Are Mortal Wounds a good mechanic?

[Yoid]

Mortal Wounds are pretty flawed as a mechanic. Having high rend wounds/improved rend wounds would be much better. A cannon should be lethal? Sure, make it -4 rend. To what creature should be lethal? Up to a horseman? Then 3 damage you go. But oh, this magically kills two other models if you hit a 1 wound unit... suddenly this is wrong.

To correctly have it done, the combat values would need to be reworked, with no spilling wounds, and an approach to save/rend similar to S/T (allowing certain units to have 2+ save and others to have -5 rend)

Ideally, certain unit will deal a very small amount of attacks/damage but with insanely high rend, and other will do an insane amount of attacks/damage but with no rend at all. The first would be good vs monstrous behemoths with 2+ save and elite units with 3-4+ save, and the later would be good vs hordes of low armored mass of wounds and even fleshbag type monsted that have insane amount of wounds but low saves.

The problem is, instead, mortal wounds (effectively high rend wounds) are mix with regular damage in most units, and often used as a way to deal very high amounts of damage. Is not that those units got a niche of dealing very poor damage but in the form of mortal wounds.

I think GW should be more clever with the system they have, using the same fundation they can create way more interesting unit archetypes, instead of simply "Yes, more damage" or "Yes, more tankiness" that lead to only 1 unit anvil, 1 unit hammer and 1 unit chaff being viable in most battletomes, and some battletomes having clearly underperforming units compared to the same type of unit in others.

To me the existence of Mortal Wounds only make sense to counter ethereal, as a way to represent magic to fight nighthaunts and thats it. I wish for the armor/rend and wounds/damage values to have a bigger impact and diversity within the system instead of the current Mortal Wound spam that make every damage dealer almost the same.

[zilberfrid]

4 hours ago, Yoid said:

Mortal Wounds are pretty flawed as a mechanic. Having high rend wounds/improved rend wounds would be much better. A cannon should be lethal? Sure, make it -4 rend. To what creature should be lethal? Up to a horseman? Then 3 damage you go. But oh, this magically kills two other models if you hit a 1 wound unit... suddenly this is wrong.

To correctly have it done, the combat values would need to be reworked, with no spilling wounds, and an approach to save/rend similar to S/T (allowing certain units to have 2+ save and others to have -5 rend)

Ideally, certain unit will deal a very small amount of attacks/damage but with insanely high rend, and other will do an insane amount of attacks/damage but with no rend at all. The first would be good vs monstrous behemoths with 2+ save and elite units with 3-4+ save, and the later would be good vs hordes of low armored mass of wounds and even fleshbag type monsted that have insane amount of wounds but low saves.

The problem is, instead, mortal wounds (effectively high rend wounds) are mix with regular damage in most units, and often used as a way to deal very high amounts of damage. Is not that those units got a niche of dealing very poor damage but in the form of mortal wounds.

I think GW should be more clever with the system they have, using the same fundation they can create way more interesting unit archetypes, instead of simply "Yes, more damage" or "Yes, more tankiness" that lead to only 1 unit anvil, 1 unit hammer and 1 unit chaff being viable in most battletomes, and some battletomes having clearly underperforming units compared to the same type of unit in others.

To me the existence of Mortal Wounds only make sense to counter ethereal, as a way to represent magic to fight nighthaunts and thats it. I wish for the armor/rend and wounds/damage values to have a bigger impact and diversity within the system instead of the current Mortal Wound spam that make every damage dealer almost the same.

I agree with most, except a cannonball killing more than one cavalier is quite possible. Accounts from 17th-19th century battles are quite gruesome!

[Yoid]

10 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

I agree with most, except a cannonball killing more than one cavalier is quite possible. Accounts from 17th-19th century battles are quite gruesome!

I admit it was a poor example the cannonbal one. Im sure there will be other weapons that one say "should kill a mounted horseman" but also "Should not kill multiple models". In fact a rule for this already exist in the system, and is in the Fiends of Slaanesh stinger. It deal 1 damage to 1 wound targets, D3 damage to 2-3 wounds targets, and D6 damage to 4+ wounds targets. Fiends are often look as a bad unit because it is design to underperform vs most enemies and only sligthly overperform vs 4+ wounds enemies (wich are quite rare), but that rule is actually a good fundation to develop better battlefield roles for the armies in the future.

