So the last few days I've been looking for deals on ebay and considering actually building the Plasmanian Devils. Switching the 3 vindicators to 2 devistator squads with a couple other changes I'm bringing 14 plasma guns against my opponent. All well and good until I remember that they are scatter weapons and you can't mention scatter weapons on an ork blog without talking about the looted wagon.
The looted wagon and I have had a bit of a love hate relationship. I loved the looted wagon but the looted wagon hates me. It's a solid vehicle with armor 11 so it can resist bolters which the more you run trukks the more you'll learn to hate armor 10. It's also got a carrying capacity which can make it a cheaper transport for your burna boys if you can't afford (points or with real money) a battlewagon. You can also give it a skorcha to add a little more flavor to your burna boys. It can take all the usual vehicle wargear so you can add a good amount of customization. The big thing you'll see looted wagons for is their boomgun. Str 8, AP 3 and a large blast template. Not too shabby a stat line on that and it'll make marines shake in their power armor.
After many, many, many loses with my orks I realized that if you're gonna run boyz forward you're gonna need a firing base behind them to harass your opponent a little bit, a tactic employed in the shootin' and lootin' list. My initial idea was to use my looted wagon I built when I started playing and use that for support. The AP 3 really makes marine players worry about it and they'll actually spend a good amount of time shooting that instead of your guys, which has it's own advantages. However, they need not spend that time because the boomgun is rubbish. There, I said it. Ok the stats are impressive but the main thing to remember that it's being fired at BS 2 so you're probably gonna scatter pretty far. Even if your opponent is clumped together, the gun is never going to hit where you want it to. Sure it's orky to just throw explosions at your opponent but there are times where you want it to hit a tactical squad out in the open and it'll instead hit a dreadnought. This actually happened to me and even though I killed the dreadnought, I still had a tactical squad blocking me. Worse yet, the gun may end up scattering onto something like a land raider and bouncing off completely or completely miss. Never forget you can just all together miss.
Take into account it scatters 2d6 which on average is a 7. Subtract the BS and you've got the template scattering 5 inches in a random direction. Now you can roll a hit on the scatter die but you'll only get that 1/3 of the time which is maybe two turns out of the game. Think about terminators for an moment, whenever they need to make that 2+ save, the player rolls a 1. I believe the same thing applies to looted wagons. Sure you might get it every once and a while but what I'm getting at is you can not rely on looted wagon.
Looted wagons can be a lot of fun and when they work, its usually spectacular. I've killed 8 marines in a single shot and had the rest run off the board. Good day! But most of the time I fire the battle wagon, roll my dice and proceed to place my palm on my forehead. So needless to say, I don't think I'll be building the Plasmanian Devils
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