I hate that the person that does most of the work gets nothing for it. If I shoot someone for 5 wounds I want to be rewarded with them going down, I do not want it to be the case that someone else then can just shoot him for 1 damage over defence and blow him apart.

That is bad design in my mind as it robs player of the satisfaction of being able to take credit for their kills. It also makes things like ambushes rediculously hard to pull off unless you ournumber your ambushees 2 to 1. I think that the wound mechanic although a nice idea falls down in practice. I also think that the critical tables are far too big making it impossible for you to kill someone quickly even when it makes sense that you should do so.

Good point, Kaihlik. Also let's imagine the situation where a target got a full-auto burst for 5 or more hits from one attack and, unwilling to continue, runs away. With 5 wounds from one burst. Such damage must kill ordinary foe for sure but according to the rules he have a chance to flee with 5 holes in his body. That's quite ridiculous, isn't it?

Also, Manchu, I really appreciated you clarify the rules again but I only posted my thoughts about how it would look right for me. It's my opinion only and it will be part of my house rules because I'm thinking rules are broken at this point. i'm not arguing about how it's written in rules, I only think that it is written incorrectly and must be fixed.

I hate that the person that does most of the work gets nothing for it. If I shoot someone for 5 wounds I want to be rewarded with them going down, I do not want it to be the case that someone else then can just shoot him for 1 damage over defence and blow him apart. That is bad design in my mind as it robs player of the satisfaction of being able to take credit for their kills. It also makes things like ambushes rediculously hard to pull off unless you ournumber your ambushees 2 to 1. I think that the wound mechanic although a nice idea falls down in practice. I also think that the critical tables are far too big making it impossible for you to kill someone quickly even when it makes sense that you should do so.

For most enemies, that will kill them. Mooks only take 2 wounds before dying, or die to a crit, and an elite will still die instantly to a crit.

Milliandson, not sure what you're allowed to say on the matter but how does singelshot and fullauto stack up against one another when it comes to stacking wounds for the cumulative +5 on the chart per wound?

I think it's pretty clear that the +5 doesn't count for that attack and all shots are from the single attack.

Maybe i expressed myself poorly, my apologies. Let's say me and you Lucifer are in the same group.

I have an autogun, you have a sniper rifle. I shoot first, 3 hits, 3 wounds. You shoot 1 shot, and kill him due to the 3 wounds already in place giving you 15+. Now, if this will be dramatically different if we turn it around you shoot first as I would only get +5 on my burst.

Is that a huge balance issue currently? I'd love to test it but I kind of need a group for that, or simply run alot of combats by myself.

Ah, I get what your saying now, and yes, I agree. I'm not overly fond of the +5 per wound bit myself. I'm really not sure how to fix it though.

Well, one thing to look at is the diverentiate with severity of wounds. The current system seems to promote rapidly firing weapons, basically papercutting a person to death.

I haven't done any testing, which is why I'm hoping an internal tester, or anyone else who has a group up and running to tell about their experiences.

Ah, I get what your saying now, and yes, I agree. I'm not overly fond of the +5 per wound bit myself. I'm really not sure how to fix it though.

I guess the most straight forward way would be to simply have a wound level closer to DH1. Hit by 3 1 damage auto pistol shots, you take 1,2 and 3 on the damage chart and all future hits are at +3. Hit by 1 18 damage sniper rifle, you take 18 on the damage chart and are at +18 for future hits.

I imagine that's less balanced with the rest of the system because it would have been designed for +5 wounds but it's an option.

I have an autogun, you have a sniper rifle. I shoot first, 3 hits, 3 wounds. You shoot 1 shot, and kill him due to the 3 wounds already in place giving you 15+. Now, if this will be dramatically different if we turn it around you shoot first as I would only get +5 on my burst.

Is that a huge balance issue currently? I'd love to test it but I kind of need a group for that, or simply run alot of combats by myself.

This actually sounds somewhat realistic - assuming that the +5 bonus for existing wounds is meant to reflect the target's reaction to an earlier attack, or rather how body capabilities are affected by such physical punishment. Someone who has just been shot won't move as someone who is completely untouched. Someone who has just been shot three times will move worse than someone who has been shot once.

The basic mechanic feels sound, and I don't see the problem with automatic weapons having a higher damage potential (which of course assumes that you have more than one shot actually hitting the target, which may not be guaranteed). It's situational. Autofire consumes ammunition, which - depending on the weapon and the campaign - may be sparse. This is how GMs will be able to "steer" their players. Spray and pray all the time, you'll soon run out of rounds. Conversely, I would hope that single shot weapons have other advantages such as a higher damage per shot, better range, and superior accuracy (to make sure that the one shot actually hits).

In short, the way I see it, it hinges upon the details (-> stats). The idea itself is interesting and could work nicely.

My problem is not with the higher damage potential, it's the escallation of +wounds for the NEXT guy. The guy with autofire most likely won't kill his target, the next guy will. Not because he has a great weapon but because the target has taken alot of gracing wounds.

