So, afters several months of 8th editions, what do you think about it ?
We have got plenty of data know, lots of games, many codices and errata.

Personally, I'm still enjoying it, and even if I didn't believe a word when the 8th rumor dropped, I'm happy with it.

I'm happy as a clam at high tide.

Mixed feelings, on one hand the streamlining had to happen, on the other I dont like the complete blandification of the stat lines, Weapon skill needed to stay for no other reason that all I see is "hits on 2+" for nearly all characters, who also all seem to have re roll 1's or similar, its boring.

Also the blatant lie that GW tried to sell us that they are "playtesting" with the power creep already happening and were not even a year in, once again I am thinking of just dropping 40k for 30k, which has some of the same issues but at least its not boring.

I really like the new rules system, with a couple of nitpicks. The way wounding works is really simple and effective, but it heavily favors volume of fire meaning that if you can put down masses of cheap units you can take out just about anything, while at the same time multi-hit weapons just don't do enough hits in most cases to even it out. A simple way to fix this would be to give multi-hit heavy weapons the capability for more hits when there are a certain number of models in the target unit.

Absolutely despise 8th edition, went right back to 7th., though mostly just 30k. If I had to narrow down the one thing I absolutely hate the most, it would be mortal wounds.

Still miss late 3rd edition, but this is an acceptable substitute.

I've never enjoyed an edition more than 8th (been at it since 5th).

However, I've also never been so frustrated about game design choices as I am in 8th.

Everything and it's dog having mortal wounds is my biggest frustration in this game. It removes all ownership of strategy and list building for the person eating them.

Simply telling your opponent "whelp, that unit/model is just gone and you can't do literally anything about it" is just poor design in my opinion.

That alone has me infinitely more frustrated than any Death Stars or Armor Facings ever did in 7th, because then, while the game became hardmode, I still had ownership of my own models and their survivability. Being told I simply lose this model or that, no saves or anything to be done to save it, takes that ownership away from my play. Add to the fact that smite is spammable in nearly every army (and it's often a disservice to yourself to not do so), mortal wounds leaving an army are a huge determinate factor into who wins.

If they were limited to simply "smite", unique character models, or certain relic weapons (so that they can't be spammed) I dont think this would be an issue for me. But they appear on way to many things.

However, in spite of how awful I think mortal wounds are for gameplay, the simplification of rules, the return of melee viability, and removal of scatter, combined with the other "jump in and play" quality of life changes certainly do their best to make up for it.

Just another travesty in a 10-year streak of complete failures.

Enjoying it a lot.

Everything is viable or has an use, some outliers remain, but it's not extreme like 7th.

Plays great overall, but I wish the terrain rules were a little more interesting/useful.

Enjoying it so far, but I'd also like to see a game reach round 5 and not end with tabling of one side. I think there's too much firepower in the game. Everything else looks fine.

It's good, but I feel it's a bit too random for a "skill test," like tournament games.

I was judging at a GT and saw a guy lose a baneblade t1 to a few 5-6 damage heavy weapons that then proceeded to cripple or kill tons of things around with an explosion (that he tried to re-roll with cp, but the dice said "no this thing is going up,") including knocking out his warlord. Game was over then and there.

If I were to fix issues I have with the current edition:
-put charging in the move phase a la shadow war. Makes pistols more relevant.
-reaaaaally cut down on mortal wounds. A bunch of things like rhino explosions should not be bypassing armor, toughness, and force-fields of some of the toughest things around. Also humorously, a rhino explosion is far more deadly than an orbital bombardment.

-"closest character" rule should be replaced with "can't shoot him if a unit of the same type (infantry/bike etc) is within 6". It's silly when you can't shoot a guy to your west because a guy to your east is closer.

-Several of the random shot weapons need mechanics that make them better against horde units. IE "after rolling number of shots, if the target unit has more models than that, add another d6 shots" or something. That would make those weapons more reliable vs hordes without making them super deadly against low model units.

-The most difficult fix would be a general reduction of offensive capability on turn 1. Perhaps forcing player 1 to move at least 1/4 of his deployed units to a separate "second wave reserves" (walk on if necessary) that show up t2, and don't allow their owner to be tabled before showing up. Alternatively an idea that came up before was awesome defensive stratagems that only work during the player 1's first turn, and can only be used by player 2.

-heavy weapons are a bit too random with the d6 damage roll. Played a game where my las/missile dread wouldn't stop rolling 5+ on every damage roll, and he just dominated the field. A single 140ish point unit just deleted an exocrine, swarmlord, and trygon prime over like 4 turns. And on the other hand, he could've had to spend all game working on the exocrine instead of smacking it with boxcars like I did t1. Would love to see damage a little less random like 2d3 or even just fixed 3 or 4.

I can't think of a lot else other than hoping that A: forgeworld erratas some of their junk to be less broken, and B: everybody gets a codex soon. Even with a few glaring issues, I think this is still the most fun version of the game I've played.

I have found myself getting bored with it lately. There is just something about the rules, I guess the low amount of player agency vs everything being random all the time, that just makes it not very interesting. At this point it feels like GW managed to fix almost everything wrong with the previous editions yet made it really bland in the process.

I know making the terrain rules something other than completely awful would help.

Still prefer a modified version of 2nd ed...and still think 8th is better than 7th by miles.

Sadly the "bloat" is creeping back in at a steady rate, and as a game of 40K it's as breakable as ever. Played with the right folks? It's a good time. I don't "hate" playing 40K at the moment.

I'd give it a solid 7/10. We've increased the enjoyment with a lot more common sense terrain rules, not taking janky ass lists, and skipping their scenarios altogether and making our own. So as a base set of rules, it works well enough to have fun.

I want to see what happens with the codex after Guard. If it's on par with SM/CSM/DG/GK/AdMech (though the latter is kinda lame), I'll be content and say it was a one time mistake. Otherwise I'll be disappointed in power creep happening that quick.

That said, definitely much better than 6th, 7th, and to an extent 5th.

So far it's still better than 7th, but I am really starting to look forward to seeing how much FW modifies the Horus Hersey rules.

Edit: actually I just looked through a finalized list of changes and I'm pretty much going back on this and saying we hit 7e level of broken easily.

The poll is .... Confused.
Good question but two problems.
For one thing, asking if people enjoy what brings them to this forum is pretty much a given. Yes. People enjoy their hobby. Poll results confirm!
For another, where is the option for Yes but second edition was better, or Yes but only a modified version of eighth?
I would vote Yes simply from reading this thread, actually, given that the posted opinions largely confirm my personal bias.
But then again I would vote No as I simply have had neither time nor opportunity.
Or, Yes because the hype around eighth got me back to the painting table.
Or, No because my Imperial Agents book, well let's just say that I bought an imperial agents book. Hardcover. For my birthday last January... Effn GW.

I personally enjoy it cause of the variety it has provided me as a fluff game player to allow me to customize my armies and still have them been relatively fluffy within reason and also enforce those rules in games and still make them fun to everyone involved.

I started playing February this year. 7th edition was one of the least enjoyable learning experiences I've ever had with a game. It was bloated, slow, over-complicated, unbalanced and counterintuitive. I stayed only for the models and because I'd heard rumours of 8th being on the way.

8th certainly has its flaws, but in the end I find it miles better. Balance is still way off, but it's a much smoother experience. That makes a lot of difference.

I think they should've waited a lot longer before releasing any codices, the indices were sufficient and the playing field more even. Once codices started dropping balance got worse.

Terrain is a problem, as is first turn importance, but as a casual game between friends, it works. For tournament play I'd suggest something with tighter rules and better balance, like Warmachine.

Most fun I've had in this game since, well, the start of the game. Unfortunately, things look broken with the new guard release. Seriously, it's an ill omen for things to come.

If they add more terrain rules, or the ability to get cover a bit easier, it would be for sure the best ruleset for me so far.

Still enjoying it. There's flaws that somewhat detract the experience for me when it comes to customization but otherwise I'd put it pretty well.

I'm wishing more and more to play 2nd ed with my pals. So much more diversity. Just wish some of 8th fast style play could merge backwards.

Conversely if 8th could find a way to roll less dice ....not more with bubble buffs, then it could have a glimmer of hope.

I prefer 7th, and find that 8th didn't really fix much of anything while dropping some nice bits of interest to it.

I really was enjoying 8th, was just hoping to get my codex ASAP so I could play proper games, but now the IG codex is out its knocked alot of wind out of my sails. Hoping they get addressed, the only other way to fix it is if powercreep goes into turbo mode. If they get codex wide buffs, every other army should get the same treatment. And that does not bode well for the game, immediately returning to 7th

Really not liking 8th. The core gameplay is so underwhelming and shallow now that I just have a hard time having fun. Much rather play 7th despite its insane balance issues.

Mixed, really.
I'm enjoying the basic game, aside from the oversimplified Cover and Morale rules (though I should say I'm enjoying the new Morale system more than I thought) - the sticking point is just the armies (specifically my Daemons). Even before the codex releases I hated how my Slaanesh Daemons were in comparison to every other army (and was shocked how much they felt like a different army to the one I first started half a decade ago without any real wargear options and no Deep Strike).

Aside from those first few games I played upon release I haven't played 8th since because of that.

I think I enjoyed 7th better, 8th is too simplified although there are some changes I liked.

