Is Alessio Cavatore beardy with assault troops?

[IBBoard]

Again, slightly behind the times but last month's White Dwarf had an article on assault troops in 40K. Some of the choices weren't too bad - things like arming up troops with krak grenades/melta bombs for some impromptu tank hunting, adding powerfists to Veterans (rather than individual characters) if you want them, and making sure you always give them additional combat weapons (e.g. pistol and sword/axe/choppa)

I don't know about you, but Alessio's final comment seemed a little beardy: master-crafted lightning claws. He said you'll never look back because of the rerolls to hit and to wound. Now I know it'll be character only (what with the master crafting) but I think re-rolling both with a Space Marine is a little OTT and exploiting master crafting a little.

That isn't to say it can't be done, just that it seems to me to be a little beardy and not in the spirit of the game.

[andygorn]

Not quite as beardy when you compare it to a Chaos Lord who's got 2 x master-crafted lightning claws and Spiky Bits (to reroll 2 misses and all your 'to wound' rolls) as well as a jump pack, Feel No Pain and Daemonic Visage....eek!

[IBBoard]

Reroll two misses as in re-roll them twice? Is that even following the rules? I thought there was a limit that re-rolls could only be forced once (or possibly once per side - the owning player taking a reroll to get bad to good, and then the opposition forcing a reroll to hopefully make the good roll bad again).

Adding "Feel No Pain" and "Daemonic Visage" as well does seem like uber-character. Jump packs are possible for loyalist Marines, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head that replicates Feel No Pain or Daemonic Visage.

[andygorn]

Yeah, a die can only be re-rolled once (and only you get to reroll it), but your Chaos Lord (or whoever) is going to have something like easily 4 or more attacks:

If you miss with only one die, then you only roll one miss (and keep the result) anyway, but against stuff with an equal / better WS, you're looking at 1/2 hits and 1/2 misses (in 4 attacks, this'd be 2 hits and 2 misses).
With MC claws and spiky bits, your MC claws allow you to reroll one of your to hits and the spiky bits alow you to re roll another (different) die which missed, so you could end up with the full 4 hits instead of just 2.
Therefore, your character ends up being able to kill a whole lot more things than before and makes up for their large points cost.

I agree: Daemonic Visage is really nasty against people who aren't Fearless (and there are plenty of these units around), especially if you can kill stuff like their attached Fearless characters first.

[IBBoard]

Ah, okay, having played Orks more than Marines I didn't realise Master Crafting was only a single re-roll, I thought it was a "re-roll misses" ability, at which point the combination along with spiky bits would work quite well. Should still only give you three hits out of four on average, but it's better than two and a half out of four