For the cannonbal example, you can make something like: It have 3 attacks, so it can kill up to 3 models, but it got a damage value of 1 vs 1 wound enemies, 2 vs 2 wound enemies, 3 vs 3 wounds enemies, and 4 vs 4+ wounds enemies. Suddenly this artillery piece got a clear battlefield rol that differentiate it from a catapult, wich may get a number of attacks equal to the number of models in the target unit to a cap of 15 or something like that, making it an anti-horde artillery piece. And both may have -5 rend (or deal the damage in the form of mortal wounds if you please). But both this designs don't simply fall into the "more-more damage" rule. Wasting the cannonbal in a horde would be bad, and wasting the catapult in a multi-wound elite unit would be awful, so you still want both in your artillery-like list. The enemy then can do the tactical choice of going and destroy whichever is better agaisnt the mayority of his army in general (Gloomspite Gitz launching an all-out attack into the catapult, or Stormcast going quickly to dismantle the cannon).

If the monsters and artillery got a proper high rend and focus on anti-horde or anti-elite, the knights-elites got a proper low attacks with medium rend, and the light-infantry got a proper high attacks but low rend, then this kind of choices become relevant over all armies and all situations, and make the game more believable and more tactical, probably more fun and engaging. I would be fine with all armies having access to an specialist that deal mortal wounds in the form of magic damage just to counter ethereal, and that is probably wizards and priests already.

Having too much wards saves is becoming a problem too. Because you dont have a unit archetype that is good vs wards saves. They need to be toned down too or the tools to counter it must exist. The counterargument of "then some anvils become too squishy" is not valid because then you buff the wounds/armor/point-per-model of these units to compensate, and depending on what you have choosen to buff this units become stronger vs certain enemies but weaker vs others (again the value of attacks/rend/damage making the game more tactical and rich). Then when anvils are not simply "more-more tankiness" you start wanting different anvils for different purposes and your list become more varied, how you move your troops to face agaisnt certain unit types become more relevant.

Edited April 29, 2021 by Yoid

[Maddpainting]

Yes, they are needed but you need to make sure not to go to crazy on them.

[Phasteon]

19 hours ago, Yoid said:

I admit it was a poor example the cannonbal one. Im sure there will be other weapons that one say "should kill a mounted horseman" but also "Should not kill multiple models". In fact a rule for this already exist in the system, and is in the Fiends of Slaanesh stinger. It deal 1 damage to 1 wound targets, D3 damage to 2-3 wounds targets, and D6 damage to 4+ wounds targets. Fiends are often look as a bad unit because it is design to underperform vs most enemies and only sligthly overperform vs 4+ wounds enemies (wich are quite rare), but that rule is actually a good fundation to develop better battlefield roles for the armies in the future.

For the cannonbal example, you can make something like: It have 3 attacks, so it can kill up to 3 models, but it got a damage value of 1 vs 1 wound enemies, 2 vs 2 wound enemies, 3 vs 3 wounds enemies, and 4 vs 4+ wounds enemies. Suddenly this artillery piece got a clear battlefield rol that differentiate it from a catapult, wich may get a number of attacks equal to the number of models in the target unit to a cap of 15 or something like that, making it an anti-horde artillery piece. And both may have -5 rend (or deal the damage in the form of mortal wounds if you please). But both this designs don't simply fall into the "more-more damage" rule. Wasting the cannonbal in a horde would be bad, and wasting the catapult in a multi-wound elite unit would be awful, so you still want both in your artillery-like list. The enemy then can do the tactical choice of going and destroy whichever is better agaisnt the mayority of his army in general (Gloomspite Gitz launching an all-out attack into the catapult, or Stormcast going quickly to dismantle the cannon).

If the monsters and artillery got a proper high rend and focus on anti-horde or anti-elite, the knights-elites got a proper low attacks with medium rend, and the light-infantry got a proper high attacks but low rend, then this kind of choices become relevant over all armies and all situations, and make the game more believable and more tactical, probably more fun and engaging. I would be fine with all armies having access to an specialist that deal mortal wounds in the form of magic damage just to counter ethereal, and that is probably wizards and priests already.

Having too much wards saves is becoming a problem too. Because you dont have a unit archetype that is good vs wards saves. They need to be toned down too or the tools to counter it must exist. The counterargument of "then some anvils become too squishy" is not valid because then you buff the wounds/armor/point-per-model of these units to compensate, and depending on what you have choosen to buff this units become stronger vs certain enemies but weaker vs others (again the value of attacks/rend/damage making the game more tactical and rich). Then when anvils are not simply "more-more tankiness" you start wanting different anvils for different purposes and your list become more varied, how you move your troops to face agaisnt certain unit types become more relevant.