My perfect edition would be:

Competitive Balance
Stratagems
Formations (if actually balanced)
No Mortal Wounds
Independent Characters, no look out sir
No Character Auras (makes whole armies act like deathstar units, I hate them)
Blasts rolled for like 8th, but scaling with unit size.
Variable Damage, but less random, d3+2 instead of d6, ect
8th Ed style statline + Initiative
Mandatory troops in all armies, with a focus on objective play
Getting tabled doesn't make you autolose, game plays to T5 and points are scored like normal
No Lords of War until beyond tournament level sized games
Smaller and quicker games as tournament standard

I like the streamlined rules, but I feel that it's still a cluster because GW either is lying about balancing/playtesting, or just really isn't capable of looking at things, since we've had pretty bad codex creep in a few short months. That is worrisome, but overall the game is an improvement over 7th.

We like it a lot here. The terrain rules could use some work I think. Otherwise it's been great, especially as we got used to it.

Having heard some of the stuff that's in the newest codex (Astra Militarum) I am concerned about power creep. However, it surely can't be as absurdly broken as 7th edition Eldar (specifically Warp Spiders, Windriders, and Wraithknights) or SuperFriends lists. I'm liking 8th edition better than 7th, as it seems like more stuff from each army can be competitive, rather than being forced to take some combination of a few good units. I think 8th will be much more balanced once every army has an actual codex, as the codexes seem to make armies perform much better thanks to good stratagems, warlord traits, relics, etc.

Well, its not bad.
Yesterday, I battled AdMech with my BA at the 3000 pt level. It was an enjoying game using open war. At the end, it was a draw since I wasnt able to remove his Robot unit led by Calw.
What bothers me are cover (for vehicles) and line of sight.

I like it even though my orks still such but I find a l8t of other factions upset all the time.

I am enjoying everything minus Mortal Wounds everywhere and the terrain rules.

I find it silly that unless you put a base on the GW ruins, the only way for your infantry to get cover from it is on the second floor or higher.

Was enjoying it but the guard codex has me concerned that balance may be going out the window.

Everyone in our group is enjoying it.

I'm curious as to what peoples issue with mortal wounds is though. By default I assume it's hyperbole because the odd "on to wound of 6" on the odd weapon isn't going to add up to much unless you're playing against Grey Knights and they're flinging a dozen Baby-Smites at you.

I just don't feel like outside of the psychic phase theres that many mortal wounds being caused. Certainly in all my games the shooting phase mortal wounds are reserved for like one hit from 10 ratlings or the like.

Codex armies can spam mortal wounds where index armies can't that's my issue.

hobojebus wrote:
Codex armies can spam mortal wounds where index armies can't that's my issue.

How so?

It's weird how big a deal Mortal wounds are for people. Coming from Sigmar, there's barely any in 40k by comparison. Even full smite spam armies don't do as many mortal wounds as things like Disciples of Tzeentch or Blades of Khorne do incidentally.

Best 40k ruleset yet. However, it should be the bare minimum going forward. I would want to see more playtesting, consistent balancing and a re-evaluation of the I-GO-U-GO turn system.
As it stands, going first is still way too powerful and the CP mechanic is thrown out of whack by armies that favour points-cheap units.

ERJAK wrote:
It's weird how big a deal Mortal wounds are for people. Coming from Sigmar, there's barely any in 40k by comparison. Even full smite spam armies don't do as many mortal wounds as things like Disciples of Tzeentch or Blades of Khorne do incidentally.

They're also not even new to 40k - they've existed at least since 5th and Jaws of the World Wolf, calling them "mortal wounds" just codifies the old "removed from play" mechanic.

Turning out to be equally as bad in its own way.

 Corrode wrote:

ERJAK wrote:
It's weird how big a deal Mortal wounds are for people. Coming from Sigmar, there's barely any in 40k by comparison. Even full smite spam armies don't do as many mortal wounds as things like Disciples of Tzeentch or Blades of Khorne do incidentally.

They're also not even new to 40k - they've existed at least since 5th and Jaws of the World Wolf, calling them "mortal wounds" just codifies the old "removed from play" mechanic.

And yet, GW hasn't figured out a way to cleanly delineate "kill" versus "remove from play" (the one thing of a very small number of things I feel WMH did right), as 7th was a game where Reanimation Protocols could ignore Jaws, yet Magnus got OHKO'd in his debut game by a Helfrost Destructor because its Helfrost "removed the target" but wasn't Instant Death, thus ignoring Eternal Warrior!

And of course, 8th does the same thing as you can use "Feel No Pain" (in its many whacky renamings) to ignore Mortal Wounds. Funny how that goes, no?

Getting a chuckle about all the Mortal Wound grief. Playing Orks teaches you that Saves are for Wusses.

ERJAK wrote:
It's weird how big a deal Mortal wounds are for people. Coming from Sigmar, there's barely any in 40k by comparison. Even full smite spam armies don't do as many mortal wounds as things like Disciples of Tzeentch or Blades of Khorne do incidentally.

In my case, Mortal Wounds are one of the things I hate about AoS, I dont like anything about them in principle and definately did not want to see them anywhere near 40k.

 JimOnMars wrote:
Getting a chuckle about all the Mortal Wound grief. Playing Orks teaches you that Saves are for Wusses.

I'm sure you would feel differently about mortal wounds if they actually scaled with model quality rather than demolishing elite armies while leaving hordes unaffected.

Overall I em enjoying it more than I enjoyed the tail end of 7th. The formation bonuses and deathstars had broken it and a reset was needed.

8th is not perfect but hopefully the new codices will iron out a lot of the wrinkles.

Most of the system gripes have been covered but overall I find they are not bad enough to spoil my enjoyment of the game.

8th is far from perfect but it's a lot better than 7th. We were able to finish a fairly large game in only a couple of hours tonight. Unthinkable beforehand.

7th is a weird bar to put up as a comparison, in a 'can you step over a pebble' way.

But the base game is good. The codexes seem set to drag it back down into the same old problems.

Agree.

Index 8th was some of the best weeks of 40K I ever had the pleasure to experience. Not perfect, but overall pretty sweet.

Recent Codex releases have been dumpster fires though, making 5th Ed. Grey Knights and 7th Ed. Eldar look almost reasonable in comparison.

Awkward question but, what are the codexes doing wrong?

Wonderwolf wrote:
Agree.

Index 8th was some of the best weeks of 40K I ever had the pleasure to experience. Not perfect, but overall pretty sweet.

Recent Codex releases have been dumpster fires though, making 5th Ed. Grey Knights and 7th Ed. Eldar look almost reasonable in comparison.

I don't see how this is the case. The codices have practically been a copy paste of the indexes with a couple of changes. They add in stratagems, relics, 3 psychic powers for those with psychics, and warlord traits. The stratagems are nice but situational and the rerolls, auto pass morale, and counter assault are still used far more often. Relics are normally a slight upgrade to an existing weapon and not game breaking but nice. Warlord traits add more diversity but are not game breaking. The codices make the armies with them overall stronger but not game breaking. Pretty much all of the issues and problems right now are from the indexes and went right through to the codex. I can't think of an issue that's widespread coming from a codex release. The only issue is that codex armies will generally beat non codex armies more often than not due to the extra options and their version of the "chapter tactics".

Just going by the Astra Militarum highlight of today, point reductions, doubling of shooting output, less impact of morals, army-wide re-rolls not present in the Codex. Etc.. etc... and certainly not copy & paste things.

These aren't minor changes.

Strategems and Army traits have also become consistently more powerful with each new codex. And obviously things like Chapter Tactics have without fault been badly balanced internally with some obviously better than others in the same book, resulting in less diversity than in an index-only meta.

Index versus Index was obviously not perfect and people set out (and succeeded) in breaking it very fast.

But I think if you were told no soups and build in the vague spirit of the game (which I realise is subjective and as an idea seems to really piss people off because it makes them WAACers) you generally got games where enough was up to normal luck to give the illusion of balance.

The codexes are now warping this first by creating a tier system of codex/non-codex, but secondly by increasingly damage output to a higher and higher degree.

This was already a problem but we are moving to the point where on normal dice you should expect to be wiping out 40-50% your opponents army on turn 1. I am not sure this is desirable. It might be quick but is it fun? I don't think anyone really enjoys those games.

Enjoyed 7th more. Can't say I dislike 8th, but it's just...meh. Also, way too similar to Sigmar now.

Wonderwolf wrote:
Just going by the Astra Militarum highlight of today, point reductions, doubling of shooting output, less impact of morals, army-wide re-rolls not present in the Codex. Etc.. etc... and certainly not copy & paste things.

These aren't minor changes.

Strategems and Army traits have also become consistently more powerful with each new codex. And obviously things like Chapter Tactics have without fault been badly balanced internally with some obviously better than others in the same book, resulting in less diversity than in an index-only meta.

Point reductions are generally on units that people weren't taking. I don't see the argument that turning non-desirable units into desirable ones is bad. They aren't dropping the prices of things like Scions (who got a point increase for Plasma), Conscripts (who got nerfed but in the wrong way, thanks GW), or anything else being abused. Leman Russes got a big buff because they were completely bad for their points in the index. List one tournament where you saw a single Leman Russ for IG pre-codex. This all adds up to diversity now where you actually have choices to make in what you build.

Stratagems and traits are coming for all armies. IG happens to have a very good codex as far as having meaningful choices to make. You have a huge variety of valid and competitive builds now. The codex is very strong, yes. Is it broken? Don't know. There's no need in crying broken when over half the armies haven't even gotten a codex to even be as competitive yet. When SM came out, everyone was saying how broken they were compared to other armies. Now you have other codices and even Chaos is making huge swaths in the competitive scene. Listening to a podcast earlier and Chaos came in something like 5 of the top 8 ranks. No one on here is moaning about Chaos being overpowered.

Without a shadow of a doubt it is massively better than 7th could ever have dreamed of being.

Hoodwink wrote:
List one tournament where you saw a single Leman Russ for IG pre-codex. This all adds up to diversity now where you actually have choices to make in what you build.

