Plasma vs. Melta: The Great Debate

Hey all, so I recently posted an article on the changes in the meta and what direction I see vanilla marines going towards, which is a very sternguard and thunderfire cannon heavy list. Specifically I wanted to drop in the sternguard so that they would not get shot up or thrown from a transport before they got to midfield with the ability to fire. Yet I was doing this with plasma guns instead of the common melta guns. The reason for this is that these guys purpose is to drop in and deal with enemy troops on foot by using their plasma and special ammo, not to take down vehicles, yet I will say one of the sternguard units did have melta weapons. I also did this because I really do not see many vehicles in the game anymore other than a few heavy backfield choices. Since it is the goal of these guys to be midfield presence and not suicide melta I wouldn't really consider changing them. Yet this does set up a hot debate on which is more useful to pack into our squads these days, plasmaguns or meltaguns?

Now some melta in every list is very important and we cannot ignore the use of it overall as that occasional land raider will give us fits. Yet for the standard squad which will be more important? Common marine units were small and generally couldn't fit in a special weapon yet if they could at any point it would be melta. Yet now the game is changing and mech is virtually being burried alive. We now have rhinos, if any transport, with full squads trying to grab up a good spot around midfield in order to lay down dakka down field from full 10 man units. In this roll plasma seems to have the upper hand. Also with the rise in terminators AP 2 rapid fire weapons could be more important than ever. So realistically we need the ap2 shots at a longer range. Occasionally you might run into a raider list yet if you do it will be limited and probably weak handed. So personally with the rise of MM attack bikes I would just leave the anti-raider rush to these guys.

Now it does come down to your local meta as always but if you do see the lists I have noticed starting to come to fruition on the web and in the stores plasma does seem to be replacing the standard melta gun in 70% of units. Now I will state since they cannot be snap fired I do not really see plasma cannons being used compared to multi meltas....yet again it all depends on squad role....more on this later

(Thanks for reading, please comment on what you think but keep an open mind to plasma. Also please subscribe to be eligible for future possible giveaways I may be doing)