Hyper armouring the front will lead to the reverse problem, AT weapons just don't feel effective. By all means, having better armour on the front is a good incentive to flank/ambush tanks but not in the extreme form you suggested. 8/6/4 (front/side/rear) shots to kill is a more reasonable approach, with the frontal armour being twice as effective as the rear.

I agree for the most part, but I suggested earlier that lascannons be limited to the elite/hero classes so they can still be incredibly powerful without it being able to be spammed in huge numbers. It's a nice compromise to keep the weapon in the game without breaking balance.

Already impossible and most of all - breaking the lore. How do you imagine devastators or havocs without lascannons? This is like a Khorne Berzerker without a chain sword\axe. It's enough to make it hard to unlock + make it cost a lot of rp to equip.

I'm sorry but the quintessential devastator/havoc uses a heavy bolter not a lascannon. The lore of 40k is going to be bent (or broken) to keep things balanced and playable. The lascannon is an incredibly powerful AND easy to use weapon, if you think players aren't going to exploit this (regardless of req cost) then you are hopelessly niave.

Within 2 weeks of launch people will have found the 'really op' weapons, by the end of the first month the 'slightly op' weapons will be known and by the end of the second month the games overall meta is going to slowly settle (all of this is assuming there aren't any major balance patches).

Players want efficiency, they want kills and they want to win, they are going to use the most powerful weapons available to them and devise tactics based around exploiting its advantage to it's fullest. Look at planetside, squads of players with annihilators destroyed any vehicle that came within lock-on range, lancer squads destroyed anything they could see. Look at SpaceMarine, assaults/raptors were quickly shown to be more powerful than the rest early on and, barring a few less than ideal maps, they stayed the dominant class till now. EC isn't going to be any different if lascannons (and other powerful+easy-to-use weapons) aren't kept in check.

Easy doesy. First of all, devastator\havoc with a h.bolter is not a quintesence of devastatorishness\havocness but a stereotype, lascannon is as common for these classes as afore mentioned chain sword for berzerkers or sonic weapons for noise marines. Of course some lore will be bent but it's not neccessary in case of lascannon.

The latest news from Brent assures that lascannon is going to be a powerful anti vehicle weapon and not an infantry sniper rifle like in THQ SM. It will have only 4 shots mag, 1,05 seconds delay between shots and about 5 seconds for reloading a new mag + the shot will be fired with a 1 sec delay after pressing the trigger and after that it will be very hard to change the direction of fire to ensure it will be extremely hard to use it against small and fasrt moving targets like infantry. Brent is perfectly aware of the THQ SM shortcomings and he mentioned many times that lascannon will be a primarily anti vehicle weapon.

Hence I don't see it's popularity, it won't be a noob tube or some kinda uber weapon, just an effective tool in its own scope of application and since the vehicles will be pretty scarce in EC not many players will be choosing this weapon as there will be more universal tools available like for example h;bolter or plasma cannon. So, summing up: no need to panic here.


Besides what hero or elite classes with lascannons do you know? That's not even lore bending, it'd be lore raping and EC devs are not that Slaaneshi .

Sternguards =P

The shot delay is a good start but if it 1shots infantry it's still gonna be used because infantry aren't always moving and if you're sniping you'll be looking for the non-moving targets to pick off first. It doesn't take too much practice to compensate for the delay on moving targets either, just ask any PS2 vet who used the original version of the Saron HRB. I still believe that they (and you) are underestimating how players will use these weapons when they are available in mass while also being so incredibly powerful. It's going to be a major balance issue in favour of the marines, which will attract players, and the SM's are already going to have vast numerical superiority to all but the f2waagh orks without their weapons being incredibly powerful to boot.

Lascannon must be a one shot weapon against infantry if it's to be effective against vehicles, I can't imagine a marine getting shot by lascannon and surviving it, this would be some utter bs. I think you're over reacting, there will be plenty easier to use and better weapons against infantry. Besides not only marines will have lascannons, also chaos and other races will have some equivalents. Even if there were some issues, we have alpha and beta to straighten things out. Anyway, that's much better than limiting lascannons to heroes\elites - this would be the stupidest move, heck, eeven tacticals have access to them in TT. From what I know so far I'm more than reassured that lascannons and all other weapons will function properly both: from the lore and game play balance points of view, have faith brother (and some common sense ).

