1. Sniper fracking rifles - they are so OP, that my team grabs them whenever they have a chance. So much damage, such great chance to hit. wow. much better than full auto.

2. Sniper fracking rifles are so good, no one even uses bolters - bolt pistol? meh, stick to your long las. With this, I'm starting to miss full action full auto burst with +20 bonus to hit. I mean why not? half action aim with accurate and single shot gives you +30.

3. Psykers - the whole mechanic of perils of the warp, fettered system is reaaaly stupid. Back in the day, psykers had to really think if they wanted to risk casting Dull Pain. Now it so easy. And so unavoidable. Psychic powers that require opposed test are so imba, because you have no chance of resisting them. And talents that allow to resist them are mostly (the one that matter, actually) available to psykers.

In case someone didn't knew this. http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/52101-psychic-phenomena-and-perils-of-the-warp-probabilities/

Sooo PR 5 psyker using all dice with the old mechanic has 40% chance of triggering psychic phenomena and 10% of perils of the warp. With the new mechanic you have 10% chance for psychic phenomena, and 2,5% for peris. Four times less. With FoTW its even less.

4. No utility powers - detect life? dull pain? Space slip? distort vision?

5. DoS/DoF - first succes shouldnt count as a DoS. In the current way, you have to roll only 30 below your target number to get 4 DoS - sniper fracking rifles.

6. Grenades - Oh crap! A grenade flies into the room, and falls right at your leg and deaaals 11 damage. OUCH! Good thing, with my flak and T3 i only get 3 damage. Keep em coming.

7. No money, only stupid, unrealistic, influence system - oh yeah! I got 30% chance of finding and aquiring this bolter through mystical, mysterious ways, pulling strings, and using my black market contacts. Money plus contacts from IH were much much better. I dont say influence is a bad thing. It should be there, but as an alternative.

8. Force field that negate whole attack, not shots - yeah, 10 hits. The same chance to block them, as one shot. Yay sniper rifles

9. Called shots suck even more than grenades. Flat -20 penalty is the solution.

I agree on 4 and 8.

6 has been a problem throughout the line (my OW group considers frag grenades harmless, except against civilians).

5 is really mostly a matter of convention. And of writing to the new convention.

1-2 are ... not as bad as indicated, though it does feel odd that there's no drawbacks to using long relatively slow weapons in confined areas, instead of eg. shotguns or carbines. IIRC the carbines serve no real purpose (they certainly don't in OW) other than taking up space in the weapon tables.

3 ... dirty little trick a player showed me in DH1:

You get the sum of what you roll on the dice plus your Willpower Bonus.

Invocation lets you add WB again,unless we missed an errata somewhere.

Dull Pain os only Threshold 8, so as long as you can succesfully Invoke and have 4+ in WB (which every psyker should have), you can activate Dull Pain safely as much as you want, by rolling 0 dice from Psy Rating (you can pick the number of dice you roll, up to your psy rating. No minimum.)

7 is pretty real. I personally prefer abstracted Wealth systems, like Profit Factor in RT or the Resources background in Storyteller. But exactly because of the gritty low-down feel that DH seems to have, those system don't work very well. And tying it to the namedropping discussed over in this thread is just silly, because the point of having acolytes for an Inquisitor is being able to things done un-noticed .

I love how this shows how polarising the sniper rifle is, given the multiple threads we've had with people complaining its UNDER-powered...

In my IRL DH1 game last week we played the climax of The Black Sepulchre. In it, the party squares off against a giant, scary daemon thing with 29 wounds. One of my players, before the daemon even got to act, dealt 27 damage* after toughness reduction.

He did this not with a sniper rifle, but with a pistol with the Accurate quality (Fate Bringer, IH). Snipers themselves aren't the problem - it's Accurate that leads to ridiculousness.

* RAW, Accurate's bonus damage dice don't trigger RF - a rule we've never played with. After this incident I see why it was added.

Doesn't Accurate specifically refer to Basic weapons with that damage bonus though? Or is that a post-DH1 invention?

Mother of Christ, you're right! The errata explicitly says Basic weapons only get the extra dice.

The Macharian Handbook had a suggested alternate rule where it gives +d5 on pistols, rather than the full d10. I like that.

To be fair CPS, I've seen the same thing in action pre-errata. A RT game I ran about three years ago had a guy with with a best quality duelling las pistol that was the most dangerous thing we ever saw (The original rules for RT doesn't cap 'Accurates' bonus dice in the same way, so it was even more untamed).

