As mentioned in the battle report for this week, I fielded plasma cannons for the first time. Until now, I haven't done this, as I wasn't convinced of their usefulness, especially in light of the Gets Hot! rule, which gives a 1 in 6 chance of the weapon over heating when it fires. This means the marine gets hit by the weapons super-heated coolant as it vents to prevent the plasma exploding. An armour saving throw is needed to survive*. However, as we showed it's not too much of a problem as the marine usually passes his armour save. By taking two or three plasma cannon, the risk of losing all your heavy weapons this way is reduced further.
Lascannon are the ultimate (well, not so ultimate as they were in 2nd Ed) anti-tank weapon, at S9. Plasma cannons are S8, which doesn't make a lot of difference against lightly armoured vehicles.
Against troops, the plasma cannon is just as effective against those hit. My reluctance to use the plasma cannon was the logic that the small blast template would normally only cover one troop, assuming the enemy squad is spread out. Whilst it is generally good practice to ensure your squads are spread out to avoid ordnance/blast weapons, in practice there are always going to be cases where this isn't possible (teleporting troops for instance). Therefore you could reasonably expect to hit one model, maybe two with most shots, and if lucky three or four. Each hit is most likely going to result in a kill, even against terminators.
So, it's likely that I'll be putting the plasma cannon into the Tactical squads more often in future.
*I've seen on Warseer that some people interpret this rule as saying the weapon effectively hits the firer, and so no armour save would be allowed (AP2 weapon against 3+ armour). However, no one I've played against interprets it that way, and fluff-wise it's clear that it's coolant not an actual hit.
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