Barrage Weapons and Night Fighting

[Lord Zarkov]

"To determine whether a unit wounded by a Barrage weapon is allowed a cover save, and when determining Wound allocation, always assume the shot is coming from the center of the blast marker, instead of from the firing model." BRB; Pg 24, second bullet.

I can bold things too!

The line is fairly clear IMO, you only use the centre of the template for wound allocation and cover saves, but not for any other purpose - such as granting special rules as is the case here.

Lets do a thought experiment: say a unit had a special rule that if they took hits from a model within 12" they dealt the firing model a S4 hit. Would this always be triggered by barrage weapons?

[Bubble Ghost]

Lets do a thought experiment: say a unit had a special rule that if they took hits from a model within 12" they dealt the firing model a S4 hit. Would this always be triggered by barrage weapons?

Well, you just made the Telekine Dome psychic power a lot more interesting, that's for sure.

[Mandragola]

"To determine whether a unit wounded by a Barrage weapon is allowed a cover save, and when determining Wound allocation, always assume the shot is coming from the center of the blast marker, instead of from the firing model." BRB; Pg 24, second bullet.

I can bold things too!

The line is fairly clear IMO, you only use the centre of the template for wound allocation and cover saves, but not for any other purpose - such as granting special rules as is the case here.

Lets do a thought experiment: say a unit had a special rule that if they took hits from a model within 12" they dealt the firing model a S4 hit. Would this always be triggered by barrage weapons?

The rule you quote would not result in stuff like lychguard reflecting barrages. It applies for the purposes of wound allocation and cover saves. Nothing else.

You can read this either way. Shrouding is either not covered because special rules aren't covered, or it is, because it grants a cover save and cover saves are mentioned.

Personally I don't think models in the dark should get shrouding against barrage weapons, or blasts for that matter. Darkness would have very little effect on the accuracy of such weapons, which dont need to be targeted particularly accurately.

[Capt._Jaelinek]

Let's consider a few points here regarding cover saves. Firstly you do not need to be 'in cover' to receive a cover save. For example, you could 'Go to Ground' and get a cover save completely in the open. This save would work against a barrage as the barrage does not ignore cover it just measures cover from the center of the hole.

Another instance is Night Fighting. You get either shroud or stealth dependent on your distance from the firing unit. The firing unit still needs to select a target which takes precendence on the night fight rules. As has been argued above the center hole is used to determine if the model is in cover, but I don't see anywhere that says measure night fight range from the center hole. How does this make any sense?

GW elected to grant cumulative cover saves for the night fight rules as opposed to using a different mechanism (such as negative modifiers to his like in Warhammer Fantasy). Unfortunately, this creates a few gaps in the rules in certain instances. Night Fight and Barrage weapons is one instance of gray rules interpretation. I believe that Dark Reapers exarch power Crack Shot ignores cover outright, so the exarch has some form of night vision?!

I will play it that during night fight barrage weapons allow standard night fight cover saves while other cover saves will follow standard barrage rules.

[Necronartum]

Jaelinek and the others have got it spot on.

Cover saves award by the Night Fighting rules are unaffected by Barrage weapons. The rules specifically state that the two special rules would grant a cover save in the open, ergo only cover saves that had been modified by existing physical cover would be affected. So a unit behind a wall that would usually get a 2+ save would now only get 4+. The argument that Barrage weapons should ignore this on grounds of 'reality based reasoning' is silly. The cover is designed to represent any firer's ability to draw a clear aim to his target, not represent the loss of actual accuracy of the weapon being fired.