Basing "balance" on tournaments is misleading.

There are maybe ... let's guess ... 100.000 viable legal lists across the different armies, from Guilliman or Chaos soup at No. 1, Tau Commander Spam at maybe No. 15 and ... dunno .. footslogging mono-Bloodletters at No. 100.000.

A list/unit/etc.. that is only "balanced" against the Top 10 or Top 100 or Top 1000 isn't balance. To be balanced, it need to be balanced against .. maybe 90% of possible lists out there.

Leman Russ & Co were very good and even mono Leman Russ Armoured Company was easily in the Top 30% or Top 40% of those100.000 hypothetical lists. They weren't bad and certainly didn't need a buff. Plenty of stuff struggled very hard against a pure Russ list. Genestealer Swarms. Slaanesh Daemons, etc.. , etc..

They probably could've used a slight point increase without any buff, all things considered.

Just because they didn't compete in the Top 100 or so lists that frequent tournaments even Top 1000 of lists doesn't mean they weren't above average.

Enjoying it far more.

Wonderwolf wrote:

Hoodwink wrote:
List one tournament where you saw a single Leman Russ for IG pre-codex. This all adds up to diversity now where you actually have choices to make in what you build.

Basing "balance" on tournaments is misleading.

There are maybe ... let's guess ... 100.000 viable legal lists across the different armies, from Guilliman or Chaos soup at No. 1, Tau Commander Spam at maybe No. 15 and ... dunno .. footslogging mono-Bloodletters at No. 100.000.

A list/unit/etc.. that is only "balanced" against the Top 10 or Top 100 or Top 1000 isn't balance. To be balanced, it need to be balanced against .. maybe 90% of possible lists out there.

Leman Russ & Co were very good and even mono Leman Russ Armoured Company was easily in the Top 30% or Top 40% of those100.000 hypothetical lists. They weren't bad and certainly didn't need a buff. Plenty of stuff struggled very hard against a pure Russ list. Genestealer Swarms. Slaanesh Daemons, etc.. , etc..

They probably could've used a slight point increase without any buff, all things considered.

Just because they didn't compete in the Top 100 or so lists that frequent tournaments even Top 1000 of lists doesn't mean they weren't above average.

In an edition where you can spam the best units, no Leman Russes were not good. They never showed up in anything but casual and semi-competitive games because they were not worth their points compared to other units. You want balance? Look at how often units are being taken competitively. When a unit never shows up, that means there isn't a balance in power. That unit is not strong enough compared to other units that have the same role or not strong enough to justify their cost. Saying "well they didn't show up but they are strong" isn't really a very good backup to your inference. Giving someone the option and choice based on multiple units being viable is what creates balance.

Hoodwink wrote:
Saying "well they didn't show up but they are strong" isn't really a very good backup to your inference. Giving someone the option and choice based on multiple units being viable is what creates balance.

Well, saying they weren't good because they didn't show up competitively is like saying a Ferrari isn't fast car because it'd never win a Formula 1.

Lists used in the competitive scene are a tiny fraction of the entire game. Maybe 1% at best. Balance needs to consider the entire game. Otherwise your benchmark is skewed.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

 JimOnMars wrote:
Getting a chuckle about all the Mortal Wound grief. Playing Orks teaches you that Saves are for Wusses.

I'm sure you would feel differently about mortal wounds if they actually scaled with model quality rather than demolishing elite armies while leaving hordes unaffected.

Not at all. The Orks have plenty of elites (like the 900 point stompa) that gets no invul. Our book has 2 5+ invuls, which are very hard to buff our primary units (and don't work at all in combat, because reasons.)

We've been taking AP shots on the chin for years now, and others are finally being brought down to our level. I say pour on the mortal wounds!

Wonderwolf wrote:

Hoodwink wrote:
Saying "well they didn't show up but they are strong" isn't really a very good backup to your inference. Giving someone the option and choice based on multiple units being viable is what creates balance.

Well, saying they weren't good because they didn't show up competitively is like saying a Ferrari isn't fast car because it'd never win a Formula 1.

Lists used in the competitive scene are a tiny fraction of the entire game. Maybe 1% at best. Balance needs to consider the entire game. Otherwise your benchmark is skewed.

Well if the option to have a Ferrari was there but everyone chose other cars for Formula 1, then that would say that the Ferrari sucked compared to other options.

If you want to talk about game balance, then you balance based on how often units are chosen and why units are chosen. The Leman Russ in the Index wasn't taken in anything competitive because it didn't accomplish anything that other options would for cheaper. That alone says that the unit is underpowered. That alone is why the unit was buffed. You are giving no evidence as to why the Leman Russ was fine (or even strong as you say) previously other than because you say so. Then I give evidence based on statistical information with the competitive scene because that's the only evidence we really have a record of AND is a good indication to see how strong a unit is, and you say it's skewed. Balancing based on anything but statistical data will bring a skewed result.

Okay, so what about the various Space Marine stuff that wasn't buffed? Or Ad Mech stuff?

Clearly an improvement but I predict it will get worse and worse in balance.
Also terrain and similar elements are lacking.
Finally the scaling is still weird, in this case toward hordes.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Okay, so what about the various Space Marine stuff that wasn't buffed? Or Ad Mech stuff?

They need buffs and changes. That doesn't mean anything to the AM codex. The AM codex is pretty much how every codex really should have been released. Lots of good and useful units that cause someone to actually have choices to make in how they build their army. It gives a plethora of options on how to build your army to accomplish different results. The AM codex is far better balanced within its own units than other armies. There are very few units that are just bad. That doesn't necessarily mean on its own that it's overpowered. But it will mean that it will at least be a very strong army. The individual power of the army will be based on how well balanced the other armies are released. AdMech is surprisingly decent but their internal balance is garbage. Their list of units isn't long but they have several that are not useful at all and several that are autopick. SM have so many units that a good number just aren't useful enough to include or straight up bad.

Wonderwolf wrote:less impact of morals

To be fair, morality has never been a strong suit of the 40K universe, and has often back-fired in the tournament scene (comp lists, any one?).

Hoodwink wrote:


Well if the option to have a Ferrari was there but everyone chose other cars for Formula 1, then that would say that the Ferrari sucked compared to other options.

But plenty of people choose the Ferrari (and/or the vast majority of Index entries even weaker than the Leman Russ). Just not the tiny, unrepresentative sub-group of the hobby that is tournament players, hence why tournament lists, rankings and results are irrelevant for balance.

Got to sample a few hundred lists from store games with 12-year olds, lists from painters, list from people with vintage miniature collections, etc., etc.. Probably skew towards the weaker lists you find in there to be on the safe side and balance against them.

Only than do you have a shot to balance an army against as large a % of the GW range of miniatures as possible.

Good news guys!

So far the clear winner are:

Yes 37%
[ 155 ]
Yes, more than 7th ed 45%
[ 187 ]


and the losers are

No 3%
[ 13 ]
No, and even less than 7th 4%
[ 18 ]

Wonderwolf wrote:

Hoodwink wrote:


Well if the option to have a Ferrari was there but everyone chose other cars for Formula 1, then that would say that the Ferrari sucked compared to other options.

But plenty of people choose the Ferrari (and/or the vast majority of Index entries even weaker than the Leman Russ). Just not the tiny, unrepresentative sub-group of the hobby that is tournament players, hence why tournament lists, rankings and results are irrelevant for balance.

Got to sample a few hundred lists from store games with 12-year olds, lists from painters, list from people with vintage miniature collections, etc., etc.. Probably skew towards the weaker lists you find in there to be on the safe side and balance against them.

Only than do you have a shot to balance an army against as large a % of the GW range of miniatures as possible.

What? No. Just...no dude. Your logic is like...waaaaay out there. Trying to use games where Bill just painted a drop pod and really really wants to run it as some balance data point is incredibly silly.

Tournament lists are used as data points because they cut down on a number of unknown variables that could cause units to punch way below or above their weight in points.

For example:
-We can assume that the tournament games were played very close to the written rules, rather than a couple garage players deciding that they either don't like or more commonly, don't understand a rule and play it different.
-We can assume that the tournament games were played using reasonably fair missions, rather than zany Konor campaign stuff like where your table edge is collapsing behind you. It'd be kind of silly to run a fortification in that mission, no?
-We can assume that the tournament players have at least a passable skill level at the game, and are reasonably close to each other in skill level. We can't say the same for you and your game against little Timmy's 25 power level unpainted primaris marines.
-We can assume that the tourney players are actively trying to win the game, rather than just watch a narrative unfold.
-We can assume that the tournament game is an even X vs X points game. We can't assume the same of your garage game. Some people like those last stand narratives. I know I do!
-Tournaments actually collect data. Do you record your results and send them in to GW when you finish a garage game? And do you play 300 games in a weekend to provide some measure of reliable data that isn't heavily influenced by rare statistical outliers like "that one time the terminators all died to 5 gretchin shooting?"

To sum up, you have things backwards. The kitchen counter games are the ones irrelevant for balance. The tourney data, even though they are actually the minority of games overall, are the best tool to use for the balancing process.

 niv-mizzet wrote:

For example:
-We can assume that the tournament games were played very close to the written rules, rather than a couple garage players deciding that they either don't like or more commonly, don't understand a rule and play it different.

That's not the case. Tournaments, at least those along ITC formats or similar type, are based on dozends of pages of formalized house rules that significantly change the game as presented in the rulebook. Layering Eternal War and Maelstrom missions for example, outright changing rules like First Blood, etc., etc.. These games are barely 40K to begin with.

 niv-mizzet wrote:

-We can assume that the tournament games were played using reasonably fair missions, rather than zany Konor campaign stuff like where your table edge is collapsing behind you. It'd be kind of silly to run a fortification in that mission, no?

