all bolt weapons went down, melta and plasma went up. thoughts?

Arguyle said:

Result of complaints here (and internal play-testing). Bolters were overpowered before to the point where Heavy Bolter were one-size-fits-all solutions.
The second is that after they created vehicle stats they must have found melta/plasma penetration/damage wanting. The original stats were not good enough to hurt vehicles seriously and if you were to downgrade vehicle armour then a Heavy Bolter with Mighty Shot and Kraken rounds would again pose a problem, shredding things like Rhinos front armour with ease.

So all-in-all a sensical change. What was not so good was making the Bolter semi-auto. A lot of people have adopted the new damage stats but kept all the old ROFs.

Alex

Our GM has recently started using the errata weapon stats and they seem to be better balanced overall. If you work out the average damage for a Boltgun then I don't think that there's a lot of difference though the fact that your rolling less dice obviously means that the likely-hood of a 'Righteous Fury' roll is lessoned.

The only change that our GM is thinking of making is to give Bolt weapons (with the exception of the Heavy Bolter) their old Rate of Fire back which I think is a wise choice.

Suddenly there's a reason to take other weapon choices, lol.

The new weapon stats alone are comletely nonsense!

Even if they balance all weapons a little bit more the new ROF makes hitting a lot harder, so a lot of people change the new ROF back to the old, but with some Bolter Drill a normal Bolter isn't much inferior to a Heavy Bolter now, because the HB rarley hits with all 10 Bolts.

The whole situation changes if you use the new rules from Black Crusade. Now you can do Supressing Fire with Semi-Auto, and the new Bolter Drill rules give you one additional Degree of Success on Semi- and Auto-Fire (if you hit), of course it doesn`t grant you an increase of the ROF anymore, but this was stupid from the start, at least for full-Auto. This combined with the new Semi- and Auto-Fire Rules solves most Weapon Problems.

Oh, I forgot Swift and Lightning Attack, which now works like Semi- and Auto-Fire.

Of course the Bolters aren't true to the fluff (no 4-Round-Burst), but with the BC-rules the errata-weapon-stats make the game more balanced. Maybe FFG will publish new Rulebooks based on the BC-rules, but in the meantime my group will combine both rulesets.

Makes hitting a lot harder?

In what world do we live in where Marines have any trouble shooting anything? The last game we played had Marines usually needing 90's and 80's to hit things. There are enough special rules and modifiers (range, size of target, etc.) that giving Full-Auto fire to Bolters was unnecessary.

BYE

Switching Semi and Full Auto bonuses would have been better imho because it would have been a minimum solution. The greater difference simply increases the inter-system confusion for me.

Alex

ak-73 said:

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Everyone complains about parts of the rules they don't like, and want them changed... but when they get changed, people complain that the old stuff they had isn't as compatible with the new stuff as they wanted it to be.

Simply put, you can't effectively allow the rules to evolve while simultaneously remaining absolutely compatible with previous iterations of those rules - compromise must be made either on the side of developing and refining the ruleset or on the side of inter-version compatibility.

Switching the semi- and full-auto bonuses would have been a half-arsed change. The BC changes to full- and semi-auto don't just tweak to-hit chances, they alter the dynamics of combat by allowing greater variety of action and a wider range of meaningful choices from round to round... rather than just "stand still shooting until everything's dead, because nothing else works as effectively".

N0-1_H3r3 said:

I'm not damning anyone, only stating that I would have prefered a minimal impact change. That said, I would have to test the switch of bonuses in order to gage its effects.

Also evolution is a tricky thing - sometimes it's a step backwards. I can't comment on the merits of the new system. I just feel that the whole of 40K RP is getting a bit patchy now.

All I am saying.

Alex