40K BREAKING: Weapon Profiles Teased
Games Workshop has yet another tease for the new edition – this time it’s the Weapon profiles!
After yesterday’s Unit Profile hints, Games Workshop is filling in more blanks with a quick look at three of the most iconic weapons in the Grim-Dark: The Flamer, the Bolter and the Lascannon:
The three big changes here are the Damage stat, the AP system and templates going away. Again, as we saw yesterday with the unit stats, these are basically a combination of the 40k rules in 7th and the way things work in Age of Sigmar. It’s really like the best of both worlds!
AP changing to a modifier vs a “binary” system is also pretty cool. It’s a throw back to 2nd Edition for sure. Now I’m wondering if that will impact the classic Invulnerable Save. As we saw yesterday a Terminator has a +2 save. Doing some quick math that means if they get hit by a Lascannon shot they will have a +5 save…which is the same as their current Invulnerable Save…
And how about the change away from Templates!? Auto-hitting at 8″ with D6 attacks? That could be pretty devastating! But now that’s got me thinking about how that interacts with the “kill range” of weapons like in 7th. If models in the unit are outside of 8″ will they also take hits or will the extra hits stop at 8″ from the Flamer? Also, what about Wall of Death?
Damage as a stat allows for some extra granularity in the attack. This combined with the Damage Table work together to really create the sense that specific weapons have a specific purpose again. The Boltgun and Flamer are great against low wound models and the Lascannon with it’s possible D6 damage is the weapon of choice vs monsters or vehicles. This does raise the question of how damage will be distributed to units. The article alludes to the fact that the Lascannon only counts as a single hit and the D6 Damage doesn’t spill over to the rest of the unit…
One final note is that D weapons are gone. With the removal of the stat cap of 10, weapons can now go beyond a 10 strength value – and apparently this new system is scalable with the damage matching the effectiveness of the weapon…
If you’re hungry for more info, please go read the full breakdown from Games Workshop.
What do you think of these changes? And what other questions does this bring up?
