Hello all,

The developers have posted their weekly update ! Please use this thread if you wish to discuss its contents.

Thank you for your continued support.

Love the Sound Constitution update and the Common Lore update.


So this will be the fifth week in a row I will keep at it: VARIABLE SETTINGS FOR LASGUN AND PISTOLS!!! (please)

The changes made seem reasonable but its mostly stuff that I wouldn't have noticed as something that needs fixing. Two things I'd really like to see within this beta.

• Variable Lasgun Settings
• Vehicle rebalancing

The latter one is hugely important since right now most imperial vehicles are nigh indestructible even with powerful anti tank weapons (see link in my signature).

Yes, huzzah for the new Sound Constitutions and Common Lore.

However, I'm not sure what I think of the medicae changes. Those are big .

I'm not sure if it was done to clarify the rules or to make them more lenient. I really dislike the 24 hour timer on first aid. It seems a bit too gamey. I feel any new wound should be able to have first aid performed on it. I can see why they put in the 24 hour timer though, since now it can be performed each day (although extended care is more effective).

I do like that they seem to heal faster, as that was a real session killer sometimes. Still, it feels a bit too effective. "You were nearly chopped in half soldier, but we got you all stapled back together and you should be good to go in 20 minutes."

Not bad, not bad. Love the Sound Constitution change, and Sanctioned Psykers getting their Best Craftsmanship staff.

I agree with the others on Variable Setting Lasguns, however. And I still would very, VERY much like the Storm Trooper to get Common Craftsmanship Storm Trooper Carapace either instead of or as a second option to Good Craftsmanship Light Carapace.

I'd like to see Medicae rules address the issue of someone besides the casualty treating the Blood Loss critical. Because it is possible to have someone else help bandage you, but the rules seem to fail to address that possibility.

Vehicle changes that have been discussed at length need to happen. They're just too hard to take out.

Variable Lasgun settings. Potentially add Pen rating to the humble lasgun and frag grenade.

Storm Trooper is largely inefficient and currently is optimized for melee combat. Consider swapping Offence for Finesse, or dropping Weapon Skill for Leadership or Perception or something. He also needs his armor back.

Also throwing in my usual request for Valkyrie and Tauros stats.

Plushy said:

I believe HMBC (who wrote the Vehicle rules) said that that wouldn't happen, due to having to keep the size of that section down.

Plus, wouldn't the Valkyrie then require the aircraft rules to be included?

MILLANDSON said:

They have to leave something for the supplements after all.

We need to rejigger the Master Chirurgen talent now that Heavily Wounded no longer requires a long narrative halt to heal; that was sort of all that Talent did, after all, and my group's Medic decided not to buy it now specifically because it's no longer needed with the alterations to healing.

That said, thank you for the alterations to healing. It's going to help the Medic a lot that getting knocked down to Heavily Wounded doesn't turn First Aid into a simple band-aid now, and as a GM, I am going to have a much easier time now that I don't have to make a PC take weeks to recover if they take a heavy hit. It might've been realistic, but it was very narratively inconvenient!

Also, it would seem the usefulness of Hardy has been decreased. Perhaps it should be made a tier 2 talent now? All it seems to do now is remove a -10 penalty for the medicae check.

Musclewizard said:

Musclewizard said:

This, very yes. I thought the BC system was a good step forward. It lacked a bit of actual oomph though; cost way too high for what little extra it gave, even if/when combined with stuff like an overcharge pack. The basic settings of Las weapons are effectively 'high efficiency' or 'low' setting, what you use on grots or when you need to give suppression a few hours.

Was rather surprised to see it removed instead of boosted up a bit. Gotta at least make Las a proper choice instead of wholly ineffective against so much, ya know?

