Vindication for the Vindicare

A long long time ago, a gentleman called ‘JohnnyCache’ asked:

“I would like to see a breakdown of my likelihood of stopping a vehicle with the 4d6 turbo-penetrator round from the vindicare covered in your excellent mathblog, because I am looking at it and it looks like (assuming he hits the vehicle) he will glance-or-better armor value 10 9 time out of ten? And glance-or-better av 14 over half the time?”

I sent him a quick response without writing an article, and didn’t think anymore about it until today, where I realised that I had completely misinterpreted the vindicare’s tank killing capability.  So firstly apologies to JohnnyCache, but better late than never, right?

I’ll frame the discussion with one of my more traditional questions:

How many marines with lascannons would you need to equal the Land Raider killing potential of one vindicare turbo penetrator shot?

The Vindicare has long been one of my favourite models both in terms of looks and rules.  What a badass.  In the current ruleset the Vindicare is BS8, and has a special ammo type called ‘Turbo Penetrator’ that has 4d6 for armour penetration.  When I responded to JohnnyCache, I basically provided the following:

Which basically proved his maths correct, 55% chance of glancing or better on AV14, 90% chance of glance or better on AV10 (assuming you hit).  But it was only today that a few additional details popped into my head.  Number 1, his weapons are marked as ‘Sniper‘, so they get a Strength of 3 to add to that 4d6, giving us the following:

The AV14 penetration result rockets up to over 75%!  But wait, there’s more: ‘Sniper’ weapons are also rending, so any roll of a 6 on penetration gets an additional d3 to penetration – combined with the Str 3 bump we get the following:

As you can see these combine to form a major boost to the previously predicted tank busting power.

Looking back to my setup question, the Vindicare is BS8 (approx 91% chance to hit), penetrates AV14 79% of the time, and the weapon is AP1 so it adds +1 to the damage roll.  End-to-end odds of killing a Land Raider? approx 37%

How many devastators with lascannons does that equate to? Well with BS4, S9, and AP2 you would need 12 lascannon-toting marines to get the same odds of a kill.

In my opinion, for 145 points, he’s a steal.