Getting +5 to wounds regardless of damage promotes the highest amount of ROF.

Not sure how realistic it is that 3 small gracing wounds causes the target to take more damage then one regular, solid shot. And Warhammer40k is not the most realistic place. I don't care all that much about realism either, I care about setting, mood and balance.

What if this could be resolved by

a) reducing the amount of wounds required before death

b) Instead of +5 and +10, it could just be +1 for regular and +5 for Critical.

That would make Glancing wound less effective at moving you down the chart, if moving on it just required number of wounds you've taken and damage.

By reducing the amount of damage necessary before you die [on that table, or start going trough horrible things], then MASSIVE damage can still one shot people.

Stacking damage would still hurt, but a lot less, as every stacking hit effective gives you +1 damage to your next hit.

My problem is not with the higher damage potential, it's the escallation of +wounds for the NEXT guy. The guy with autofire most likely won't kill his target, the next guy will. Not because he has a great weapon but because the target has taken alot of gracing wounds.

You're assuming that the guy with autofire, on average, falls somewhere between not hitting at all (or only hitting once, which would have the same effect as a successful single shot attack) and simply killing the enemy with a hail of bullets. Have you tested this? I don't have the rules and go only by what I'm reading here, but it might be interesting to see what the dice will actually say in a "simulated combat", so to say. From personal experience in past games, whenever I used auto-fire, I mostly either missed or had only 1-2 shots hit. Might've just been my crappy dice luck, though.

I've proposed a considerably better idea over in the mechanics forums if people want to check out on how to deal with this issue.

@Lynata:

If you hit a guy 4 times on the same attack he has four more wounds but they only modify the wound effect of hits taken on subsequent attacks, not the subsequent hits in the same attack.

Let's say an Elite enemy has been hit once last round and this round you hit him 4 more times on the same attack. Each of those four hits only gets +5 to the wound effect. Now it's my turn: I take a shot at the same enemy and hit him once. That's a subsequent attack on an enemy that has already suffered 5 wounds. Even if only one point of damage gets through the Enemy's Defence Value, I get to add +25 to that 1 damage when determining the wound effect.

More hits greatly increases the likelihood of scoring a critical, which instantly kills most enemies from what I'm gathering. So there is really no reason to ever use anything but as many shots as you possibly can per turn, as you only need to score a 10 on 1 of them. Single shots, with only a 10% chance of scoring a critical, serve almost no useful function. At a rate of fire of 3 per AP, even the expenditure of 1 AP enormously ramps up chances of an insta-kill crit. So yes, doing anything but full auto every turn is very silly in this new system, or so it seems from casual reading.

I wounder if a basic fix could solve the issue without too great a dramatic change. Consider this :

- The +wounds for hits is equal to the bleedover damage (small hits aren't objectively better now)

- Accurate weapons get back their +1d10 damage (this also helps them crit more often)

- Mooks die when they take a fixed amount of damage (between 5-15, depending on Toughness), instead of any two wounds, so big hits will kill them instantly, and smaller hits will probably also kill them quite rapidly

This still leaves the issue of dual wielding getting 2 attacks unlike everyone else (which is somewhat solved by the chances to the +wound system), but that can easily be solved by tweaking weaponry and armor.

You know, its kind of obvious full auto would be objectively better since there exists nothing else(except rare weapons with single shot quality). Accurate is now an extra +5 to hit and that's it.

So we can only assume that this was intentional.

Also, this is kind of offtopic, but accurate has pretty much always been better than full auto ever since the very first DH errata which gave it +d10s damage for extra DoS. Which is why BC and OW nerfing full auto was really weird to me.

You know, its kind of obvious full auto would be objectively better since there exists nothing else(except rare weapons with single shot quality). Accurate is now an extra +5 to hit and that's it.

So we can only assume that this was intentional.

Also, this is kind of offtopic, but accurate has pretty much always been better than full auto ever since the very first DH errata which gave it +d10s damage for extra DoS. Which is why BC and OW nerfing full auto was really weird to me.

Where you playing the same system as me? As soon as BS got high enough for iterative attacks to really start kicking in, full auto was absolute murder of anything that lives (give a DW marine a storm bolter, or worse, a heavy bolter, and see the carnage that does). It only got worse with heavy weapons; an autocannon on full auto will butcher anything short of a tank, for something that's half the price of a Nomad. It even has more range; sniping with an autcannon, on full auto if you like, is akin to ***** shooting with a Browning M2. It's not ever remotely fair for the guy who's on the receiving end.

The changes in OW and BC made it so FA wasn't always automatically better. The thing is, in the Wh40k system, landing hits isn't too difficult. Whats difficult is making them do a lot of damage, and that's either achieved with large numbers of low damage hits, or few larger hits. However, because sniper weapons don't really have larger damage dices than regular weapons (to avoid people using them all the time), to be relevant over simply using a full auto gun, they need to have bonus damage for their intended use. The accurate bonus damage is the only way to make sniper weapons be relevant without making them the go to weapon for all situations, due to the utility cost of the accurate quality.

