Rick: With the release of the Boromite Brood Mother I was reminded of a pending Q&A enquiry about units that comprise both heavily armoured and ordinary models. For example, the Boromite Brood Mother and her attendant swarms of Hatchlings, or the Ghar Bombardment Crawler and its Scutters.
The question arises because units that have a Resist roll of 11 or greater once modifiers have been applied are ‘heavily armoured’ and don’t take pins where they pass all their Resist rolls. So, a Ghar Bombardment Crawler with its Res of 13 could be hit by plasma carbines with their Strike Value of 2, leaving it with a Res of 11. In such a case, only rolls of 10 would fail, so if the Bombardment Crawler successfully passes all of its tests it doesn’t suffer a pin. On the other hand, targets with a Res value of 10 or less once modifiers have been taken into account always takes a pin when shot at and hit, regardless of whether Res tests are passed or failed.
Obviously, our Brood Mother as with the Bombardment Crawler will count as heavily armoured in many situations, while the accompanying models with their much lower Res values wouldn’t count as heavily armoured were they units in their own right. So, where both the heavily armoured model and other ordinary models are hit, does the unit take a pin on account of the ordinary models being hit? For example, if a Brood Mother’s Hatchlings are hit does the unit take a pin? Similarly, if an ordinary model is hit and fails its Res test does the unit take a pin, even though the heavily armoured model hasn’t failed its Res?
The answer to this one is that the unit doesn’t take pins so long as the heavily armoured model passes all of its Res tests. It doesn’t matter how many Hatchlings meet their maker, or how many Scutters explode in flames, the unit is a heavily armoured target as far as allocating pins goes.
Of course, should the heavily armoured model fall casualty leaving only ordinary models, then the unit will suffer pins just like any other ordinary unit. The chances are that these ‘hangers on’ will perish long before their heavily armoured compatriot falls casualty, but you never know, even the most mighty can succumb to a well-aimed plasma bombard and a few lucky dice rolls.
The thing about these help-mate models is that they are there to help out or augment the heavily armoured model at the heart of the unit. If adding them to a unit made it vulnerable to pinning it would become possible to add any number of pins onto a vast creature such as a Brood Mother by shooting away its hatchlings. That might annoy our Brood Mother but it isn’t going to deter the poor creature from stomping all over you, quite a lot.
Sam Phillips