I have still the idea that instead of a one shot-dead weapon lascannon shoud be oheshot-downed weapon.(that give also a stronger feeling about "it's a powerfull weapon but not the best anti infantry weapon")

WWII Online has been doing it since 2001..... with 200+ in battles. That's was on computers with less than a gig of RAM. It still has the largest persistent game world to date, with very realistic and detailed damage models for aircraft, tanks, apcs and ships. All of those vehicles fighting right along side infantry players...

And are you serious.... on your "players wouldnt want to be caught in the open in their vehicle if it was tracked... frustrating" comment. A product of the current generation's of "everyone gets a trophy/we don't keep score" mentality. Heaven forbid a game is hard or challenging. The rationale only compounded and made worse by the legions of games being released in the last few years where instant gratification rules supreme, where it's nearly impossible to fail. Games that hold the hands of their players while spoon feeding them content every minute of play.

Sorry for the rant but if you're going to have armored vehicles in game, why not have them perform like they would actually perform, versus dumbing down game play to satiate the "everyone gets a trophy" crowd?

Planetside has separate resistances for different weapon types, it may break the lore a little to not have lascannons 1 shot infantry but still do normal damage to vehicles if it means they aren't used as snipers more often than AT weapons. The devs have said that the official 'sniper rifles' aren't going have the ability to one-shot players (even with a headshot) which means those who want the 1shot kill experience is going to use the next best thing, lascannons. Also, I'd just like to point out this isn't TT, it's a vastly different beast to TT. There are no turns, there is no diceroll accuracy nor dice roll saves, you are either aiming and hitting or you aren't and aren't.

I have plenty of faith that the devs will make the best game they can, but I don't like how a lot of the people on these forums think that having (semi-)perfect lore accuracy is what's going to best for an mmo-shooter's balance. There are 2 rather distinct groups on this forum, the 'hardcore' TT players and the 'hardcore' PC gaming, 40k fans and you should be using the TT players for keeping things to within the lore as much as possible and the pc gaming fans for the general balance of things within the game. The pc gamers are going to know how things are going to play out ingame because they've seen how it's happened in similar games (eg, me with my near continuous references to planetside) and how other players react to certain weapon types. I'm not saying that TT players should just be ignored, but I'd like them to remember that this isn't TT and is going to need to balanced like a shooter.


Sidenote; common sense, despite the name, isn't common. What seems like common sense for me may be ridiculous to you because we have different experiences in the matter. Eg, our disagreement on how lascannons will work once the masses of players get access to it.

200+ people in a battle, but how many tanks? I'll admit I did forget about WW2O but it's the exception, not the rule. The game was built from the ground up to be realistic, very short TTk's (most rifles will 1shot the chest iirc) and vehicles are incredibly powerful unless towed AT (or another tank) is used (or the driver derps by driving into a village/city without infantry support). The people who are going to attracted to EC aren't going to be realism freaks, they are going to be the people who've played BF, CoD, PS2 etc and they aren't going to stick if they aren't enjoying themselves.

The community now, the people who are interested in the games concept, aren't going to be the majority after release, the horde of shooter fans are. They are going to be the warring horde of orks, marines and eldar, even the amongst the organised players, we are going to be a minority, because clans/outfits/guilds are gonna jump across and give this game a shot if enough of their members push for it.

Soooo ... I recognize that 4 is a solid number of rounds, I think it's generous without allowing laser spamming that encourages the 'risky' shots like wasting them on infantry, especially factoring in 5 seconds of reload (also perfect), so 8.5 seconds (1.5*3+1*4) is the minimum time to solo a 'very stationary' Predator, with a 5 second reload taking it to a minimum 14.5 seconds if one of the 4 in the mag is wasted/inaccurate (5 rounds fired). You likely have a Predator firing on your position from round 3 on so that's probably going to take 5+ shots

I love it Brent. That's just about perfect in my opinion, which is very, very, very in favor of rewarding higher skill and smart users. I'm borderline concerned along with Blade on this issue:

2 Havoc/Devastators coordinating fire to essentially 1-shot Rhinos full of squads does seem somewhat harsh. Allowing for Smoke Launchers and Rhino drivers performing 'jinking' maneuvers during frontal assaults I can see how it may be more difficult than a tandem '1-shot' but still it seems low atm. I'd be scared to get into a Rhino personally, unless there's a good chance my squad can evacuate before the transport detonates. I await the testing/balancing patiently.

You very much deserve to get smoked. Being that oblivious to danger is a risk that snipers have to take