Whether you find it silly or not, Konor campaign is part of normal, offical 40K. Zany ITC "mission"-abominations are not.

 niv-mizzet wrote:

-We can assume that the tournament players have at least a passable skill level at the game, and are reasonably close to each other in skill level. We can't say the same for you and your game against little Timmy's 25 power level unpainted primaris marines.

Which is why balance is more important and should be bencmarked against Timmy's unpainted Primaris Marines. "Skilled" players would use the weakest available army anyways to prove their skill, as using an army that is above the curve would invalidate any victory as "rules-writer-incompetence"-based as opposed to being "skill-based".

 niv-mizzet wrote:

-We can assume that the tourney players are actively trying to win the game, rather than just watch a narrative unfold.

Which is why they are not representative of the game as a whole. Narrative is as much part of it as "winning", like it or not. People who only focus on one aspect miss the whole picture.

 niv-mizzet wrote:

-We can assume that the tournament game is an even X vs X points game. We can't assume the same of your garage game. Some people like those last stand narratives. I know I do!

If you sample lists from garage games, playtesters can still test them against equal points.

 niv-mizzet wrote:

-Tournaments actually collect data. Do you record your results and send them in to GW when you finish a garage game? And do you play 300 games in a weekend to provide some measure of reliable data that isn't heavily influenced by rare statistical outliers like "that one time the terminators all died to 5 gretchin shooting?"

Just because the data exists, and other data does not, doesn't mean the data is skewed. It's like researchers doing psychology experiments only on college students, because they are easily available, or election polling only going by data in urban areas, because it's more convenient than going out into the countryside.. The results are usually misleading and worse than useless, precisely people went with "what's there/easy to get" as data rather than making an effort to cover the full spectrum.

It started out good but now i've got a feeling that power creep is starting anew. Also, hating terrain rules, the increased potency of alpha-strike and the importance of 1-st turn. But the biggest disappointment so far is the amount of rolls and re-rolls. It's taking even more time than in 7-th cause everyone is re-rolling everything.

To sum up, you have things backwards. The kitchen counter games are the ones irrelevant for balance. The tourney data, even though they are actually the minority of games overall, are the best tool to use for the balancing process.

+1 niv-mizzet.

"We can assume that the tourney players are actively trying to win the game, rather than just watch a narrative unfold"
Which is why they are not representative of the game as a whole. Narrative is as much part of it as "winning", like it or not. People who only focus on one aspect miss the whole picture.

Games like a Sunday afternoon battle where all the Eldar hold out as long as they can but all die to Chaos invaders is awesome narrative and probably good fun, but not really useful for 'balance' discussions.

There's nothing wrong with it, but that sort of game doesn't generate useful data.

A few big tournaments will give stats like "12% of players brought Chaos and half of them finished in the top 20. 8% of players brought Necrons, and none finished in the top 50".

Then we can criticise the tournament format all we like, but it has generated something concrete worth discussing from a balance point of view.

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Tournaments are only good for finding out what is totally broken and needs toned down. Beyond that they're no use as a metric of how the game plays.

40k was never intented to be played at a super competitve level. It was created so that nerds could have fun with their toy soldiers with other nerds in their kitchen. Acting as if GW rules writers goal is anything beyond making a fun game with a minimim of OP stuff is a fools hope. This isn't laziness on GWs part nor is it a bad thing, its just that, well, the tournament scene DOESN'T MATTER.

I keep reading about how Leman Russes are terrible but that didn't stop me running 6 of them in a big 3k, 4 player game my group had the other week. Just like how it the tau player in our group keeps taking his riptide. As long as they aren't utterly useless GW has achieved its goal.

Have to pitch in here. Narrative gaming cannot be used for statistical data and balance analysis. This is simply due to the fact that Narrative by its nature skews the environment and rules in which the game is being played and rules as written, and is not consistent with other games played by others within the consistent environment that the rules were written in and for.

Granted that Tournaments that have applied rules modifications are not perfect, as the Codexes and Indexes are not written specifically for those rules modifications to be applied, but they are all atleast consistent statistical points of reference and comparison.

Garage gaming and in particular Narrative gaming is simply not a consistent environment for data to be extrapolated from.

This does not even factor in the relative knowledge and skills of the players. At least in tournaments, after the first round you have more chance of being paired against someone with somewhat relative knowledge and skills to be able to draw competitive data from, garage gaming is more likely to get inconsistentices of skill level and ofcourse inaccurate or incomplete use of the rules.

I surely prefer this edition overall but 2 of my 3 armies (orks and dark eldar) were nerfed quite badly and I enjoyed them more in 7th edition than now. SW have become a little bit better but only because SM transports are overpowered now. I'll wait for the codexes for a final thought about the current edition.

Making an on-topic post here...

Ultimately I'm have less fun in 8ed then in previous editions before it but it's not because I think 8ed is a worse game then previous editions (It is much better then 7ed). The problem I'm having is that they over simplified my Daemon army with the transition to the Index.

I've been playing Daemons since their first stand alone codex dropped at the end of 4ed. They were by the far the most fun I've had playing 40k because of how wild they played from. You had to think on the fly to account for their random way of deployment but they had so many cool options and ways to deal with the enemy that if played well you could pull out wins even in seeming dire situations (sometimes because of the warp's fault)

Then their 6ed codex came out. The zaniest rules were toned down (such as Daemonic Assault was just regular deep strike and they were all regular psykers again) but they still had a huge amount of tools and interesting ways to to come at situations. Sure they had some grossly overpowered abilities that resulted in it being of the most powerful armies in the broken mess that was 7ed. But those crutches afforded me the ability to have massive army variety as I could take units and lists I wanted while still being fairly competitve. I pretty much never played the same list twice as I could just spend hours playing around with potential unit combinations.

But now almost all of the flavor is gone. Almost no army special rules or hidden synergies. The only deployment trick Daemons get is Ritual Summoning which is just an inferior version of deep striking. They lost their army wide morale immunity (and were the only army to do so). Psychic phase is pretty much just spamming smite. The army doesn't even have weapon options for any units outside of the daemon prince. All the tactics and army building is just "take units and stand characters next to it for aura buffs" and it's just so boring. Its not even that they aren't competitive because they have broken undercosted units to play with but the list is basically spam brimstone horrors to screen for your characters. The last time I played in league I just didn't have any army list I wanted to play so I let a friend just pick models out of my case at random so I would have a list to play. Sure CSM have plenty of pretty toys but I want Daemons, not heretics.

It's a shame. I was really burnt out 7ed and was very hyped for 8ed. I hope the Daemon codex fixes this problem.

I'm enjoying it more than 7th, but that's such a low bar to clear I'm not sure that's a useful statement.

In general I'm fairly happy with 8th but I'm already starting to see some worrying trends in the armies that now have a Codex. I think re-rolls are too prevalent and there are some serious balance issues starting to rear their heads. The new AM Codex is worrying just for the leap in power it represents over other books. I'm also doubting the claims about this being the most playtested version of 40k ever. There are still a lot of really obviously bad units and options and I'm slightly annoyed that GW's reaction to this is to sell us another book in a month or so.

If GW can use Chapter Approved to balance the game properly, including making changes to Codex rules, not just Index ones, I'll feel a bit more positive.

It's good, but I feel it's a bit too random for a "skill test," like tournament games.

What an odd criticism to level. Did you play 6th or 7th? If THIS edition is too random, what did you think of those?

I'm liking it so far. The fact that I've played any games at all is a huge improvement since, by early 7th, my playing had dropped off pretty severely. This edition has brought a lot of people back that had previously quit, and it's a snap to introduce new people to.

They did completely botch terrain. I laugh now every time someone rolls out that old mantra of "if your games seem unbalanced you need to add terrrain". Terrain is officially meaningless. With multiple armies having access to no scatter DS and no scatter indirect fire, and with cover being difficult to get anyway, you may as well be playing on planet bowling ball half the time.

I'm also worried about knee-jerk reactions. It seems like people are especially quick this edition to want to nerf things (in many cases before those things are even released), and I worry that with GW being so quick to FAQ now, that we're going to get stuck in an endless cycle of "nerf this! Wait! Too far! Ok buff it! Crap! Buff everything else!" etc etc.

That said, the game as it stands right now, is better (imo) than it's been in several editions.

I'm enjoying it more than 7th, but man do I miss vehicle armour facings, exploding on a 7 (I know I'm about the only person who liked that mechanic) and the flavour of the game, which I feel has been gutted in a lot of cases. I also hate the current terrain rules and mortal wounds. But those are my two major gripes, I am actually enjoying it a lot.

Complaining about terrain? You probably aren't using enough or a variety of terrain.

Complaining about simplicity? You probably need to reread the section on the assault phase. (It's amazing!)

Complaining about overpowered units? Stop playing with special characters in matched play, they are a fluffy unit not a competitive play unit.

Hate the missions? (How? There are literally more missions than any previous 40k edition.)

8th ed is a blast imo, but if you try to break a game or refuse to use parts of it then you'll not have much fun.

Complaining about terrain? You probably aren't using enough or a variety of terrain.

Complaining about simplicity? You probably need to reread the section on the assault phase. (It's amazing!)

Complaining about overpowered units? Stop playing with special characters in matched play, they are a fluffy unit not a competitive play unit.

Hate the missions? (How? There are literally more missions than any previous 40k edition.)

8th ed is a blast imo, but if you try to break a game or refuse to use parts of it then you'll not have much fun.

