Hard to wound or Armor which do you prefer

[Nutcase168]

As a Leveticus player I have a ton of options in my lists but one of the common choices for me is a model with armor or hard to wound.

So I figured I'd ask which you prefer.

I think hard to wound anything always is better than armor 1. But when you hit armor 2 or more it gets a little more interesting.

the question then comes down to negative flip versus damage reduction.

So what does everyone prefer(can't think of anything with both)?

[Dark_Trainer]

Hard to wound by far. Armor is nice but focus fire can really bring many of those down. Although I admit ARMOR 2 is pretty nutty.

[Nutcase168]

The interesting thing is against models with higher damage like a mature neph who IIRC is 4/5/6 with hard to wound (barring a joker) the damage is 4/5/6 but with armor 2 the damage is 2/3/4.

In general I would agree that HTW is better but armor has its merits.

[greenstuff_gav]

not to mention Hard To Wound wound flips can't be cheated...

[Nutcase168]

Well then can be if you get it back to even.

If you charge, it would offset hard to wound 1 barring any negative flips from the difference.

[Ropetus]

I've been thinking the same thing lately, except with Death Marshals vs. Guild Guard. It really depends on the situation. One thing to consider that with average Cb vs. average Df, the most common hit is one with .

Armor 2 we can leave out of the discussion, that is clearly much better than any Hard to Wound. I shall analyze this with different damage ranges:

Versus weak weapons, like 1/2/4 or 1/3/4, I think I would prefer Armor 1. As the hit will most likely be a hit with , Hard to Wound makes it only slightly more likely to score only weak damage. However, it is not that unpropable to get moderate. Armor 1 reduces Dg to 1/1/3 or 1/2/3, which is better than with Hard to Wound. Weapons with minimum damage of 2 turn this even more into favour of the model with Armor 1.

Medium damage weapons, like 3/4/6 I think I would still prefer Armor. Turning it to 2/3/4 is better than having much higher chance to score weak Dg, which is equal to Armor moderate damage. This is especially true if the model has a moderate amount of Wd, like 6 on those basic Guild grunts. With Hard to Wound you will surely be dead after 2 hits, with Armor you might survive one more. Armor gets only better when the model has more Wd, since then it will grant you more extra Wd.

Against high damage like 4/5/6 I don't think it makes much difference. Weak (Wd < 7) models will still die in 2 hits for sure. However, consider a model with 7 or 8 Wd (quite common) and Armor 1 grants you the possibility to survive an extra hit. This gets even better with more Wd.

Against some weird weapons, which score insane damage on moderate/severe, like 2/3/6 or Leveticus' 0/1/12 of course Hard to Wound is better. However, I don't think there are too many weapons like that in the game and most of those have their ways to bypass Hard to Wound and/or Armor.

This analysis changes a little depending on the model's Df and the attacker's Cb. With high Df, Armor becomes better since the damage flip will more likely have a . Against high Cb Hard to Wound is a little better I think since it stops them from getting a that easily. Many of the more dangerous attackers have high Cb so Hard to Wound is maybe better than presented here. However, I'm not sure if it really matters if you have either when facing your opponent's best fighters.

There are two important things to note: damage from other sources than damage flips and Blast generating attacks. Against direct damage sources Hard to Wound does not help, but Armor does. Against blast weapons Hard to Wound is better since your main goal is preventing them from cheating damage to produce blasts. I think direct damage sources are more common than blasts (Sonnia, Nicodem and Raspy are the only ones commondy employing the latter).

I think I would take Armor 1 any day over Hard to Wound 1. However, Hard to Wound 2 vs. Armor 1 I'm not sure.

And one thing to consider is that there are more effects that ignore Armor than effects that ignore Hard to Wound.

-Ropetus

Edited July 12, 2010 by Ropetus

[Monkey]

Looking at one attack on a unit is not quite right. If you also look at out comes from Med and sv damage that have blasts then hard to wound causes the attacking player have to spend alot more resorces to get a straight flip so that they can cheat for the damage to get blasts off.

