I'm saying its clearly superior, even after the rules have bent over backwards to try and make it less so.

After reading all the comments, I was left with the impression that the problem here is not that autofire is EDIT: too strong. After all, filling your opponent full of lead/las/plasma/screaming gretchins tend to be a very effective way to kill them. DH, as far as I'm aware, is not so concerned about being balanced as being "cinematographically accurate", so to speak.

The main problem is that sniper weapons are currently weak.

We have all seen or read about snipers like Vindicare assassins, Sergeant Cyrus or Mad Larkin, being some of the deadliest characters on the battlefield. And DH misses this point, as it currently stands.

I may not be as well schooled in the mathematics of the rules, but I think a simple solution to this matter would be to return Accurate to a semblance of its previous power, like surgeon and Plushy have suggested.

Maybe adding 1d10 for each DoS would ensure that proficient snipers could, if not kill, at least seriously harm their opponents with a good shot, if I am reading the rules correctly.

What are your thoughts on this matter?

I totally agree. They need a damage boost, that's probably the best way to handle things. Other people have suggested adding a weapon quality which causes RF to trigger on rolls below ten (say, on a roll of seven or higher, righteous fury triggers), which could also solve things well. I prefer the raw damage though.

One thing worth considering is that any weapon can be accurate now, with aid of a simple red dot sight. I can't see this breaking things too much, but maybe mandate that accurate shots only get extra damage if fired once a turn, instead of multiple times?

Making righteous FUREH happen more often might have been a fix if FUREH wasn't so incredibly binary right now.

Edit: Wait, what red dot sight now? That's so ridiculous.

Its worth pointing out that by RAW at least, Novice grade enemies don't even track what wound effect they suffer. Its just 2 wounds/1 crit wound = dead. So theoretically hitting them with a single, non critical wound that deals wound effect 37 won't technically kill a Novice.

Personally I am all for a system that causes certain grades of base damage to become critical wounds. Examples: If dealt base damage (before wound modifiers) in excess of 2x or maybe 3x TB, then the wound is a critical wound. This would cause melta weapons to vaporize novice grade humans, which they very well should.

Given the prevelance of the Accurate quality, I don't think its a good idea to base it off that. I also recognize the importance of the Accurate quality as it is now, and don't think it should be changed (realize that aiming is about the only guaranteed way to increase to hit modifiers).

I'd be legitimately shocked if FFG didn't make it so that massive amounts of damage kill novices outright.

I totally agree. They need a damage boost, that's probably the best way to handle things. Other people have suggested adding a weapon quality which causes RF to trigger on rolls below ten (say, on a roll of seven or higher, righteous fury triggers), which could also solve things well. I prefer the raw damage though.

One thing worth considering is that any weapon can be accurate now, with aid of a simple red dot sight. I can't see this breaking things too much, but maybe mandate that accurate shots only get extra damage if fired once a turn, instead of multiple times?

Tom, I very much agree with you, except for the last part. An Accurate weapon has to be entirely created with this purpose, just strapping a laser dot with silver tape doesn't turn a las-lock into a sniper-pattern longlas.

I would give the old benefit to Accurate (1 or 2 AP to aim, up to two times, +10 to hit and +1d10 per 2DoS) and give +5 to hit with a laser sight.

At the very least Sniper should be 1/2 RoF, so that you could Aim + Called Shot + Fire.

Right now, you can't which is dumb, as that's what you want to do with a Sniper, Aim and Called Shot.

Well yeah, sniper rifle needs to be given Single Shot quality, and made RoF1.

Right now, besides overall range, a lasgun is more accurate than a sniper rifle because you can devote more APs to aiming with it.

having insta kill weapons for a battle situation is bad.

But setting it up assassinating a target, then yeh, sure, from a narrative stand point, it should be instant kill if headshot.

The real problem with how wound state works is say you kick this guy 5 times in the leg, all of the kicks doing 1 damage or more.

