Math for plasma

If you remember the leaker dude, he posted on imgur the leaks of weapon profiles for Horus Heresy 3.0, and he was pretty, uh, vocal and angry about it. I mean, just look at his furious words at the bottom of the image. So if I think plasma is decent, I'm apparently a "retard."

It's not that I don't understand. Aside from the guy needing therapy, anger management and probably a ban for harassing poor Pardo, I do think plasma is...actually kind of bad this edition. Breaching 4+ went down to 5+, though 6+ and lower Strength if you want to play it safe (you'll still be wounding Astartes on 2+, though). But that's like 33% (67% on safe mode) less effective in terms of taking down both power armor and terminator armor dudes. Gone are the days of plasma as anti-Terminator equivalent weapons. With them being bumped to 2 wounds, and now Toughness 5 means you'll have to overload your plasma gun if you want to continue wounding them on 2+ instead of 3+, they...are just not as effective anymore. Meltaguns are better anti-Terminator weapons, particularly against the new Saturnine Terminators, while plasma is...what exactly is plasma's role now?

They are high Strength weapons, so they can be light anti-tank, though I don't fancy my chances of glancing AV12 vehicles on 5+. Might give them tactical statuses, I guess. They wound infantry, most of them anyway, on 2+, which makes them more effective than boltguns, but are they really worth paying 10 points each and taking up a support slot? At least the plasma cannons (and the heavier plasma weapons) are damage 2, but they're mostly blast. The one upside, aside from the nerfed Breaching, is that rapid fire as a trait is gone now, and plasma guns can fire 2 shots from their full 24" instead of needing you to be within 12" for 2 shots. So I guess you're safer from charges, and you can make more shots at longer range now? But that's still not worth the extra 10 points and Support slot, is it?

Let me offer a hypothetical (now I'm sounding like Ultramarines, but Thousand Sons do this too because we're scholars) scenario. I have 10 Thousand Sons plasma gunners. That's 20 shots. In Heresy 2.0, with a BS4, we average about 14 hits (rounded up), and 7 of those are Breaching wounds resolved at AP2. Not bad.

In Heresy 3.0, with the nerfed Breaching, we'll only have roughly 4 Breaching shots (5 if I round up), and that's only if we overload our guns (which basically puts us back in square one). Ouch. If you want to play it safe, you can fire without overloading, and that's...2 Breaching shots. 3 if you want to round up. And you're wounding Terminators on 3+ instead, which is...well, we're ignoring those because we want to focus on Breaching shots for now, as those are what kill Terminators, and it's unlikely they'll fail their 2+ saves anyway.

However, what if I tell you there's a way to make them decent? Thanks to my scholarly tendencies and my legion being Thousand Sons, I might perhaps have a way to make plasma guns for us work a little more efficiently than they did in Heresy 2.0. That doesn't mean they're worth it, mind you. If you think plasma was decent in 2.0, then hell yeah, this works out. If you don't because you think Breaching 4+ is still bad, then...well, nothing has changed, except that plasma is slightly better for my Thousand Sons.

Huh? What are you talking about? You may ask. Well, with the newly updated Prosperine Arcana, I present to you the Corvidae's Fated Shots Blessing. Sure, you run the risk of Perils of the Warp, but thankfully I'll just shunt them off to my Castellax-Achea, which retains his ability to take the hits for us when we peril, but let's run the math for now. Fated Shots gives us Rending 5+, which means we automatically wound on hit rolls of 5s and 6s, and these wounds count as being resolved as 6s. Which means they count as Breaching wounds. Hell, yeah.

So what does that mean, mathematically? It means that out of 20 hits rolls, about 7 of them automatically breach. Just the Rending hits alone make us equal the average tally of Breaching wounds in 2.0! The remaining 7 hits will produce another 2 wounds, which means you average about 9 breaching wounds at AP2. That's 2 better than Heresy 2.0's 7! If you play it safe, it goes down to about 8 wounds, which means no-overload does 1 more than the number of Breaching Wounds in Heresy 2.0, without the risk of blowing yourself up (but with the risk of perils, which is mitigated by Castellax-Achea, but you're paying an extra 80 or so points on top of that).

So...are plasma weapons worth it with Corvidae's Fated shots? It depends on whether you thought they were worth it in 2.0. If you didn't, nothing has changed and you can continue to avoid plasma. If you didn't mind the Breaching 4+, then you can play your plasma tactical support squads as Corvidae to get a slightly better number of Breaching wounds than in 2.0!