I would go for hard to wound every time over armour 1 as its provides very close to the same protection as armour and it makes your opponants attacks more resorce heavy.

[Ropetus]

As I stated, Hard to Wound gets a lot more value if your opponent relies on blast attacks. However, there are not too many of those in the game and definitely less than direct damage pulses or other such things. Armor helps against those but Hard to Wound does not.

Overall I think they're quite equal and the difference is very minor in most cases. Hard to Wound makes weak damage much more common compared to Moderate or Severe. On the other hand, on most weapons, Armor 1 turns Severe into Moderate, Moderate to Weak and Weak to Weak minus (unless Weak damage is already 1). This is not the case with weird weapons with differences of more than 1 in the damage ranges but those are not very common.

The correct way to play vs. Hard to Wound is not to pour your resources to overcome it anyway. Instead, try buffing you Weak damage up through means like Critical Strike and damage buffs and laugh as the Hard to Wound model suffers. When your damage is 4/5/6, you don't really care about Hard to Wound anymore.

-Ropetus

[Nutcase168]

@Ropetus Thanks for the nice insight to the discussion. I hadn't gotten the chance to write mine out yet.

That way I was looking at it, things with lower def probably prefer Hard to wound since there is a greater chance for the flip to be even meaning the opponent could increase the damage.

Armor on higher def models is better has the flip is likely already negative.

And that's for HTW 1 or armor one. Armor 2+, HTW 2+ is a whole other category. I can only think of 4 things with armor 2+

[jmp_mydog]

I prefer hard to wound over armor, other than when that neg flip is the red, than I wish for armor.

[Chucklemonkey]

Hard to Wound for me.

Purely Psychological, in that it is hindering your opponent earlier in the process, as opposed to when you are taking the damage.

[Rathnard]

Hard to wound is good until you get hit by a weapon with a high weak damage. Then I'd much rather have armour.

Edited July 12, 2010 by Rathnard

[tenabrae]

Armour any day. It's easy to get neg flips on the enemy damage... there's no way to manipulate damage mitigation.

As Ropetus mentioned, there's a whole bunch of ways to do damage that aren't flips (blasts, auras), no level of hard to wound will save you then.

Armour also protects you outright from some effects (such as the +1 damage buff gamin provide).

Edited July 13, 2010 by tenabrae

[Headcase2]

Armour for me, if I could pick between two models that are identical except for those 2 traits. Armour just helps out in more situations, and nearly always helps (unless your opponent is fielding things that bypass armour, but those often hit like a ton of bricks anyway and will laugh at your Hard to Wound). Also, Hard to Wound is still flips; play this game long enough and you'll face a :-fate:-fate that comes up severe. And don't forget that the odds of that red joker coming up are a lot higher if you continuously flip 3 or 4 cards for damage.

[HopelessHeretic]

Armor for me but maybe that is just cause I messed up juju the other day with spiders and an electrical creation. Then when he came back alyce killed him with a red joker due to the . Maybe I am biased because I play Ramos but armor is just more consistent and any time I can randomness out of my battle plan I will.

-Heretic

[PanzerKraken]

As a guild player I find Hard To Wound better at least it is when my opponent has it. I've had such a hard time taking out Hard to Wound heavy armies like Sheamus and his undead hookers who I have to plink away it seems always. Armor is usually easy to get past if your guild since so much of our stuff has Critical Strikes and average armor is 1 so it kinda evens out.

[dgraz]

I have to agree with Headcase2, there aren't many things that ignore armor - Johan, Taelor, and Ronin jump to mind - they also pretty much don't care about HTW. Johan & Taelor have high weak damage anyway and Ronin get the +1 twist for the sword so they negate HTW.

When I put my Peacekeeper on the board, the above models are the only ones I really worry about. Otherwise he is a tank. Someone mentioned HTW using up the opponent's resources - when you have to bang on a model 6 times instead of 2 or 3, that's wasting resources IMO.