I like that sniper rifles deal boatloads of damage on a good roll, but in the current RAW they are just too easy to abuse. WH40k is the first system I've seen where you can one-shot an unaware enemy with a sniper rifle, and I think the bonus damage mechanic does a good job of representing the power of a sniper in the hands of a skilled marksman. HOWEVER, I do not like how players can pull off "no-scope 360 head shots" by Half Aiming and attacking to reduce an enemy to paste in a single turn.

I have two possible solutions that don't require nerfing the damage of Accurate weapons:

-- Accurate weapons can only get bonus damage dice if the weapon is Braced before firing.

-- Accurate weapons can only get bonus damage dice if they are fired after a Full Aim action.

Personally, I favor the second option. Telescopic sights only give their bonus after a Full Aim, so this kind of limitation is already built into the game. The first option would require more radical changes to the rules and could create some really silly rules interactions with Bulging Biceps characters. Option two also permits snipers to move around the battlefield without "wasting actions" Bracing their weapon in multiple places (encouraging tactical movement in combat is a very good thing IMO).

EDIT: Option Two also allows for some counterplay against snipers. If a character spends a Full Action aiming their sniper rifle at a target in anticipation of blowing them to paste, enemies can attack that character much more effectively. If the character chooses to Dodge the attack, the Full Aim bonus is lost. To use a sniper rifle effectively, the character should attack from concealment or cover to minimize their chances of being hit while Aiming.

Make bracing ne essary to get the bonus damage for basic accurate weapons - problem solved.

I think I actually prefer Weasel's second option (Full Round Aim). Bracing is really only a hindrance if you have to move a lot. Otherwise you brace before the first shot, and after that it ceases to be a penalty.

I would say that within a certain range (50m?) sniper rifles lose their accurate quality and suffer a penalty to hit enemies within 30m as they are too bulky to properly aim quickly with. They are designed to be fired at longer distances and not toted around like a lasgun.

@ Weasel - your second option would be a great solution i think. I'd also like to see a damage increase in pistols, maybe by d5. That way pistols like fate bringer, command laspistol, archeotech laspistol and wrath plasma pistol, and dueling lases would really be competitive.

If I may vote, I'd agree with 2, VERY MUCH with 4 and 6 (my players never, ever touch a grenade) and 8, and strongly disagree with 7, as I think that bean counting sucks.

And I see no problem with accuracy, snipers can be some deadly bastards. I'd just add bracing requirements to it.

EDIT: hadn't read Weasels suggestion, sounds great!

Very much with you on 3, the psychic system really hasn't been right since Rogue Trader for exactly the reasons you give there.

On the topic of grenades, we used the following houserules for OW:

Grenades (and explosives in general) deal 1 additional d10 of damage in enclosed spaces, such as civilian buildings or a dirt trench. At the GM's discretion, this may be increased to 2d10 in cases where the space enclosed is particularly solid (back of a Chimera or void ship corridors). Again, at the GM's discretion enclosed spaces may also drastically increase the grenade's effective blast radius.

Additionally grenades gain the Proven (7) weapon quality. This quality is reduced by 1 for every 1 meter from the target the grenade blows up. This means if you manage to land the grenade directly at someone's feet they are likely in for a world of hurt, but if it scatters the damage grows more erratic.

It does require a bit more to keep track of, but neither I or my co-GM have too much trouble approximating the values. Most of our combat is abstract though, so unsure if I would care for this rule if we were more strict and used minis and the like. We also feel its a worthwhile trade-off to keep grenades feeling like the limited use but lethal tools they are supposed to be.

Grenades always make me miss good old Shadowrun and their explination of the "Chunky Salsa Effect"

Grenades always make me miss good old Shadowrun and their explination of the "Chunky Salsa Effect"

The new rulebook uses two gangers dropping devil-rats into a factory chimney, followed by two fragmentation devices for fun, as a way to explain the effect of grenades in enclosed spaces. It is written in a rather amusing manner.

Grenades always make me miss good old Shadowrun and their explination of the "Chunky Salsa Effect"

That's a pretty one.

Reminds me of Fallout.

Blade, although that sounds like an interesting idea, I think it's a little overcomplicated, don't you?

We might just add a die to the damage, what do you think?

Personally I've not seen grenades be anything but lethal to DH level characters, but then I guess I might just be lucky to play with people who realise you can't walk around in flak armour all the time without drawing attention to yourself...

Personally I think that Accurate requiring 2 degrees of success vs. 2 EXTRA degrees of success is a cut-and-paste error; everything else was so converted.

EDIT- I'm out. Done.

What? Tearing dice don't generate Righteous Fury?

Sorry...two thoughts escaped into one sentence while editing in my head. Ignore that Tearing blurb.

You scared me!