I don‘t like that kind of complexity, its also the major thing I dislike about 40k (although I really like the game in general). 

S vs T. 

When you have a full S3-7 army you are gonna have a bad time against a full T8 army (Knights for example) and if you got too many low volume shots to deal with high toughness, you are gonna have problems against those hordes. 

What I love about AoS is that the numbers work out as they do. 

Toughness of an army is generally measured in a wounds per point ratio and so is damage. 

Buffs and Debuffs can then shift the balance between those. 

For me its very engaging list / army building, knowing that my -1 rend 2 damage weapons will ALWAYS be good/ hit hard, whereas in 40k I always feel like I‘m lacking some punch/ defences against certain things, which is a bummer more often than not as it leads to me not playing the list I 100% want to play because I need to fulfil certain numver values or I cant compete against certain armies. 

Sure, the same thing can be said about AoS, but I think that most AoS armies are very forgiving in the „take what you like, even if its not optimal“ department.

All in all MWs are a good mechanic in both systems - although they are far more restrictive in 40k than in AoS - but also more powerful in 40k, where normal damage doesnt spill over and invuln/high saves are a very common thing. 

But then again, in a game where most units delete each other in 1-2 rounds of combat, dealing 20+ mortal wounds is not any worse than dealing twice the amount of „regular“ wounds. 

I‘m still looking forward to my first game against the feared Lumineth and their Sentinels, but I actually don‘t think their MW output is that NPE as people claim. 

Edited April 30, 2021 by Phasteon

[Yoid]

5 hours ago, Phasteon said:

I don‘t like that kind of complexity, its also the major thing I dislike about 40k (although I really like the game in general). 

S vs T. 

When you have a full S3-7 army you are gonna have a bad time against a full T8 army (Knights for example) and if you got too many low volume shots to deal with high toughness, you are gonna have problems against those hordes. 

What I love about AoS is that the numbers work out as they do. 

Toughness of an army is generally measured in a wounds per point ratio and so is damage. 

Buffs and Debuffs can then shift the balance between those. 

For me its very engaging list / army building, knowing that my -1 rend 2 damage weapons will ALWAYS be good/ hit hard, whereas in 40k I always feel like I‘m lacking some punch/ defences against certain things, which is a bummer more often than not as it leads to me not playing the list I 100% want to play because I need to fulfil certain numver values or I cant compete against certain armies. 

Sure, the same thing can be said about AoS, but I think that most AoS armies are very forgiving in the „take what you like, even if its not optimal“ department.

All in all MWs are a good mechanic in both systems - although they are far more restrictive in 40k than in AoS - but also more powerful in 40k, where normal damage doesnt spill over and invuln/high saves are a very common thing. 

But then again, in a game where most units delete each other in 1-2 rounds of combat, dealing 20+ mortal wounds is not any worse than dealing twice the amount of „regular“ wounds. 

I‘m still looking forward to my first game against the feared Lumineth and their Sentinels, but I actually don‘t think their MW output is that NPE as people claim. 

Well, this goes heavily into the personal opinion area. I prefer diversity and everything having his own utility, and you prefer a "take what you want and everything is good vs everything" approach.

I can see the "take what you want" working if done right, but as it is done right now it have some fatal flaws. Since everything is reduced simply to a mass of good stats, you can clearly tell wich unit is the better, making all the other units the wrong choice to pick. Also there are certain units that are not currently design with this philosophy, and by the mere existence of the others that are (often the spammy Mortal Wounds units) you make all the others a bad choice to pick. If this was really-really a "take what you want" I can see it working as a design philosophy, but currently is more a "take the best choices or play with an obvious disadvantage, bad luck for you if your army cannot support a best-choice type of selection"

I can see why GW don't refine that philosophy because it would make a lot of people complain. Some time ago warscrolls were more simple, and a lot of units were copies of others with basically same stats and abilities, and there were a lot of complains about that.

I prefer a complex design that encourage the tactical use of all units in an army, but I admit the other way can work if done right. The problem is we are somewhat in between because GW cannot made his mind (probably different people working in different battletomes without following the same design philosophy) and the spam of Mortal Wounds/Ward Saves in certain units tie tightly into this.