I am toying with the following idea.

Remove characteristics from the base damage. Instead you calculate damage like this:

Weapon damage + total number of successes + damage from action card + highest severity amon crits inflicted.

This gives a wider spread in damage output, while making those epic high success rolls, feel really epic.

Damage example:Troll slayer with strenght 5, weapon skill 2 and a great weapon uses a basic melee attack.

Attack 1: He makes an awesome check and ends up with 6 successes, 2 boons and a sigmars comet. He uses the sigmars comet to inflict a critical with a severity of 4. His total damage is: 7+6+2+4= 19 (normal damage would be 14)

Attack 2: The enemy dodges and he barely hits the guy with one success and a bane. His damage is then: 7+1 = 8 (normal damage would be 12)

Attack 3: A decent hit with 3 successes and 2 boons. He inflicts 7+3+2 = 12 damage. (normal damage is 14)

This system will give a slightly lower average damage but a much bigger difference between good and poor hits. You could also let criticals simply inflict one extra wound if you think 1-5 extra wounds is too much.

I think that's a neat idea. I'm leaning towards a way to nerf heavy armour and I may try some of your ideas here for "piercing" damage.

For example: bonus successes not going extra damage, but each 2nd or 3rd extra creates "pierce". This would make henchmen a lot more dangerous on ironbreakers and knights. A mob ganging up looking for the c hink in the armour so to speak.

jh

You could make the extra damage from crits piercing damage.

After going through the cards I find the rule is broken. It messes up the balance of cards.

But this effect is already here, sort of in reverse. You can use enhance cards, so you don't get as many successes.