I've got to say, the medicae changes are puzzling. First Aid being almost equally effective unless the patient is deep into the criticals and the 24 hour cooldown totally changes its utility. Why would anyone bother with Extended Rest now unless they're outright crippled, given that First Aid takes a few minutes to perform at most and can be used every day? There's a lower chance of success, sure, but even a vaguely experienced medicae can potentially get someone back on their feet in a day or two. After two sessions of play my group's medic has an effective Medicae skill of 68 (Int 48, Medicae +10, Master Chirurgeon) which is boosted up to 88 if the Medi-Kit is used. Why heal 1 wound a day (or 2 with a Master Chirurgeon watching over you) when you can recover much quicker with a good First Aid roll or two?

The medi-kit itself needs to be addressed as well. As is it provides a flat +20 bonus to all medicae tests. I've personally been only allowing this bonus for First Aid, but if it affects extended care then the aforementioned medic will be unable to fail an extended care test unless he rolls a critical failure (or I impose situational penalties). Furthermore, once he picks up the Medica Auxilia comrade talent he can treat a potentially unlimited number of patients without penalty. That last issue has been in there since the beta first came out and the matter of when the Medica-Kit's bonus applies has been a bugbear since Dark Heresy but as it is Medicae is very, very powerful now.

I'm not sure why these changes were needed. First Aid was already very useful to begin with, allowing minor wounds to be patched up with relative ease while being unable to completely remedy heavy and critical injuries. Some form of clear limit on First Aid's usage was definitely needed, but the 24 hour cooldown seems artificial and impedes Extended Care's utility. The system I was using is that any individual can only have First Aid performed on them once until they're wounded again, and even then First Aid can only mend the wounds caused by that new source of damage. The utility of Master Chirurgeon has also been impacted, though it's still a useful talent, though Hardy is now far less useful. While the squad is out in the field becoming Heavily Injured is simply no longer that big a deal.

Snidesworth said:

Probably because that's a lot of data to track for each player (whether each individual Wound they have is normal, damaged, or "treated") and makes treating injuries a lot more math-heavy than it needs to be. In general the system has been moving to be more streamlined in general, and this seems a step in the same direction. It might need to be refined more, but in general I prefer a system like this over one where you need to be tracking each individual wound for each individual player.

No need to treat each individual wound, just keep track of when the patient was last treated and how much damage they've taken since then. Example:

Parker gets shot in the chest twice with a lasgun, the shots dealing 2 and 3 damage respectively for a total of 5 points of damage. Jericho attempts to patch him up but fails; those wounds remain. Later on Parker is struck by a piece of shrapnel from a frag grenade that deals 2 damage to him. This time Jericho passes his First Aid test when he treats Parker's injures and heals those two wounds. Even though Jericho's Intelligence Bonus is 4 he can't recover the wounds he failed to treat earlier. He'll have to resort to Extended Care to mend those injuries.

If he fails, none of his patients improve beyond their natural rate
of healing. Further, he must choose a number of patients under his care
equal to his Degrees of Failure, starting with the most gravely injured
(first from among those who are Critically Damaged, then those who
are Heavily Damaged, and then finally those who are only Lightly
Damaged). Each of these patients must make a Challenging (+0)
Toughness Test or suffer one point of Damage per Degree of Failure,
not reduced my Armour or Toughness. If this results in any Critical
Damage, the patient dies.”

So… fail by just one DoS and it's very likely that one of your critical patients dies since you have to choose them first? The safest recourse would then be to allow Critical patients to heal on their own as there's no chance of their condition worsening.

Could someone make a table of how people heal with and without medical care right now? I think I've lost overview…

Aaaand throwing another voice into Variable Lasguns and Common Storm Trooper Carapace .

Lightly Wounded - 1 wound per day normally, Toughness Bonus in wounds per day if resting properly.

Heavily Wounded - No healing normally, 1 wound per day if resting properly.

Critically Wounded - No healing normally, 1 wound per day if resting properly and they pass a Challenging (+0) Toughness test.

Lightly Wounded - 1 wound per day normally, Toughness Bonus in wounds per day if resting properly.

Heavily Wounded - No healing normally, 1 wound per day if resting properly.