Yep. Everyone with a legitimate complaint is doing it wrong. lol I agree w/you about the missions, and simplicity is more of a subjective thing so there's not really a "right" or "wrong" there, but like I said in my post a few above yours, terrain is a legitimate issue this edition.
You don't even need to be "trying to break the game" to see this. All it takes is a few DS units, and a few indirect fire units to really demonstrate that. These units can be taken in fluffy lists that aren't even trying to be overly competitive. That takes care of LoS terrain, and as for the rest of the terrain types - well, there's a reason people generally feel that Imperial Fist and Iron Warriors "chapter tactics" are the weakest.

If your games just run a lot of basic units (mostly troops and little else), I can see where you would think the terrain rules are fine. Unfortunately, any meta w/a varied number of lists and armies will begin to really expose the weaknesses in 8th ed terrain.

That said, I'll take the terrain issue all day every day over some of the issues we had in 7th.

I have fixed my problems with the basic terrain rules of 8th with two things:

-All my Terrain has bases. So I can put a 30-ork boyz blob in cover without a problem.

-I use the "Cities of Death" advanced rules. They make flamers and grenades much more usefull. Even playing in a open field with a normal amount of terrain, I use those special rules. (Not the stratagems)

30 Orks shouldn't be getting cover, imo. They are priced to NOT get cover, imo.

I'm at a loss for whit whole fuss about mortal wounds.

It's like 1 whole wound!

How is this a big deal?


Smite is the most common source I've seen, but it only hits the closest unit for D3.

Martel732 wrote:
30 Orks shouldn't be getting cover, imo. They are priced to NOT get cover, imo.

Normally not the whole 30 get cover, but as per the rules and FAQ once the 6-10 that are out of the "area of cover" die, the rest gain cover even agaisn't the same bolley of enemy fire.

two secs I'll roll a dice, hmm a 1, nope it sucks

Martel732 wrote:30 Orks shouldn't be getting cover, imo. They are priced to NOT get cover, imo.

If they can physically fit into the terrain I can't see why the 30 Orks receiving the cover bonus wouldn't be fine.

CrownAxe wrote:I hope the Daemon codex fixes this problem.

The Indexes are reminiscent of the army lists in the 3rd ed. rulebook, just intended to keep the game functioning while new codexes are drafted, so I wouldn't be too surprised at the lack of flavour or army specific rules. It definitely sucks to be stuck with lacklustre rules for the moment, but it'd be surprising if the actual Daemons codex turned out to be as bland as the Index list.

Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:I'm at a loss for whit whole fuss about mortal wounds.

Likewise. I mean, sure losing a wound without saves on that terminator or captain is nasty, but I haven't yet seen any particularly egregious examples of Mortal Wounds on the table top. I'm happy to be illuminated if anyone can elaborate on this,

I saw an example yesterday: my starweaver blew killed 2 harlies, then rolled 3 mortal wounds for the rest and 3 for the troupe master. Those 3 sixes cost me the damn game. But man did we both laugh of our ass of.

Regarding Orks in cover: +1 cover isn't that be a deal for horde units in 8th. In most cases it turns a 6+ into a 5+, which promptly gets reduced back to 6+ or nothing because of the AP system (which is one of my favorite things about 8th).

Where cover really shines in on units that already have 4+ or better saves. Most horde units do not have good saves, so I don't see the issue with 30 ork boyz getting a 5+ because of cover. It's still better than 7th where they would get a straight up 4+

-

 nurgle5 wrote:

Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:I'm at a loss for whit whole fuss about mortal wounds.

Likewise. I mean, sure losing a wound without saves on that terminator or captain is nasty, but I haven't yet seen any particularly egregious examples of Mortal Wounds on the table top. I'm happy to be illuminated if anyone can elaborate on this,

The most damage done to me by mortal wounds was a Land Raider exploding and doing D6 to a Penitent Engine, Immolator, and 2 squads of Dominions.

Personally, my views on 8th are the same as when the rules were first announced: 7th but worse.

No templates + defender chooses casualties + flatlined damage + a wonky Deepstrike mechanic = a game where quantity really has a quality of its own, and the game becomes ultimately even less about outmaneuvering your foe and more about just out-dicing your foe. Speaking of which, this is a game where you can just cause the game to crawl under a sheer mountain of dice for little effect. Remember Razorwings prior to the FAQ? 7 points for 8 S2 attacks that hit on 5. Get a Beastmaster, and they reroll to hit. Get Doom on a target and reroll to wound. You could easily have an 80-point unit *potentially* roll 320 dice (200 or so being a more common amount) to resolve a single round of close combat attacks. Conscripts aren't that much different, especially if given a "reroll 1" bonus. You can just force the game to jam to a halt under sheer dice fatigue. Granted, this issue could exist in 7th: one of the most painful Battle Reports I read was Matt Root's second game at LVO 2014, since the game was a Green Tide versus a second Green Tide. Either way, it would be an interesting experiment to log the average amount of dice thrown per 40k game from edition to edition, as I imagine 5th threw *far* less than most, given how that game revolved more around "hi-strength" weapons like Lasplas Razorbacks, Long Fangs, Psyflemen, etc.

Were formations a problem? Yes, only a small number of them felt "just right" and many were flat upgrades rather than "hey, at least it's interesting" sidegrades. By contrast. The 8e Detachments have functionally made every game "Not Unbound" and armies are amazingly even spammier than ever before. Both systems ultimately result in a system where "best unit=only unit."

USRs or qualifying tags for rules? I like USRs done competently, as they could allow for non-ambiguous future-proofing. Alas, GW didn't use them competently as in many cases they weren't Universal (Only one weapon in the entire game used Missile Lock, when there were so many weapons that were fluffed as missiles that lock-on targets), Special ("Soul Blaze. Ooooooooh, scary"), or even rules ("Relentless lets you count as stationary for purposes of shooting...but Gitfindas do not work with Relentless because you actually have to be stationary to benefit from a Gitfinda."). In other cases, they just didn't care. Perhaps the most notable example of this sort of debate was the Haemotrope Plasma Reactor, and "what *is* a Plasma weapon anyway?" By RAW, a Plasma Culverin was not a Plasma Weapon, since it was "not a Plasma Weapon as defined in the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook." (Wheras Skorchas, Flamespurts, etc were "Flamers as defined in the 40,000 Rulebook" so yay for consistency). 8th Keywords could have been interesting, and yet there were holes in the system that required immediate FAQs, such as "A Wolf Guard in Terminator Armor attached to a unit of Grey Hunters is treated as having the Terminator Keyword." And then you have Stratagems like "Flamecraft", granting "+1 to wound for any Flamers, Heavy Flamers, Flamestorm Cannons, or any other weapon with 'Flame' in its name." So by this system, Brayarth Ashmantle, a Salamander with a unique weapon called "Burning Wrath," which is clearly a Hand Flamer, cannot use Flamecraft because the weapon does not have "Flame" in its name, nor does it "count as a Hand Flamer." And "Flaming Wrath" would also not be a match, since it still doesn't have "Flame" in the name. And were the Marines to get an Inferno Cannon for a narrative or future mission? Haha, nope. And it's not like they could say "any weapon with Flame or Inferno" because the Inferno Pistol...is a Melta weapon.

8th is fine.

Infinity better than 7th. but has problems of its own.

 Desubot wrote:
8th is fine.

Infinity better than 7th. but has problems of its own.

I would rather play Infinity than 8th

 MagicJuggler wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
8th is fine.

Infinity better than 7th. but has problems of its own.

I would rather play Infinity than 8th

Heh i rather not. seems like a wild cheer leader mess.

i get you like 7th and feel like it had some kinda tactical depth that 8th is lacking but really 7th boiled down to a kirby cash grabapalooza, and the whole game came down to breaking one or more aspect of the game to win.

how many people actually used actual classical movement tactics to win the day rather than just deep striking in grav devs or wraithknights or just moving forwarded with bike guns and just shooting forward.

 Desubot wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
8th is fine.

Infinity better than 7th. but has problems of its own.

I would rather play Infinity than 8th

Heh i rather not. seems like a wild cheer leader mess.

i get you like 7th and feel like it had some kinda tactical depth that 8th is lacking but really 7th boiled down to a kirby cash grabapalooza, and the whole game came down to breaking one or more aspect of the game to win.

how many people actually used actual classical movement tactics to win the day rather than just deep striking in grav devs or wraithknights or just moving forwarded with bike guns and just shooting forward.

Sean Nayden's Lictorshame, or Jon Camacho's Monolith Necrons?

I admit there are a lot of problems with 7th (and mentioned quite a lot of them), but I feel like most the issues were with "individual powers" (meaning Invisibility, rerollable 2++s, and D/Stomp tables) rather than many assorted core rules. As a notable example, *squad coherency* did not need a FAQ in 7th because it had actual diagrams that got the point across, while in 8th, "as a single group" versus "within 2" of at least one other model" led to the "2-man buddy system" of squad coherency.

And for every story of that one person slowplaying spacing out to avoid blasts, there is now the potential for that one person slowplayiny spacing out Conscripts exactly 18" away from the units they are protecting from Deepstrike, while keeping exactly one model exactly within 6" of the Commissar. If anything, the cynic in me wouldn't doubt if a "real reason" 8th got rid of templates and AOEs is they cost money to produce, yet you can only sell *one* set to a player (and arguably even less if the FLGS had a copy you could use).

Honestly, I'm sitting out of 40k now. And spending more time trying to write another game altogether :(

No doubt 8th has issues of its own. and it appears to primarily be a an issue with basically one book.

it so far feels like everyone would of had equal footing if everyone had access to unique strats and chapter tactics. but i wont know if we are going back to age of kirby until everything is released.

except iron hands feth those guys apparently.

