It always bugged me from 3ed onwards seeing players throwing their cannon-fodder units against the Avatar and routinely succeed in pummelling him to death. Even a combined platoon of Guardsman should be no match for Khaine or a daemon prince and armies should be punished for such recklessness. Such monstrous warriors should be shot to death and if that doesn't work, send in a hero. It's what they exist for, not butchering some hapless mortar squad.
someone like a Succubus or an Avatar should be untouchable to all but highly trained fighters.
No no no! This is all wrong, the whole
point is that you can bring down a heroic creature by weight of numbers!
Don't be fooled by cartoons, it's not that hard to land a blow on someone. Even in Kung Fu movies (where things are highly stylized) most of the fighting involves blocking blows rather than dodging them outright. The 40k to-hit chart reflects this, even against a DE Wych Succubus, when there are ten of you and you're leaping out from behind rocks and bushes, you're going to land some blows; even if they could dodge all of someone's punches, with that many someones, there's nowhere to dodge
to. Or in the case of the Avatar, yes it possesses the martial skill of a god, but it's a giant metal statue! Do you really think a full platoon of guardsmen would be unable to land more than a handful of blows? Ridiculous!
Also, don't forget that close combat takes into account more than just fists. There are grenades, point-blank shooting, and a whole gamut of things that skills in hand-to-hand combat would not protect you against.
Plus, the other stats involved in CC cover a lot of the issues and occurrences that the detractors in this thread are thinking about. Yes, a wych would be able to dodge many of her opponent's blows... and look, she has a 4++ save that represents what? Oh yeah! Likewise, an Avatar probably
could walk through a full platoon of IG (as long as they didn't have a bunch of JOs with fists
) because even though the crush of bodies would mean that the Guardsmen could land some blows, they still have, what, like a 5% chance to wound after to-wounds and saves?
Khaine and IanC covered it pretty well, I think. The current system is fine unless you want the game to be based mostly around incredibly powerful hero units. Which I certainly don't, they're already powerful enough, if you ask me. If you think it's not "realistic" enough, then it's more likely that you're just not being imaginative enough about what's actually happening in CC than that there's a flaw in the basic mechanic.