Critically Wounded - No healing normally, 1 wound per day if resting properly and they pass a Challenging (+0) Toughness test.

And with a succesful Medicae test that becomes…

Lightly Wounded - 2*Toughness Bonus in wounds per day if resting properly + DoS + consecutive days of Extendded care.

Heavily Wounded - 2 wound per day if resting properly + DoS + consecutive days of Extendded care.

Critically Wounded - 2 wound per day if resting properly and they pass a Challenging (+0) Toughness test + DoS + consecutive days of Extendded care.

That about right?

KommissarK said:

Hardly is less useful with regards to First Aid, but it still makes a character heal much faster in the long-term - amongst other things, a character with Hardy can always recover wounds naturally (characters who are heavily or critically injured can't), and recovers TB wounds per day with rest… before you consider extended care from a Medicae.

Certainly, Hardy's bonus to normal healing rates is still useful, but is it tier 3 useful? I always felt its greatest benefit came from the immediate short term benefit of always being able to heal IB wounds when having medicae performed. It effectively meant that unless you went critical, you could heal quite a significant amount quickly. Now it is more an extended long term benefit. While useful, it stops falling under the immediate life saving level.

Personally, it never seemed that difficult to track the "treated" and "untreated" wounds from the old style of medicae.

You had total wounds (which only changed with Sound Constitutions), current wounds (which changed by healing and taking damage), and the treated level of wounds (which starts off equal to total, and is set to the current wounds a PC has after first aid is applied, and is functionally the new total until they extended care).

It is pretty bad that its now better to not treat a critically wounded patient with extended care (for risk of them taking further damage), and rather let them heal on their own. Also, yes, it is sad to still see no improved method of treating Blood Loss besides the -10 check.

Since this week is dedicated to Armoury, it's a good oportunity to change the Primitive quality, so it only works against non-primitive armour, and machine trait. Possibly also Natural Armour.

And add Swarm trait to Adversaries section.

Thank you.

Lusgun with variable settings is something we all want. I am all about removing redutant weapons like triplex etc. Do we really need 3 different shotguns? Just give us one but useful.

They said they want truly playtest Ogryns so we must wait a little for proper stated one. I think that same thing will happen with Storm Trooper and the end version will be more fluffy one.

I have faith in H.B.M.C about vechicles. He will for sure analyse our feed back and make necessary changes to size, weapons etc.

Adversaries and NPC chapter needs most changes in my opinion. Small positive changes allready happened like reducing Stormboy TB to 6. Now they should reduce Weirdboy's wound to Nob level. In Chaos section I would remove Hulking Chaos Mutant and replace it with something more original than corrupted Ogryn [in fluff it is almost unheard that Ogryns could betray the Emperor. They are one of his most devouted servants - 'Blessed is the mind to small to have doubts'] or made them Plague Ogryns [i think only fluff plausible version]. Since all NPCs except servitor can be made from character creation rules I would also advocate to remove them and add inique ones like Administratum cleric, Munitorum officer, Sister Hospitaller, Skitarius etc.

Also, I need to correct myself, Hardy is Tier 2, not 3. Not sure what to think of it now. It probably shouldn't be made a tier 1 talent, but perhaps it could have its pre-reqs lowered.

Shadow Walker said:

A noteworthy point here: freelance contributors like myself and HMBC have no official part in this playtest - we cannot directly make or influence any decisions made to Only War at this point. We can offer suggestions to the guys at FFG who do make the decisions, but that's it. HMBC can't directly change anything about the Vehicle rules, just as I can't make any changes to the Regiment Creation Rules (and trust me that I've put in a fair pile of feedback about those).

For all intents and purposes, aside from the fact that we wrote sections of this book originally, we're no different to the rest of you in regards to this playtest.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Hey NO-1_H3r3,

Just so you know, I appreciate your and H.B.M.C.'s efforts. From regularly reading your posts it's obvious you give a **** and are open to constructive feedback.

Keep it up!

Thanks also, FFG. I remain cautiously optimistic about the beta process.