Next round you hit him in the face for 5 damage, and

The impact obliterates his skull, spraying brains and bits of bone onto anyone nearby as his recently-headless corpse

staggers for a moment before collapsing. Characters within 1d5 metres must make a –10 Evade (A) test or be struck

by this skull shrapnel, which inflicts a single hit for 1d5+2 Rending damage to a randomly selected location (with

penetration of 1 and number of degrees of success equal to the character’s degrees of failure on the test). Any character

who witness his awful demise must make a –10 Fear (Cowering, Mania) test.

Each limb, body and head should have it's own wound stack, so you need at least 6 wounds to a limb to remove it, or chest and head to kill.

Maybe give the on Accurate weapons, instead of a +10 extra to aim give the normal +5 extra, the +1d10 for each 2DoS, and when you aim, you automatically use a called shot.

Something I have found that works better with RoF in my opinion was adding up all the damage done by all the shots and resolving damage from that rather then adding +5 for each shot. This is only for shooting with one weapon and damage from other weapons are resolved separately.

Lets say an acolyte has an armor of 7, then they are shot at with 4 shots that equal (7+15+6+8) 36 damage, this means you use the number 29 to resolve damage done to the player rather then 0; 8+5; 0; 1+5.

Note: I am terrible at math so it might be off but you get my point.

I haven't followed all 5 pages of this thread so someone might have said this before.

It seems that the best way to fix the comparative weakness of low rate of fire weapons would be to introduce crit ranges. Leave high volume of fire weapons at 10, but give 1/3 RoF weapons a 6-10 or 7-10 Righteous Fury range. You could adjust this for other fractional weapon RoFs, maybe give 1/2 Rof a 8-10 or 9-10 crit range, and 1/4 RoFs a 5-10 or 6-10 crit range. I'd need to run some numbers to see where exactly those changes would help.

This would make it so novices die in a single round, but is probably going to be really nasty for Elites. I don't see the problem with just dropping that rules from elites though.

This means that single shot high damage weapons don't fall behind the curve for critical wounds on target, At least, they won't as badly.

Accurate needs a buff, a big one. Probably the cleanest way to fix it would be to make Accurate a variable stat. So a weapon would have Accurate (+15) for the bonus to aim. Because Accurate weapons are pretty much all fractional fire rate weapons, 1/2 RoF weapons would need Accurate (+25) to gain more from aim than a weapon with RoF 1 that doesn't have Accurate. Weapons with 1/3 fire rates would need Accurate (+30) to break even with RoF 1 weapons.

Each limb, body and head should have it's own wound stack, so you need at least 6 wounds to a limb to remove it, or chest and head to kill.

The biggest complaint about the system as is too much book keeping, adding an individual wound stack per limb would be a pain. Realistic, but impractical.

Again, for the modifying the # for the Fury- I really think it should be a "special" event, if were going to modulate it that way- then alternatively, there should be a cool effect that people will cause people to cheer when they roll either a 01 [on a hit] or a 10 on damage.

Each limb, body and head should have it's own wound stack, so you need at least 6 wounds to a limb to remove it, or chest and head to kill.

The biggest complaint about the system as is too much book keeping, adding an individual wound stack per limb would be a pain. Realistic, but impractical.

considering you would have to track armor at each location, both for yourself, and for the npc's, this is really only a problem for the gm when dealing with loads of enemies at a time.

Each limb, body and head should have it's own wound stack, so you need at least 6 wounds to a limb to remove it, or chest and head to kill.

The biggest complaint about the system as is too much book keeping, adding an individual wound stack per limb would be a pain. Realistic, but impractical.

considering you would have to track armor at each location, both for yourself, and for the npc's, this is really only a problem for the gm when dealing with loads of enemies at a time.

True but the point made does highlight the issue of confusion at the heart of the wound system; is it an abstract wound system or a location-specific system?

Currently its a mix of both and as a result it does neither well.

As the saying goes, 'a man who chases two rabbits catches neither'.

Hitting, location and wound effects are locational. Wounds are abstract, although they affect the locational aspects with wound effect bonuses.

Personally i prefer the abstract route, but as long as the rules pick one and stick with it that's fine.