Heavy Weapons Squad

Ah yes, the heavy weapons squad.

Many of you have them.

Let's take a look at them in depth.

Many of you are wondering if the 'nerf' that hit them makes them worth taking.

The 'nerf' is they are now a 2 wound model.

For the record, IG players--you brought this on yourselves.

Years of endless whining on how to remove casualties and count template/blast hits, have not gone unnoticed by GW.

While not as 'gamey' as before, it's a pretty simple change that eliminates all that bs.

You also should be getting 4+ cover saves most of the time, and with only a few armies having across-the-table heavy firepower...you shouldn't bitch, be happy you can still use them without having to run them in big infantry squads.

For 60 points (plus upgrade costs), you get 3 teams.

Each team gets one big gun.

Mortar. If you bring a lot of these, everyone will be annoyed when the game slows to a crawl. However, small numbers aren't exactly effective.

Heavy Bolter. It's a heavy bolter. It is what it is, yes? Everyone gets something like this, a moderate strength weapon for shooting at infantry.

Autocannon. A nice upgrade to the heavy bolter, costing you a single shot for +2 strength.

Missile Launcher. While it's flexible in the hands of marines and eldar, in guard hands it only feels flexible--you just can't kill vehicles with it reliably.

Lascannon. Direct anti-tank. Like the missile launcher, you need to build a foot army around giving orders with boosted LD10 in order to make these twin-linked and able to hit.

Krak Grenades. Don't ask me why these are in here.

So anyway, in a foot army you can bring any combination of these orders.

In a semi-mech army, like what I did with my DH to Guard conversion; you should bring along autocannons. They are decent against infantry, MC, and light vehicles. Which means almost everything. They are damned annoying when twin-linked via command orders.

Personally I think you should have a couple of autocannon toting units in a guard army. For 75 points, I can't complain--it fills a real need in a Guard army.