Warhammer 40K Hot Mess – The Lamentable Land Raider
Let’s take a deep dive into a hot mess of a 40K unit and some thoughts in how we can fix them up. Do you remember when the Land Raider was good? It’s been a while.
I am sitting in my little office cave staring up towards the ceiling. I have some shelves on top of a table that reach towards the top of my vision and sitting there are 3 red Land Raiders. Heck on the shelf below is another custom Nurgle Land Raider staring at me too. That is a decent amount of Land Raiders and whenever I get the new Horus Heresy Box I will end up with another one too. It is too bad they are just terrible right now.
So how the heck do we fix them? Well I think there are a few ways to make them relevant beyond just making them super cheap. I want them to be good, scary, and to have players wonder if there is actual gold inside of them because they are just too sweet. With that let’s deep dive into making up rules for the original tread box of doom.
Land Raider Basics
These models are supposed to be tough and powerful. They deliver important damage dealing elements of an army down the enemies throat. On top of that they should also have some shooting potential with deadly lasers that can cut thru enemy armor like Imperial synth-butter that is totally not made from people. Their stats are actually fine with a high toughness, boosted armor save because of Armor of Contempt, and a decent damage profile. They are just not good enough for what they cost.
Let’s Tweak Their Toughness
The easiest thing to do for them is to just give them a flat -1 damage to all attacks. I kind of feel we could be more radical with FNP added on top but at the base level a flat -1 damage might make them a tad bit better. You mix in some other flavoring I will talk about later and you start to have something that doesn’t feel like a dumb little box in your deployment zone. On top of all of this they should also have some kind of regeneration ability to gain wounds back due to their feisty Machine Spirit fixing things.
Make it a True Assault Delivery System
If something needed to be a true Assault Vehicle this is that something. This model needs to have a rule for everyone to allow it to move and then dump out their candy that is bouncing around inside. I know the Black Templars can do something like that – but they should get something like a move, advance, and ability to do that to make their Land Raiders better. Or just let everyone do it and now. It doesn’t cost CP for the Templars. Either way this thing needs to but the A in Assault Vehicle and the B in busting heads.
PEW PEW
Super Weapons
GW is known to rename weapons for different platforms so why not tweak this one. Make it the Auto Destructus Las Cannons. Instead of just being a 2 shot set of nonsense make it something like wounds carry over to each model. I don’t like adding mortal wounds on top of the damage as you start to really get weird damage profiles but instead just have it be D3+3 with wounds that carry over. Think of this as the laser cutting thru the first guy and burning the next. It would give a really unique flavor as while the idea of this rule would be interesting on all guns it starts to skew things in directions of even more insanely killy. Having it on one or two things means this units become unique and worth taking.
Make the Land Raider Good Again!
This thing doesn’t just need to be cheaper to be useful. The Land Raider needs to actually do cool things. The only true simple update I think we need to see on it and other vehicles is a second look at their transport capacities. It needs to be able to hold a full size unit and a character even if they are wearing the fattest pants around. On top of that it also needs to not care if they are Primaris too. As we don’t need a Primaris Land Raider anytime soon. Just fix this one and let it do wheelies down the battlefield throw out death lasers and then dumping a ton of Marines like they were a box of Legos found by your kiddos.
Let us know how you would fix the unit, down in the comments!
