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Epic: Hive Development Thread

Call me old fashioned, but myself and the group that I play EA with have "only ever" interpreted the rule as, "you fire the slow fire weapon, no matter how many shots, you can't fire it next turn."

To me that's the spirit of the rule regardless of the Warhound Titan or not. Why does everything have to be gray and not black or white?

Because the rules are written by humans who accidentally leave things out, or accidentally cause rules interactions they didn't intend.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

Yes. FAQs aren't intended to be hard, fast rules that can or should be parsed out in detailed interpretation. They are general explanations. Sometimes they can be specific but often they depend on context.

In this case, the question was in one of the early, Fanatic Mag FAQs and that just happened to be how the question was submitted. It was about Warhounds, because at the time, the Warhound's plasma gun was the only weapon in the game that raised the issue. The answer addressed that question directly, as it was asked. It didn't occur to anyone to editorialize it into a general concept.

Just because 6 or 7 years ago that happened to be the sole occurrence of the issue doesn't mean the answer should apply only to that specific situation.

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In fairness, I think this is not an unreasonable interpretation based on the way the rule is written.

The mechanic of spreading multiple, slow-fire shots over several turns to provide consistent firepower instead of on/off functionality goes back at least to SM/TL. I think a large number of the playtesters were old hands and we pretty much all went into it with that assumption. My memory is like swiss cheese most of the time, but I can't recall this question ever coming up until after publication, when new players were coming into the game "cold" as it were. From the questions raised, it's obvious the text that made it into the rulebook is somewhat ambiguous.


Because writers are human. Because GW philosophy is to write the rules to be entertaining rather than dry, legalistic rules. Because even among dedicated playtesters, minor issues can be interpreted differently for literally years and simply never come up in conversation.

I guess my logic in my statement is everything has to have a "give and take". You want to use that awesome cheap weapon, then you have to give something up for it. To me it seems the way it's being interpreted on the EA community now is kinda like the whole "have cake and eat it too" mantra.

Boring...

Well, choosing 1-1-1-1 has a built in "give" for the "take."

Based on the way the game works, the "alpha strike" shot is almost always preferable. You want to disable as much of the enemy as quickly as possible. Plus, choosing 2-0-2-0 firing pattern gets you more fire in a 3-turn game - 4 shots instead of 3 (or in the very rare 5-turn game, 6 instead of 5). I've even seen people plan to alternate shooting and assault, because on the "off" turns they give up less firepower by choosing to assault.

The only time you wouldn't want to alpha strike would be in the case of an overkill, and how often is that really going to happen with 2 shots?

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Edit: And for the record, all the titan weapons take that into account. The slow-firing weapons earn their value based on the alpha strike ability, not by consistent fire. Non-slow-firing weapons pump out more damage turn-over-turn and over the long haul. The plasma weapons trade "damage now" for total damage over the long term.