EDIT: it seems that skee.t shooting is censored...

Well, I didn't play much DW but I heard lots of stories about how heavy bolters there minced everything so on that point, I shall concede.

In DH however, heavy weapons were really expensive and really heavy, and it was hard to get the statline to use them effectively, not to mention that you had to brace. And heavy bolters cost way too many thrones to be used often.

The fact that each hit with FA gets reduced by armor and TB while the accurate +d10s is pure damage stacks the odds in accurates favor. The fact that full auto might be better with super heavy lategame weapons might be because there are basically no lategame accurate weapons except the Angelus.

If you make comparisons of weapons that exist at about the same tier, say autopistol and long las, accurate is far superior against anything with a modicum of damage reduction. In BC/OW its just ridiculous, an accurate weapon easily gets +50 to hit, meaning anyone without any investment in BS can use it very well, while FA is at -10. You need VERY high BS to make up for that difference.

But the problem might be that accurate was always a low level thing, and full auto was more of a high tier god. But in my experience, even a long las outperformed bolters a lot of the time(bolters are just SA though).

If you make comparisons of weapons that exist at about the same tier, say autopistol and long las, accurate is far superior against anything with a modicum of damage reduction. In BC/OW its just ridiculous, an accurate weapon easily gets +50 to hit, meaning anyone without any investment in BS can use it very well, while FA is at -10. You need VERY high BS to make up for that difference.

But the problem might be that accurate was always a low level thing, and full auto was more of a high tier god. But in my experience, even a long las outperformed bolters a lot of the time(bolters are just SA though).

From my experience, autoguns tend to easily beat out accurate weapons a lot of the time. Considering that bonuses to ranged attacks are very easy to come by, for the average enemy with around 6-7 soak, the autogun performs equally, or better than the long las, or any other accurate weapon. The +1d10 damage is better when it's difficult to hit or to do damage to a target, but, as long as you can do damage reliably, an easy 2 or 3 extra hits really add up, and fast RoF weapons benefit more from special ammunition. Without the accurate bonus damage, sniping weapons are entirely useless; you nearly always have enough BS to land a single hit anyways, so why not try for more hits if the damage is the same, or even better?

okay full auto

lets say you hit 4 times

all of the hits deal damage

none of them will get the +5 bonus because these wounds where gotten at the same time, but on the next attack they count, and then they have 4 wounds...

Also remember that hitting with full auto means DoS is important

Lets say you have 40 BS, a good number, by any account. That means there's 80% hit chance with A, and 70 with FA.

At 80, A is better. At 70, they're about equal. At 60, A is superior because it doesn't get reduced. At 50 A is still better on average(2d10-soak v 3d10-soak*3). At 40 A is at its prime and vastly superior (3d10-soak v 4d10-soak*4). As it goes on FA starts to catch up, but by the time it is statistically superior, its a very low roll needed.

Counting with DH rules obv, and assuming accurate has a red-dot because they're really cheap and common. Now obviously, an autogun can crit for HUGE damage, but that's rather random.

Also, I want to make sure this is clear: Accurate in DH2 is completely rubbish and totally worthless. All it does is +5 to hit after aiming. That's basically nothing.

@Lynata: If you hit a guy 4 times on the same attack he has four more wounds but they only modify the wound effect of hits taken on subsequent attacks, not the subsequent hits in the same attack.

I understood that - I'm just questioning the likelihood of an autofire attack scoring 4 hits on average (which still do not end up killing the target). It's just not something that meshes with my own experience from the other games, hence the suggestion to try it out with rolling some dice under the new mechanic.

Lets say you have 40 BS, a good number, by any account. That means there's 80% hit chance with A, and 70 with FA.

At 80, A is better. At 70, they're about equal. At 60, A is superior because it doesn't get reduced. At 50 A is still better on average(2d10-soak v 3d10-soak*3). At 40 A is at its prime and vastly superior (3d10-soak v 4d10-soak*4). As it goes on FA starts to catch up, but by the time it is statistically superior, its a very low roll needed.

Counting with DH rules obv, and assuming accurate has a red-dot because they're really cheap and common. Now obviously, an autogun can crit for HUGE damage, but that's rather random.

Also, I want to make sure this is clear: Accurate in DH2 is completely rubbish and totally worthless. All it does is +5 to hit after aiming. That's basically nothing.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your calculation. What are the 80, 70, etc.? Also, by normal DH1 rules, it's ridiculously easy to get bonuses to BS, essentially guaranteeing extra hits. In the new version, it's somewhat rarer, but both accurate and full auto can aim if required (full auto even has more AP to spend on it). Sure, if you are only getting 1 hit, accurate is better; at 2, it tends to nearly break even, and if you can get 3, FA is always better. The thing is, accurate doesn't scale, while full auto does; until a weapon with a larger RoF is available with accurate, more BS or success for accurate just makes your hits harder to dodge, while for FA, it makes them harder to dodge and improves the effective damage.