Today, I'd like to take a moment to talk about an issue that might affect a number of people's games. That is the issue of causing
too many wounds in melee.
What? Causing too many wounds! Are you serious?Why yes. Here's a situation that has happened to me, not once, but
twice over this past year. Your opponent is fielding space marines or chaos space marines -- all with a 3+ save. On the other hand, you and I are fielding chaos daemons (example
army list here). To be more precise, I'm going to talk about a squad
daemonettes in particular, as this is the context that it happened in. Although I've talked about the
relative merits of daemonettes before, the key to this particular situation is to note that daemonettes have the rending special ability and can therefore by-pass the marine's 3+ save with some fortuitous die rolling.
After having a lot (well ... a round or two, at any rate) of hand-to-hand combat, there are only a few miniatures left on both sides. Let's suppose that the opponent has two marines left, and the daemon player has several daemonettes remaining.
If our daemonettes manage to hit the marines a few times and then go on to cause 2 rending wounds, then there is assuredly only 1 possible result: 2 marine casualties.
But consider this. If our daemonettes cause an additional "normal" wound, then the two marines can allocate the wounds how they like. Unless my opponents and I have completely mis-read the hand-to-hand combat rules, the sensible opponent should allocate 2 rending wounds to one model (meaning 1 automatically dead marine) and the "normal" wound to the second marine. Chances are that the second marine will then make his ordinary 3+ save and survive. Hence by causing more wounds, we have placed ourselves in a worse situation than would have happened if we had
only caused 2 full rending wounds....!
So as a chaos daemons player, I now tend to take daemonettes in slighter larger squads than I have been doing. If I'm going to cause more wounds than required, then I want to make sure that I cause many, many, many more wounds than are required rather than just a pesky extra wound or two. Perhaps a longer term solution would be for the next core rules re-write to explicitly talk of allocating "no-save" wounds before other wounds? (Although I'd be totally impressed if a GW staff writer was reading this and took notice!)
