A blast template scatters and lands at the back of a unit covering 3 models. According to the new shooting rules the 3 closest to the unit shooting have to take armour saves regardless of being covered by the template, is that correct?
this is particularly annoying as in this case it was my Broodlord which had to take all the saves and dying while the rest of the brood got off scot-free
It’s to prevent sniping characters by landing the template right on them. Your Broodlord shouldn’t be right at the front, or you should hope you make your LO,S! rolls I guess.
You have to take away the models closest to the source of fire/impact… if a template lands in the back, you take away the back models… Also, a player can choose to fire specifically at models in/out of cover, in which case you remove the nominated models, regardless if they’re the closest or not.
It’s just down to semantics… you remove the models closest to the source of fire, not just the models in front of your unit.
And a template can only kill the models covered by it (with the exception of a succesful look-out sir)…
Tommy H, it wasn’t at the front of the unit (at least not at the beginning of the shooting phase) just closest to the unit that fired the blast template at the time the shot took place.
Zuh-Khinie that would’ve been my interpretation as well but both my opponent and the store manager said no it’s the models closest to the unit that shoots.
I don’t have the rulebook at work with me but can anyone let me know where to look to try to find this rule?
I guess we did it play it the correct way then. Still seems daft to me.
I rarely play 40K but the local store is gearing up for some sort of one day tournament at Warhammer World so everyone wants to get practice games in so for the next couple of weeks the only way I’ll be getting a game in will be 40K.
Oh well I still managed to pull off a pretty convincing win
Yeah, but if your Broodlord hadn’t been closest to the firing unit, this rule might have saved him! You just got unlucky this time. The rule is designed to prevent blast weapons from bucking the basic wound allocation rules and being too powerful. Against every other gun, putting your character at the front is a bad idea - if blasts worked the way you’re suggesting, the opposite would be true. So blast weapons would fluctuate wildly in utility depending on how numerous they were in a given army. You’d set your units up differently if you expected to face a lot of blast weapons, and they’d be used at the exclusion of any other type of heavy weapon just to keep opponents guessing!
The rule may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s the only way to work it for such a common weapon type (compare the much rarer barrages, which do actually work that way).
yeah, but that means you get wound allocation like in warhammer when shooting at multiple wound units with a template…
It’s a bit weird when you fire a template at a unit of Nob bikers, and then allocate all of your wounds on the closest models first, when all of them might have been hit, which might set the unit back a hefty number of attacks when they charge.
Playing Tau myself, I’m usually the one that places the templates though
It’s an abstraction, to make the game playable and to avoid all the kind of nonsense we got in the last edition of 40K, when models with different weapon load-outs could bounce wounds around to their heart’s content. Now, all wounds are allocated against the closest model to the firing unit, end of.
The Warhammer method (“remove a rank and file trooper in preference to anyone important”) is great for massed units of identical models, but 40K is about small squads with as many as three differently armed models in even an ordinary Troops choice, and possibly a whole mess of differently armed guys in an Elite unit, so you need to find a way to distribute wounds amongst them without making it too easy to snipe, or to protect powerful models in an unrealistic fashion.
I know, but in this instance, it has just become easier to protect powerful models in an unrealistic manner.
And shooting at a unit with a weapon that scatters isn’t really the same as sniping.
I get what you’re saying, and I agree with you. But just as you said, it feels a bit counterintuitive to remove miniatures not hit by the blasttemplate.
Like I say, it’s because otherwise with the current wound allocation mechanic (which is easier to explain, easy to apply and much fairer than the old system), blast weapons would be hugely powerful. They’d buck the whole concept, and warp the game completely. So they have to be awkwardly retro-fitted into the system, and it ends up being a slightly odd abstraction on what otherwise makes perfect logical sense. The closest model dying first is totally intuitive, but it comes at the price of blast weapons being a bit strange!
I think the occasional annoying quirk like this is better than letting your opponent just dump his blast markers right on top of your character and sniping him, in defiance of the way that all other shooting in the game works. And of having to put your character on the edge of the unit to avoid such a fate, thus making him vulnerable to regular shooting.
We’d get “blast herding” where units with missile launchers or plasma cannon position themselves such that characters are forced to stay on the fringes of units to avoid being sniped by them, and then a unit with regular guns comes up from the exposed side and opens fire…
