Email in: Artificer or Power Armor?

"Hey Kirby!

Me and my friend both play Vanilla Marines. We both follow your blog but we still have something that we disagree on after all the time we have spent reading article after article. This disagreement is artificer armor or power armor a better choice.

My opinion is that artificer can save you from attacks that could kill your captain instantly ( i.e. a krak missile ). When my friend was playing with his outflanking Khan army, he unintentionally separated Khan from his command squad. This lead to him being being shot down by a krak missile even though he was in cover. The 2+ Armor save in my opinion, can save you from potentially dangerous threats and only failing 1/6 armor saves is much more better than failing your armor save 2/6 times.

My friend however doesn't like it when he rolls a 1. He was playing a guard army with a biker list and charged into combat against a 30 man bubble wrap of guardsman with a full 10 man biker squad but the captain only had 1 wound left. (mass amount of plasma weaponry and unlucky 3++ cover save). The combat resulted in 1 guardsmen surviving contact. After no bikers were lost, the line guardsman miraculously wounded the captain who continued on to fail his 2+.

This is the reason why he doesn't like artificer. But he sees my logic and I see his but is artificer worth its points?

Thank you very much!

Jason"

The answer is yes & no :P. I personally rarely use it in an effort to spend those points elsewhere (i.e. more guns/bodies over a better individual). However, if you're tooling out your HQ to be a beatstick (i.e. Wolf Lords on Thunderwolf mounts) that 2+ armor save can come in handy a lot. It makes such a character even more expensive though - your basic Bike Captain is already 165 points with a Relic Blade - do you want to add more to that? A TWC Lord is 200+ - taking it closer to 300 with a 2+ armor save is nice but can sometimes be overkill.

In the end there isn't really a "right" answer. I'd recommend generally not taking it if you can spend the points more usefully elsewhere but if you're finding you've got some extra points left over, Artificer Armor (or the equivalent) isn't a bad choice and does have some obvious advantage (laughing at AP3 weapons, 16.666% improved save, etc.).