I had hopes for 8th until they made imperial guard even more broken.

Gameplay speed, rules bloat, etc, all that is secondary to game balance.

I do find that this edition fits narrative and casual play FAR better than 7th, and in that regard, i'm content. Just don't let AM players, or people abusing "Imperium Soup" to bring mad cheese into your casual/narrative campaigns and you're fine.

Cheaper is almost always better until you get down to grots. GW will eventually realize that they screwed over their poster boys again.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Marmatag wrote:
I had hopes for 8th until they made imperial guard even more broken.

Gameplay speed, rules bloat, etc, all that is secondary to game balance.

I do find that this edition fits narrative and casual play FAR better than 7th, and in that regard, i'm content. Just don't let AM players, or people abusing "Imperium Soup" to bring mad cheese into your casual/narrative campaigns and you're fine.

How do you justify outlawing a legal build?

Why not just say lets play 1 battlaion as a standard size.

you can still bring soop but you start losing out on tactics,

you cant spam out certain slots

everyone has near equal command points.

8E appears to be developing its own issues, and it's filled with typical stupid GW D6 mechanics for everything that make the variability insane. It's a step up from 7th, but given how garbage 7E was, I'm not sure thats saying much, but 7E needed to go either way, there was no salvaging that mess. 8E's better, but it continues the trend of 40k never quite managing anything better than a marginally functional ruleset fails to work well as a narrative sandbox and utterly craps itself as a tactical and competitive wargaming ruleset.

The continuation of the "bring anything you like" lists composed to multifaction armies hasnt helped, that was a bad issue with 7E that they should have killed with 8E.

 Marmatag wrote:
I had hopes for 8th until they made imperial guard even more broken.

Gameplay speed, rules bloat, etc, all that is secondary to game balance.

Complexity is a nuanced thing however. There's complexity that adds in-game options, versus that which simply drags on the game.

On one hand, you have Tank Shock. This rule confused many a player due to its implementation, since it operated less as a "ram" and more akin to a sumo wrestler finding a landing point to jump on. It had idiosyncratic flaws, such as a Warbuggy stopping a Land Raider, but a Rhino being able to run over a Stormsurge. However, it gave players another tool, one that let their Rhinos act as "crowd control", breaking up bubblewrap or pushing units into "please flame me" formation, and just being a generally annoying form of board control...if you had a sufficient mass of throwaway vehicles to take advantage of it. Either way, the rules were complex but they "could" offer another tool to use.

By contrast, you had Soul Blaze. Place a marker on a unit affected by Soul Blaze, roll a D6, and on a 4+, you inflict D3 S4 hits on the unit Whoop-de-freaking do, an annoyance that took more time to remember was actually in play than would actually have any in-game impact. Oh, but Eldar got the funny version of Soul Blaze via the Firesabre, where 6s on the "does soulblaze work" caused units within 6" of ground zero unit to also get Soul Blaze, like a Virus Grenade of "annoying sneezes." But it was a bunch of rolling that didn't actually impact your choices. Ditto the Chaos Warpstorm table (at least unless running Fateweaver as your Warlord), or other "randumb" options that actually didn't give you in-game choices. Chaos is fickle!

Perhaps the most annoying issue though is when the choice is an illusion. For example, Orks in 7th could Waaagh once per game. However, "when to Waaagh" wasn't even a decision as it was either "always" (running a Green Tide) or "never" (running Zhadsnark). Likewise, the odds of a Nova Reactor boning you over were always less than the potential wounds saved by upgrading from 5++ to 3++.

I definitely like th change to bring back a form of save modifier. I have fond memories of this in 2nd Edition. Much better to have degrading saves than an all or nothing system in recent editions.

 niv-mizzet wrote:
To sum up, you have things backwards. The kitchen counter games are the ones irrelevant for balance. The tourney data, even though they are actually the minority of games overall, are the best tool to use for the balancing process.

The problem with balancing based on tournament lists is that sub-optimal stuff is often never seen.

I mean I think a lot of players thought 7th was awful for balance. At the top tier you had Eldar, Tau, Marines of various flavours, chaos daemons and renegade lists, Imperial Knights and maybe a few others.
Oh and Ynnari. Lets just skip that end of edition insanity.
Anyway that is quite a few lists. If you looked at the top 10 lists in tournaments I'd argue there was considerably more variety than today (where often its variation on an identifiable core be it imperial soup or chaos soup).

So you might ask why given this greater variety did everyone hate it.

The problem was the gap between these armies and everything else had grown to a comic level. Necrons were famously a bit crap when it came to tournaments - but would chew through most casual lists without losing a unit. Your garage games ceased to be fun.

The problem is that for a codex to be viable in a tournament you need one build. You can be a "solved" codex.
Like say the recent Ad Mech codex. I firmly think Cawl & Dakkabots, Stygies Dragoons, fill in the rest as required, is a solid list.
Will anyone discover some other secret build hidden in there? I don't think so. I hope people keep looking and trying stuff - but really its probably over, literally moments after the release.
For a tournament player - that's fine. So half the units in the (relatively tiny) codex are inferior? Oh well. Just won't use them.
For a casual player though its not great.

Really its a question of whether Codexes should be tool boxes or mathhammer equations to solve.

The problem with 40K balance, which I think they were trying to solve, is that too often Unit X is just better than Unit Y in all circumstances and the only reason to take unit Y is if you like the model.

Put another way 40k should have an evolving meta. Historically it hasn't had much of one. I can't think of many units which were bad at the start of an edition and then became top tier later on. It has solved codexes that are good until new content means they are not.

Tyel wrote:
Put another way 40k should have an evolving meta. Historically it hasn't had much of one. I can't think of many units which were bad at the start of an edition and then became top tier later on. It has solved codexes that are good until new content means they are not.

It will be interesting to see what they do which Chapter Approved. Will they nerf AM? Is there time to get the AM nerfs in before the book is printed? Or is AM just a run of the mill 2018 codex?

The very best thing they could do is publish Chapter Approved as a softcover supplement every 3 months or so, adding in all the latest FAQs and point changes. I'm worried that a new codex will come along soon (ahem, Eldar) which will allow utter gak to play for a full year before the 2018 CA fixes it.

Tyel wrote:

 niv-mizzet wrote:
To sum up, you have things backwards. The kitchen counter games are the ones irrelevant for balance. The tourney data, even though they are actually the minority of games overall, are the best tool to use for the balancing process.

The problem with balancing based on tournament lists is that sub-optimal stuff is often never seen.

I mean I think a lot of players thought 7th was awful for balance. At the top tier you had Eldar, Tau, Marines of various flavours, chaos daemons and renegade lists, Imperial Knights and maybe a few others.
Oh and Ynnari. Lets just skip that end of edition insanity.
Anyway that is quite a few lists. If you looked at the top 10 lists in tournaments I'd argue there was considerably more variety than today (where often its variation on an identifiable core be it imperial soup or chaos soup).

So you might ask why given this greater variety did everyone hate it.

The problem was the gap between these armies and everything else had grown to a comic level. Necrons were famously a bit crap when it came to tournaments - but would chew through most casual lists without losing a unit. Your garage games ceased to be fun.

The problem is that for a codex to be viable in a tournament you need one build. You can be a "solved" codex.
Like say the recent Ad Mech codex. I firmly think Cawl & Dakkabots, Stygies Dragoons, fill in the rest as required, is a solid list.
Will anyone discover some other secret build hidden in there? I don't think so. I hope people keep looking and trying stuff - but really its probably over, literally moments after the release.
For a tournament player - that's fine. So half the units in the (relatively tiny) codex are inferior? Oh well. Just won't use them.
For a casual player though its not great.

Really its a question of whether Codexes should be tool boxes or mathhammer equations to solve.

The problem with 40K balance, which I think they were trying to solve, is that too often Unit X is just better than Unit Y in all circumstances and the only reason to take unit Y is if you like the model.

Put another way 40k should have an evolving meta. Historically it hasn't had much of one. I can't think of many units which were bad at the start of an edition and then became top tier later on. It has solved codexes that are good until new content means they are not.

The divide between "good units" and "bad units" I feel is the main issue that plagues 40k in its worst of moments. When the internal balance of an army is off, and choosing options becomes "FINAL DESTINATION", that is. It has almost always been an issue from edition to edition, be it Green Tide for 8e Orks, mass Flyrants for 7e Tyranids, Eldar in 5th needing 2 units of Fire Dragons or else they're doing it wrong!

A lot of what makes units bad is an army has multiple units that do the exact same thing (ex: Wraithblades vs Scorpions vs Banshees) meaning there can only be one best (or Wyverns vs Mortars, or Whirlwinds vs Thunderfires, etc), or the roles are pointless to begin with (alas, poor Pyrovore). 8th Detachments in turn made things "not unbound", which combined with questionable internal balance leads to lists like "all character superfriends" winning a tournament. Gulliman, Celestine, Draigo, a Malleus Inquisitor and Ultramarine Librarian tag-team with 2 Vindicares, 3 Eversor Assassins, and 4 Culexus Assassins, exploiting the "closest target" rules so that the Culexus Assassins (which are only hit on 6, have a 4++ and are immune to Smite) are the only legal targets!

In 7th, Formations were hit-or-miss. Some were, if not gamebreaking, horrific for garage play. The Riptide Wing is the most immediate offender, but Warp Spider Aspect Hosts were similarly nasty, and the Fenrisian Hunting Pack comboed with Azrael for a really wonky experience. Then there were the formations that did absolutely nothing, my personal favorite being Khorne's Bloodstorm. You had to take 2 units of Raptors and a unit of Warp Talons (eww), and in exchange, you got +1 to the strength of your Hammer of Wrath attacks (the punchline being this prevented said Warp Talons/Raptors from using their Jump Packs to move).

