Melee and shooting are the two biggest damage-dealing phases of 40k. Unfortunately, melee seems to fall short in 40k and GW hasn’t fixed it.
If you play an army in 40k, there’s a chance it’s centered around shooting or melee. Sure, there are a few outliers like Thousand Sons, Craftworlds, and Grey Knights that can do some serious damage in the Psychic phase. But for the most part, armies really specialize in either shooting or melee. Just from a top-down standpoint of 40k over the years, it seems like shooting has notoriously been more powerful (and will probably stay that way).
3 Reasons Why Melee Isn’t As Good as Shooting in 40k
Note: I enjoy the melee aspect of 40k more than shooting. I’ve played a mix of Space Marines, Tyranids, and GSC for years solely geared around getting into melee and have almost always seen poor results. The games are fun but hardly competitive. On that note, I don’t claim to be a pro by any means. Here is a perspective based on experience.
So what are some drawbacks to melee that shooting doesn’t have?
1. Shooting Lets You Deal Damage Without Any Sacrifice
One huge part of the game, especially in ITC matches is board control. There are secondary objectives where you need to have a model in every quadrant, hold every objective, stay in your enemy’s deployment zone, and even just sit directly in the middle of the board. With all of these, positioning is key.
Where shooting comes in is that you can still position yourself on an objective and not sacrifice your damage output. If someone was playing a Khorne Berzerkers list, they might have to dedicate a melee powerhouse squad to go sit on it and basically stay irrelevant. Meanwhile, factions like Tau and Imperial Guard wouldn’t even break a sweat getting bodies on an objective and continuing to lob damage.
2. Getting Into Melee is Never a Guarantee
Another drawback to melee is that it’s never really guaranteed that you’ll even be able to get up close. The further you are away from the target, the less likely you are to get into combat. Sure, some armies like Emperor’s Children, Blood Angels, Orks, and Night Lords have ways of altering the dice, but it’s almost always in the form of a Stratagem that can only be used once per phase. Melee armies will almost always be attempting to charge with more than one unit at a time, so that is kinda restrictive.
Even if you do pop a Strat to help you get into combat (and you only get one unit in) you’re almost assisting your opponent in turning it into bite-sized chunks for them to manage. It usually just ends up in frustration as you get one unit into combat and the other three fail.
At least with shooting, if you know you’re in range and can see an enemy unit, you will be able to pump some potential damage into them.
3. Charges Get Blocked, Bullets Don’t
Even if you do make it into combat, unless you have a way of Flying, you’ll be getting bogged down on the unit in front. That’s where screens come in. Screens are a melee player’s worst nightmare. Most lists bring a ton of low-strength/high-volume dakka to make a hole big enough for melee units to get through and do work. However, it’s a coin flip if you’ll even be able to get units through. Especially against armies that bring blobs of Plaguebearers. Good luck running a football team of Paladins through them.
On the flip side, if you invested in quality shooting, you can completely ignore the screens and melt something’s face-off with Fusion Blasters/ Las Cannons, etc.
Now you might already be typing “bUT mELEe hAS AlwAYs DonE MoRe DAmaGe”
Sure, melee usually has way more consistent damage output than shooting. However, looking back at all the releases since 8th edition began, have we seen any kind of real love given to melee players? Most of it has been Primaris support where the closest thing to a melee upgrade has been Aggressors. However, with a rule like Fire Storm where they get to shoot twice if they stand still, there’s hardly ever a reason to throw them into combat.
We’re not saying that melee is completely useless in 40k. But we are saying that there are so many more variables to account for, which in turn, makes the overall value fall short compared to shooting.
With that said, one person thought outside of the box at a recent tournament and took players by surprise.
Melee as a Set-Up: Reversing the Roles For Clearing Screens
This list came from Jessie Rocha at the Barrie Bash 40k Major. For this list, it worked exactly like a one-two punch combo. some Khorne Berzerkers were loaded into Rhinos and were covered by volley fire from three Knight Despoilers. With each Knight being armed with two thermal cannons and a missile pod, basically anything with armor was as good as dead. As for the screens/objective grabbers in the enemy’s force, they only lived as long as it took the Rhinos to drop their angry bois inside. Very simple, but very awesome list.
If you know about 40k’s meta, 9 times out of 10, spammable bolter/lasgun fire is almost always used to clear screens. That opens a hole big enough for Sanguinary Guard, Smash Captains, etc. to get in and do work. However, Jessie reversed the roles and used shooting to melt problem units while he sent Berzerkers like attack dogs straight toward screens. With six thermal cannons in the list, the screens did nothing to protect their armor and Berzerkers would make short work of the squishy meatshields.
Overall, melee is in a rough spot still. Until we see some melee-centered stratagems come to the game where we can use on more than one unit, shooting will still probably have the upper hand. Especially in lists where they deploy units like they were in a parking lot…But kudos to Jessie for thinking outside the box and doing work.
What do you think about melee in 40k? Would you like to see some melee-heavy armies get Stratagems that they can use more than once? Do you prefer playing melee or shooting heavy?
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About the Author: Wesley Floyd
