Alrighty....

Quick question out there for the rules lawyers. Since I don't know this off the top of my head and I did not have my book with me, I have to ask...

If I have a unit of 7 eldar guardian stands and one farseer stand and I take 9 hits, must I allocate 2 of the hits to the farseer stand even though he is in back of the formation.

I had a game last night and my opponent caught my guardian formation out in the open (Yeah I know...bad tactics) and fired upon them causing exactly 9 hits. With my formation at 8 stands and 7 which do not get a save, should I have to put the 9th hit on the farseer unit that actually has a 4+ save? I'm not trying to be cheap, but from my interpretation of the rules, casualties are taken from "front to back", which translates to hits taken are also "front to back". Am I wrong on this?

My opponent actually wanted to argue that and I wasn't about to let him spoil the night, so I agreed (under protest which I kept to myself) to put the 9th hit on the stand...(which brought the farseer down unfortunately with the invulnerable save."

Hits are applied front to back. Everyone in the formation would take one hit, then the leftover hit would be applied to the unit at the front of the formation. You cycle through front-back over and over again until all hits are applied.

You don't check saves until all hits have been applied, so the fact that the guardians have no save isn't relevant.

As Zombo says, for normal shooting you allocate 8 hits front-to-back and the 9th gets put on the front stand. This means that potentially a guardian gets killed twice

If your opponent had some MW hits to allocate as well, these get placed after the normal hits are resolved so would all land on the Farseer assuming he survived (using his invulnerable save to survive)

Note, Barrage rules differ slightly in that you need to roll separately for each unit under the template (so the Farseer can still be hit no matter where he is placed)

That's what I thought too...Oh well. Next time I'll have to bring that to light. Would have been a doozy to see the Avatar rip him a new one in the next turn.

Thanks for the response guys!