Some formations were redundant, and the bonuses could be inconsistent too. Every Marine army got a variant of the "Techmarine+3 Tanks" formation. On one hand, Space Wolves had their Land Raider grant a POTMS bubble to nearby tanks in the formation, and the Iron Priest (which was viable as a standalone unit due to being able to take a Thunderwolf and Cyberwolf escort) could grant a buff to one of the tanks each turn. *That* is cool, and there is a fun (if not necessarily competitive) appeal in your Predator Annihilator selectively sniping out enemy heavy troopers. On the other hand, Chaos Space Marines...got a 6+ Invulnerable Save for tanks near their footslogging Warpsmith.

And yet there were other ones, like the Helforged Warpack, or the Pinion Demi-Company, or even Ynnead's Net which were an entertaining balance of tax to bonus, sidegrade to tradeoff, Formations that were at least "interesting" and wouldn't automatically preclude you from winning. Alas that more formations didn't adhere to that model.

Personally, I'm loving it. More units than ever are viable. As someone who went deep into comp 7e, its exciting to see varied lists when i show up to a tournament.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
I'm at a loss for whit whole fuss about mortal wounds.

It's like 1 whole wound!

How is this a big deal?


Smite is the most common source I've seen, but it only hits the closest unit for D3.

I take it you haven't played against an army that really exploits the mechanic? I play as Tzeentch and have played against Renegades & Heretics, so I've seen the brutality of it from both sides. There's a reason Chaos Soup tournament lists runs a dozen malefic lords.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
I'm at a loss for whit whole fuss about mortal wounds.

It's like 1 whole wound!

How is this a big deal?


Smite is the most common source I've seen, but it only hits the closest unit for D3.

I take it you haven't played against an army that really exploits the mechanic? I play as Tzeentch and have played against Renegades & Heretics, so I've seen the brutality of it from both sides. There's a reason Chaos Soup tournament lists runs a dozen malefic lords.

Don't leave out everyone's favorite, bucket-o-brimstones.

Pfff... do you think that the Malefic Lords are bad spamming mortal wounds... you don't know nothing, John Snow...

Tzaangors Skyfires... if you don't have faced that, you don't know what it is Mortal Wound spam...

NickMcMahon wrote:
Good news guys!

So far the clear winner are:

Yes 37%
[ 155 ]
Yes, more than 7th ed 45%
[ 187 ]


and the losers are

No 3%
[ 13 ]
No, and even less than 7th 4%
[ 18 ]

I'd just point out 2 things:
1 - more than 7th is a loaded question. Doesn't mean the respondants necessarily like it, only that they like it more than 7th.
2 - No is a tricky one to gauge. Outside the grognards like me that haunt the forums occaisionally, the average 'no' player has probably moved on and isn't available to answer the question.

But if overall, the 'average' player is enjoying 8th: cool. Good for them. Nothing wrong with that.

 Torga_DW wrote:

I'd just point out 2 things:
1 - more than 7th is a loaded question. Doesn't mean the respondants necessarily like it, only that they like it more than 7th.
2 - No is a tricky one to gauge. Outside the grognards like me that haunt the forums occaisionally, the average 'no' player has probably moved on and isn't available to answer the question.

But if overall, the 'average' player is enjoying 8th: cool. Good for them. Nothing wrong with that.

The question is "Do you enjoy 8th ed ?". To which each answer starts with a yes or a no. There are two "more than 7th" answers, one yes and one no. Presumably, if you don't like 8th, but think 7th was worse, you'd go with "No, but more than 7th".

 Cream Tea wrote:

 Torga_DW wrote:

I'd just point out 2 things:
1 - more than 7th is a loaded question. Doesn't mean the respondants necessarily like it, only that they like it more than 7th.
2 - No is a tricky one to gauge. Outside the grognards like me that haunt the forums occaisionally, the average 'no' player has probably moved on and isn't available to answer the question.

But if overall, the 'average' player is enjoying 8th: cool. Good for them. Nothing wrong with that.

The question is "Do you enjoy 8th ed ?". To which each answer starts with a yes or a no. There are two "more than 7th" answers, one yes and one no. Presumably, if you don't like 8th, but think 7th was worse, you'd go with "No, but more than 7th".

Depends how much you wanted to keep playing. Again, all the "No" answers require the player to still be active enough to answer the question.

The GW staff could collectively start smoking crack today and maintain the habit until 9th and 8th edition would remain a completely superior product to the utter shitshow that was the 7th edition moneygrab. Does that mean it's perfect? Nope, but in terms of quality it's night vs day.

 Torga_DW wrote:

Depends how much you wanted to keep playing. Again, all the "No" answers require the player to still be active enough to answer the question.

I agree about the problem with "no" being underepresented. That's certainly a problem with any self-selected poll.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Just another travesty in a 10-year streak of complete failures.

You're still a slave, Angron. Enslaved by your past, blind to the future. Too hateful to learn. Too spiteful to prosper.

 MarsNZ wrote:
The GW staff could collectively start smoking crack today and maintain the habit until 9th and 8th edition would remain a completely superior product to the utter shitshow that was the 7th edition moneygrab. Does that mean it's perfect? Nope, but in terms of quality it's night vs day.

I'm not entirely sure how i'd get it (the crack, that is), but if they released the 40k crack edition i'd certainly consider it. As long as it came with a sticker on it - you must be this high to play.

Tycho wrote:

It's good, but I feel it's a bit too random for a "skill test," like tournament games.

What an odd criticism to level. Did you play 6th or 7th? If THIS edition is too random, what did you think of those?

Yeah, I've been playing since 3rd. My comment comes from the fact that in the mere several months of play in this edition, I've seen way more shocking upsets mid-game than ever before. Vehicles blowing up at the perfect time and clearing multiple diminished squads and wounded characters off the table, a psyker managing to get in close to your warlord and rolling 11 on smite and 6 damage. A single twin lascannon dealing 12 wounds, a lot of "6 fishing" effects like sniper MW's, old blast and flamer weapons hitting one guy, but then sometimes hitting 6 or 12, even when there aren't that many to hit...

I mean I get not "getting" me on this, because I'd have to do thesis-level research to really be able to really back up my stance and quantify how much more random than previous editions exactly. And to clarify, I mean during the game proper. 7e had a silly amount of "ran-dumb" stuff like traits and powers that could end the game before it started, like if a star rolled its dozen psychic rolls and managed to never pick up invis, but the inside of the game proper never really felt that random to me. Things went along how they were expected to until RGL rolls decided who won (assuming that was still up for contention.)

I think it really is the existence of several "on a 6, battle-changing event happens!" effects like vehicle explosions. At a GT I judged at recently, I saw a guy get effectively tabled top of t1 by his baneblade exploding in the middle of his forces, even though he tried to cp reroll the explode result, and a table where 3 dreads and 3 immolaters with a couple sister squads were all apparently made out of matchsticks, because once one thing went up, it all went up, and that whole area of the field was suddenly empty. And of course there's the deep strike charges with CP, which are basically coin flips.for an insta-charge. One of the BA characters has an ability where any of his squads nearby could roll a 6 and fight again immediately.

Just feels more random mid-game to me, and some of the random has very extreme effects.

Both 7th and 8th edition are extremely random. 8th has d6 shots, d6 wounds, explodes etc. 7th had vehicle damage table, scatter dice, all or nothing morale tests, deep strike mishaps, dangerous terrain etc. Both have seize the initiative, psychic powers, perils, random charge range, plasma mishaps, "on a 6+" effects etc.

I think it's intended to make the game winnable even if your opponent is more skilled and/or has a better army, as well as to make the game more "beer and pretzels" and less WAAC.

I don't entirely like it, but then again I do play Warmachine as well, where skill, planning and movement all play bigger roles. 40k is more like role-playing, it's about the journey.

 Desubot wrote:
Why not just say lets play 1 battlaion as a standard size.

What if a battallion is literally not big enough?

One can fill the entirety of an infantry-heavy Guard battallion for 750 points, easily.

 Melissia wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
Why not just say lets play 1 battlaion as a standard size.

What if a battallion is literally not big enough?

One can fill the entirety of an infantry-heavy Guard battallion for 750 points, easily.

This is why i preferred the percentage system over slots. It's too easy to game slots. Percentages guarantee a proportion of your army adhere to a certain specific, while scaling up and down without any need for additionally FOCs.

However, that also screws other lists entirely. For example, it's hard to argue a list based around large numbers of sentinels is overpowered, or one based on terminators for that matter like my BA termie list.

Sometimes, rather than a flat rule, you need to start making judgment calls.

Well that depends on army lists in general. I don't see a reason why BA can't have an all termie list - heck back when i first started playing that was their thing (space hulk).

But yeah, i agree on judgement calls.

Because percentage-based schemes generally require mandatory troops choices, a "troops tax" for certain specialist lists that basically forces players to take the cheapest troop options possible in order to play the list they really want to play.

The specialist detachments in 8th edition are a good compromise. You get more command points by having troops, and thus more tactical flexibility once you have a codex. But you're still allowed to take all specialists.

But you could still do that with percentages, which would scale proportionately to whatever size battle you were having. The troops 'tax' is that troops are generally bad compared to the other options. In my perfect, imaginary world, the 'troops' (or whatever the mandatory requirements were) would be worth taking on their own merits.

 Torga_DW wrote:
The troops 'tax' is that troops are generally bad compared to the other options.

Even if Troops are good, why should I be forced to take them in my Angelic Orbital Intervention Force?

