I'm not sure, though here they mention Devastators having repair kits. And of course, the class with the repair kit is usually the go-to class for crewing vehicles. I'm sure you can see where that would go. Thus, why I think we should take a serious look at just what players should be able to bring with them when they get inside a tank.
3 post down Steven say that it's temporary for testing purposes but dunno, I think someone said that they wouldn't allow that but dunno who or where lol. We can ask on todays stream.
If you are rolling around with 5 guys, you should have an advantage over a 'pure' tank pilot who only has a driver (and possibly a secondary weapons gunner), the issue here isn't the ability to bail but the fragility of tanks (or overpowered nature of the lascannon, eitherway). Slowing down bailers isn't going to fix 5 devastators with lascannons obliterating vehicles. Even with a 5 second delay (which I would say is on the extremely long end of waiting time) on exiting a vehicle, unless your tank can destroy theirs before that 5 seconds is up, you are gonna die to the lascannons anyway. They are going to have to be very careful about how they balance such powerful, longrange and accurate AT weapons because they can very easily come to dominate the battlefield making vehicles obsolete. I'd personally prefer lascannons be available only to the hero/elite classes rather than rank and file devastators since they are so incredibly powerful.
las cannons main usages should be taking out vehicles and terminators and walkers. bolters are for killing light infantry, or shot guns, or autocannons, o ya i love me some auto cannons.
When it comes to tank armour GW uses two ideas. The Glancing Hit - which is like a weapon slowly chewing through armour until it finds or creates a weak spot to hit something vital inside. This also has a good chance of immobilising an armoured vehicle. The Penetrating Hit - which represents a weapon that can punch through armour either because its that powerful or found a weak spot. So when it comes to a Rhino, a Heavy Bolter (and to a certain extent all bolters) can only chew through the front and side armour. But they can get a chance (1-in-6) to punch through the rear armour (probably because of the ramp). But a Lascannon can just punch through a Rhino's armour with a 2-in-3 chance of penetrating the front and side armour, plus a 5-in-6 chance through the rear armour. As for the Annihilator Predator, I would point out that due to the it fires it technically has 3 Laser weapon systems. One on each sponson, each equal to the troop carried Lascannon, and the turret system which has two Lascannons firing as one.
The problem is with that is that it is very complicated to add that to a comp game, it's quick and easy when you use dice rolls to determine accuracy/pen etc. With a game like EC players are doing the aiming so to get the non-penetrating shots means you have to give the frontal armour of vehicles different armour thickness stats and all weapons penetration stats which the server then has to keep a track of and determine whether a shot pens or doesn't. It works in WoT because the battles are limited to 15v15 but it'd very quickly become a resource hog on the server when it has 100 tanks and 300 infantry are fighting and it has to calculate pen for every single shot that will hit the vehicles.
basically we have demostrated how space marine can be so powefull in the lore 20-30 space marine can devastate endless number of enemy armored tank in the middle of a big confused battle. space marine carry on troops weapon tath other army like imperial guard use on enplacement or tanks. i think that the solution for balancing can be give frontal armor absurd resistance, and back estreme weakness. something like 20 lascannon frontal hits for a predator, 5 hits side and upper, 2 or 3 rear armor. so if a squad of 20-30 player With heavy weapon manage to ambush an armored zerg can devastate 10-15 tanks before the zerg reacts. but if the same squad make a frontal assault they can destroy 1 tank before the zerg notice. that make skill tactics >>>>>> "we use LOLCANNONS tactics" (also i suppose that a multimelta can one shot or almost a tank if hit the back but only the back) at the same time tank are powefull but only if they get a good support from troops or bike that avoid the backstab.
Since Gagoc reminded me: I'm rather curious to see how twin-linked weapons (we can use lascannons for this example) will be handled. Do you think they'll count as two lascannons, or one extra-wide beam? I know the question sounds silly, but AFAIK, they actually behaved more like the latter on TT for quite some time; this led to them being more reliable to hit, but doing underwhelming damage compared to what was expected.
As someone who abused the hell out of the Lascannon in Space Marine TPS I can safely say that it shouldn't be in EC in the same form. It was overpowered as hell in SM TPS.
