deathwatch enemies

since me, bear, and andrew have been playing deathwatch for a couple months now, i made up some enemy character sheets we use to keep track of what rules and statlines most of them have.
as a reference, when looking at the armor and statlines, a basic Deathwatch character (you) will have armour values that say 8(eight) the 2nd number is your toughness bonus, added to your armour value; when you do damage, you have to roll higher than that value to injure the opponent. every marine statline start with a value of 30 per stat, and you add 2 D10 dice values to each stat to see how good your character is at shooting, fighting, talking, thinking things out, etc.
finally, most characters you play start with around 22 wounds (every point of damage you do greater than their armour+toughness value in an attack removes 1 wound each).
so a starting character can take a total of 38 damage in a single attack before they have very very bad things happen to them (like arms or legs blown off, etc)

so here's a couple of the bad guys we have, focusing on chaos marines. we haven't used either of the 2 bosses on the bottom yet:

They look really good. Only suggestions I have are knock down the basic chaos marine str, bump up berserkers str and make the thousand sons Bolters ap9 or 10.

There's already official stat blocks for Khorne Berzerkers and Rubric Marines in the Black Crusade books, fyi.

Ll of these are made via the stats in Mark Of The Xenos, with the lords coming from First Founding. Still gotta make the thousand sons lord in that book, and there's another one for iron warriors.

Like the format, but I am not sure about how you are calculating strength as well as Mellee damage.

Usually I put chaos basic marines at 45 str base so 65 with armour powered and with a 10 str bonus.

Berserkers and characters I bump up to 60 or higher.

As it seems these are off a template, would you post a link ? Is this excel or paint or other?

I think they're doing the multiplicative Unnatural stats and not the additive that the other books use.

Nice looking templates

tnx robyn

if you read carefully through the deathwatch expansions, you'll see that these are the stats FFG gave these guys, and while looking through them, i noticed that they double the str bonus first, 'then' add the +20 str bonus for power armor. which makes more sense balance wise, because the other way gives you too high of a bonus. ex: 60 str guy, unnatural str x2, +20 for armor, = 14 as your str bonus. 60 str guy, +20 for armor, unnatural str x2, = 18 as your str bonus.

while i agree its odd that a basic guy is str 65, and a berserker is 45, look at their weapons and you'll see they did it for balance (something GW codices arent known for) since all weapons have a fixed profile that adds your str bonus to them.

example: astartes chainsword is 1D10+3+str bonus, the berserker axe is 1D10+8+str bonus. this was before they errata'd alot of the weapons. i think the current errata berserker axe is now a D10+4+str bonus.
is reversing their str stats to something i think is better than the book suggests seem like a good idea? sure, when looking at the basic stats. but dont forget what all those talents would do:
berserk charge: +20 bonus to WS when charging
frenzy: spends 1 turn not doing anything, next turn he's +10 WS, Str, Toughness, Willpower.
furious assault: pass your WS test to hit and you get a free 2nd attack.
hatred: he's +10 WS vs all deathwatch players
lightning attack: makes 3 attacks per melee round instead of 1
so now he's charged you, he's got his base 59 WS to hit you. he's got a bonus 30 WS on top of that. 89 to hit, and he gets to hit 3 times, gaining a bonus attack for each time he passes a WS test for those 3 hits. so a possible 6 hits if the GM rolled well.
i dunno about you guys, but i wouldn't want to boost the stats of a guy that can cause a possible 32*6 (192) damage to a character with only an average of 16 damage mitigation before they take wounds. that means a possible 16 wounds get through to your tiny 20-23 wound pool and now your taking crit damage. 2 hits, and you're a dead duck.
now, if the gm decides to waste the charge bonus to use frenzy, then he's hitting on 79 or less, and that +10 str bonus kicks in before you double the str, so now its a possible 6 attacks at 34*6 (204) damage.

thats a scary opponent if everything hits. dunno about you, but i think str 45 is plenty good, lol.

flip side, looking at the basic chaos marine:
he gets 2 D10+14 attacks, at WS 60 (cause of hatred), so he's doing a possible 28*2 (56) damage per round against you.

anyone watching the numbers and wondering where im getting an extra 4pts of damage per attack; you roll damage, then you add the pen value of the weapon to the result, and that's what he did to ya.

in the end, with all those bonuses from the talents the berserker has, that's why FFG made his str stat sooo much smaller than a basic marine who doesnt have all those bonus talents. when we started off and were looking at the weapons and statlines, we thought some stuff looked underpowered too, but once you take the effects of the talents into consideration, some of these guys are retardedly strong in a good combat roll.

when deathwatch was released, bolters did 2D10+5 damage, and could do S/2/4 shots. but then as the other series came out, they dropped them all to D10+9 S/3/-. why? because of all the bonuses that semi and full auto give you. every degree of success on a full auto hit gave you a bonus hit for free. (say you rolled...3 degrees: needed a 60, rolled a 30) that first shot on full auto was actually 4 hits, each doing a possible 29 damage; (116 damage total). ho-lee-crapsticks. basic bolter that kills a demon prince on the first bullet? SURE! i'll buy that!!

now, you're bolter only does 3 semi auto hits, so you need a degree of success of 2 for that free hit (need 60, rolled 40 = 1 bonus hit) so now your newb gun can do a possible 23*2 damage (46 total) on the first shot.

changing the statlines is all well and good if you're ignoring all the talent and action bonuses in combat, but if you're using them, you have to carefully think what the effect will be on that guy if you boost a stat by say, 10-20 points.

i do all the text, etc, in photoshop, but here's a blank that you could fill in the info yourself on if you have any custom characters you'd wanna make.

the image is scaled to fit 1 page, so just make sure your printer scales it properly, and it should look good on paper when you print it out.

don't add the Pen of the weapon to damage, just subtract the armor.
for one big reason;
meltagun at close range is 2d10+14 pen 24 vs a marine with 10 toughness and 10(ish) armor. if you add the pen value then it deals 2d10+18 whereas if the pen just ignores the armor it deals around 2d10+4. bit of a difference there.

in the case of a meltagun, yes, that makes a difference, but the weapons i chose for my examples were both only a pen value of 4, which is so small that theres no carryover of pen to damage. that's why i used them and added it all together.