get talents that do it and you can still use powers fettered (which shouldnt even be in the game IMO) so Perils of the Warp are still reduced alot.

I dont mind psykers being powerful but I dont want a team of nothing but psykers simply because they are the best and with the way Lightning Attack and Warptime work that might just be how its going to work (at least for combat).

This would be my suggestion for how it works (or is supposed to work):

You can Swift Attack with weapons that are NOT Unwieldy.

You can Lightning Attack with weapons that are NOT Unbalanced or Unwieldy.

When you dual wield you can make a Swift Attack or Lightning Attack with one of your weapons and a regular Standard Attack with the other weapon.

So, the optimal combination of weapons when using Lightning Attack would be something like Power Sword/Force sword in your mainhand and a Powerfist in your offhand (much like we see ALOT of spacemarined being armed in the tabletop game).

Ofcourse if you want to reduce the penalty from using 2 weapons to 0 instead of -10 (lets assume you have Ambidextrous) you pick Bladedancer and use 2 Power Swords, not quite the damage output of a Power Sword+Power fist combo (on the surface at least) but its easier to hit (which would give you another hit with your mainhand weapon in most cases so probably more damage as well).

Allowing 2 x Lightning Attack is just asking for 2x Force Sword death to everyone in the game.

I always saw lightning attack as main hand only. Two-Weapon fighters just get the luxary of hitting once with their offhand.

Dual wield force sword guys would still be insane even if they can only lightning attack with first hand

While I think it is silly and unbalanced, the two-weapon fighting rules begining on pg 243 are pretty clear. If I am a chainsword / bolt-pistol wielding loonie, there is nothing stopping me from using lightning attack on one victim in mellee, then firing a semi-auto burst at his little friend who is out of arms reach.

I'm personaly feeling more terrified of the dual lightning attack lightning claws than force-swords.

Edit: forgot to mention, don't forget that the extra damage is a psychic power, so it can invoke perils (go on, push all those attacks, I dare you!) and be countered by certain things (like 9 out of 10 Khornate champions). Imagine the look of surprise on the dual force sword lightning attacking psyker when the frothing loonie with a pair of chainaxes and red power armour ignores his psyker-uber-mellee-death-ray-of-doom!

Hygric said:

Yes the rules on PG 243 are pretty clear, however the text describing the Swift Attack talent says the exact opposite so its by no means clear what the correct rules are supposed to be.

According to Swift Attack talent (which says Lightning Attack several times just to increase the confusion even more) you can not make 2 Swift Attack / Lightning Attack actions in the same round even if you are dual wielding.

The two-weapon fighting rules on pg 243 says its possible to make 2 Swift Attack / Lightning Attacks actions in the same round.

Ofcourse common sense doesnt necesarily have any place here but 2 x lightning attack are fairly silly.

So the confusion is total, I hate to say it but its beginning to be par for the course for WH40K roleplaying books. They are good, very good but the rules are messy!

Agreed about messy rules!

Dealing with two-weaponfight w/ambidexterity and doing lightning attack with both weapons wouldn't that give the attacker a -20 to attack with each weapon? -10 for two-weapon fighting and -10 for lightning attack? Giving up a lot of attack power there just to use both weapons with lightning attack it seems. Swift would just be -10 with two-weapon fighting correct?

I think i'm going to use the old rules and what the talent states. Main hand can only use swift/lightning attack and off hand can only do a standard attack be it melee/ranged so single hit or shot. Keep it simple and ability won't be super over powered.

nethru said:

yeah, unless you have bladedancer which reduces the penalty by -10 again, so you just have the -10 for lightning attack...

I think i'll stick to good-old 1 standard attack with off-hand too.

tarmonius said:

Or Sidearm if you want to go blade and gun.