Tag Archives: vindicare

15 January 2012

Vindication for the Vindicare

By WarHamSandwich

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.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Probability

6 April 2011

Cut the BS

By WarHamSandwich

My last analysis on rerolls brought up a couple of questions from the audience, with comments mainly focusing on Ballistic Skill.  One in particular about the merits of the Vindicare assassin got me thinking about the how to evaluate shooting ability.  In line with my usual form, here’s a question:

A lowly guardsman stands in the open, he faces on one side, the mighty Eldar Phoenix Lord Fuegan Burning Lance (BS7) and on the other side Krazy Kullen (BS4) the weapon operator on a Chaos Rhino.  Fuegan’s melta weapon is obviously more potent than Kevin’s twin-linked bolter.  But who is more likely to miss?

Crazy Kevin

So my earlier treatise on rerolls only considered ‘normal’ rerolls where whatever you needed to get the first time was the same for the reroll.  Cunning commenter Caolan pointed out that at very high BS the shooter gets a reroll on a miss, but it’s not the same as the initial roll.  So a BS of 6 gets you a hit on a 2+, and  a 6+ reroll if you miss; BS7 gets the same 2+ to hit, with a 5+ reroll on a miss; BS8 is 2+ 4+; BS9 is 2+ 3+; and finally BS10 is 2+ 2+.

Rather than running the numbers in this post, have a look at my response to his comment at the bottom of this post.  But where I took it a step further this time is to calculate the odds to hit for BS1 to BS10 and for BS1 to BS5 with rerolls.  This gives us an interesting ranking of the relative accuracy of the BS values, and the impact of rerolls.  I’ve highlighted the rerolls in green to set them apart from the regular BS values.  The dark blue is the additional accuracy provided by the reroll (so under the dark blue is the basic odds to hit, the dark blue is the reroll, and the whole bar is the total accuracy).

Lo and behold the answer to our starting question appears before our very eyes.  It turns out that Eldar Phoenix Lords at BS7, are only as accurate as Chaos Rhinos with BS4 twin-linked bolters.  They are equally accurate. Who knew that Krazy Kullen was such a marksman?

What really comes through for me is how good BS4 rerolls are.  I’m known to have a fondness for Obliterators, and with twin-linked plasma AND melta at BS4 you can really see why.  More generally we can see that a reroll is better than a 1 point improvement (or more!) in BS for all cases except BS1 – but I think that’s a fairly well known thing already.

That said, you now have the definitive list from BS10 to 1 with rerolls, use it well my friends.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Probability

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