 Melissia wrote:

 Torga_DW wrote:
The troops 'tax' is that troops are generally bad compared to the other options.

Even if Troops are good, why should I be forced to take them in my Angelic Orbital Intervention Force?

That was a side-note/rant on the troops tax, sorry my bad. But basically, if you wanted to take a dark angels ironwing (which is tanks), okay - you must take a minimum of 25% heavy support (spearhead detachment). You want to take a blood angels terminator force? Okay, you must take a minimum of 25% elites (vanguard detachment). Having multiple FOC-types isn't a restriction (and i often thought it was wrong that certain armies had to pidgeon-hole themselves into what looks like a basically imperial marines FOC), a percentage system still works well with them at any level. If you want to take allies, sure it presents problems. But if you want to take a 'pure' force of X at any level, it doesn't require multiple FOCs.

edit: clarification

The Angelic Orbital Intervention Force is a Blood Angels set, not a Dark Angels one. It consists of a terminator captain, and three squads of terminators (one tactical, two assault) minimum, and generally is terminators only.

It sounds like something from 7th..... Yet fits into the vanguard FOC. You could create variant-specific FOCs for individual armies (which makes make sense to me) in that in this case it must be terminator only minimum 25%.... But it still wouldn't be hurt by the percentage system. It would scale up or down as appropriate to the points level.

It was, I think. From Angel's Blade according to the page. The box set is still for sale, and I see its box in each store I visit.

Yeah, I've been playing since 3rd. My comment comes from the fact that in the mere several months of play in this edition, I've seen way more shocking upsets mid-game than ever before. Vehicles blowing up at the perfect time and clearing multiple diminished squads and wounded characters off the table, a psyker managing to get in close to your warlord and rolling 11 on smite and 6 damage. A single twin lascannon dealing 12 wounds, a lot of "6 fishing" effects like sniper MW's, old blast and flamer weapons hitting one guy, but then sometimes hitting 6 or 12, even when there aren't that many to hit...

None of those things are truly random though. Not like a lot of the stuff we had in the last two editions, or even in older editions like 2nd. In 2nd, you could have a tank blow up with no units near it and still have casualties because you rolled the result that causes the turret to fly off in a random direction/distance and kill something. In this edition, you KNOW exactly what the blast radius is, as well as how long before your vehicle dies. If you still have units around it when it's that low on wounds, it's the exact opposite of "random". You made a bad decision. Same with the psyker example. I mean it's one thing if there's nothing you can do to prevent the psyker from just appearing in the right spot, but if he managed to get all the way to where he needed to be and his smite went off perfectly ... again, that's NOT random. That's on the other player knowing this was a possibility and not stopping it. Same with all your other examples. Those situations are completely preventable. Making them the opposite of random.

I haven't seen as many mid-game surprise upsets as you have, but I will say that I HAVE seen way more people pull off wins in the last turn or two than ever before WITHOUT resorting to cheese like deliberately holding back a fast unit and then zipping it onto an objective at the last second. I think that a lot of what you're seeing is less do to the game being "more random" and more due to players making mistakes due to getting used to a new edition.

"Roulette" effects without a normalized distribution are just shoddy design in general. Stomp removes your unit on a 6? Bad design. D removes your unit on a 6? For shame. Tesla inflicts extra hits on a 6? Not as bad, since you're rolling more dice to begin with, and the end result isn't as all-or-nothing.

A Helbrute getting a second turn on a 6? Or other "immutable" results like that? Or even "swing effects" like the Conscript nerf. ("FRFSRF only works on a 4+. Hope your opponent doesn't use a loaded die").

I enjoy 8th, but less than 7th.

Three things that bother me most in 8th:
- all weapons on vehicles firing with an 360 arc and LOS being drawn from hull which results in silly situations
- terrain/cover rules, too much simplefied and results again in silly situations
- no more templates, i really do miss the templates, not so important, but i still miss em

 Melissia wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
Why not just say lets play 1 battlaion as a standard size.

What if a battallion is literally not big enough?

One can fill the entirety of an infantry-heavy Guard battallion for 750 points, easily.

take tanks instead of spamming chaff out the wazoo.

The limitation is designed to force different army lists instead of allowing people to spam or cherry pick.

2hq and 3 troops minimum. no LOW.

 Torga_DW wrote:

 MarsNZ wrote:
The GW staff could collectively start smoking crack today and maintain the habit until 9th and 8th edition would remain a completely superior product to the utter shitshow that was the 7th edition moneygrab. Does that mean it's perfect? Nope, but in terms of quality it's night vs day.

I'm not entirely sure how i'd get it (the crack, that is), but if they released the 40k crack edition i'd certainly consider it. As long as it came with a sticker on it - you must be this high to play.

There's also the linguistic issue to consider. 'Crack' in NZ is not the same thing as 'crack' in NA.

I think this is by far the worst 40k edition ever, even worse than 2nd edition which in retrospect was really bad.

The streamlining went too far. Games are often very bland. Most of the warmovies 'clichés' are out of the game and replaced by nonsensical rules or not taken into account. The tactical options are really limited. You can't hide, you can't avoid unless you play in a shoebox city.

Cover and difficult ground which are the cornestones of every wargame simply disappeared which means in essence you seldom can outmanoeuver your opponent. The last shred of tactics lies with CC but shooting does dominate so it doesn't really matter ATM.

The core rules are falsely made simpler and all special rules have been scattered amongst the various codicies. The bloat we loathed under 7th will be there before spring.

The so vaunted new balance was a sham. Only SM, CSM, dG an GK and AM are out and balance went already out of the window.

The inner work of the rules is so bad that horde armies irrevocably dominate even in casual games.

Moral doesn't work. The system is awful.

7th was also spoiled by the amount of rules bypassing core rules leading to an arms race between factions. Mortal wounds do the exact same thing. Instead of being really rare, they are increasingly integrated in the combos available. Has GW removed dweapons? Nope, mortal wounds and smite achieve the same brokenness.

Therefore either you have incredibly lucky rolls or you win through gimmicks.

Skill is not rewarded, list builing is key, even more than before.

In fact, GW as usual did try to mitigate 7th failings by generating other problems and an even weaker ruleset.

Given that the core rules allow hordes to dominate, I can bet those gimmicks triggered by command points will be increased for futur elite armies. If not Eldars will be craptacular or if they try to compensate, they will have horribly OP combos as usual.

All in all, 8th reminds me of WFB 8th which pushed people to buy loads of minis to no avail and eventually killed the old world.

I'm terribly bitter. Imho GW has never been able to provide us a good ruleset but this one is really terrible.

This is not a wargame anymore.

vlad78 wrote:

(1) Cover and difficult ground which are the cornestones of every wargame simply disappeared which means in essence you seldom can outmanoeuver your opponent. The last shred of tactics lies with CC but shooting does dominate so it doesn't really matter ATM.

(2) The core rules are falsely made simpler and all special rules have been scattered amongst the various codicies. The bloat we loathed under 7th will be there before spring.

(3) The inner work of the rules is so bad that horde armies irrevocably dominate even in casual games.

(4) Moral doesn't work. The system is awful.

I think regardless what one thinks of the edition in general, these are very true.

(1) Everybody, I think, feels the terrain is lacking. At the beginning I was thinking at least about dividing the terrain between cover (+1 armor) and concealemnt (-1 to hit) but Alpha Legion, Raven Guard and Ryza convinced me that is better not.

(2) One could argue that this depends from personal tastes and do not care about bloat as long as there is coherence in the ruleset, but we are seeing that stuff like the keywords are not properly used. See the interaction with FW models.
Also, the application of some weapon is counter-intuitive even if is less than feared at the beginning. I think THERE IS something inherently broken because of the kind of fixes they had to add to make units viable, like the Russ shooting 2 times. This is like declaring " we completely botched the transition from 5" area to dice".

(3) This could be the codices and the morale mitigating mechanics. We all know we are thinking at this moment at the stern guy with the funny hat.

(4) Again this is true but it could be the codex, see above. Nonetheless, like in 7th artillery does not feel like artillery (it was good for sniping, arguably) in 8th stuff like Snipers, that could mitigate (3), do not work because of their rule and the Wound bloat in minor characters. I wish we had, instead of the focus NounNoun NounVerb from the designer team, a focus on what makes a wargame feel like a wargame.

I am torn. On the other side, I see a lot of units previously considered un-usable that have some use, albeit this could again change. As someone else stated, I would have preferred a good 3rd edition all over again.
I feel also the "WarmaHording" of the game. They did see players used combo, now playtesters and/or designers prepare pre-made "fake-smart" combos to sell the Special Characters.
Is not all bad - I like as an example how in the DG this has been done wisely and the combinations are so many that you don't have a specific given combo with only specific models. You can make choices to find the specific synergy and that's great.

1) Terrain is definitely a case of "if it ain't broke." Although people may have complained about a Wraithknight getting cover because its toe is in shrubbery (which was FAQed), equally absurd is only being able to see only the edge of a tank's tread through three buildings, and said tank *not* getting cover because it isn't in shrubbery.
2) A Land Raider carries 2 models, but each Terminator counts as two. However, a Custodes Land Raider carries 5 models. The side effect is that a Malleus Inquisitor in Terminator Armor cannot ride in a Custodes Land Raider. Oops. Speaking of Forgeworld, one personal favorite example is Brayath Ashmantle, whom possesses a pistol called Burning Wrath. Fluffwise, it is obviously a Flame Pistol, but Flamecraft does not work with it because it does not have "Flame" in its name. Personally, I wish GW added keywords to weapons or wargear as well, especially as it could have helped in 7th too. Remember "Is a Plasma Culverin a Plasma Weapon" for purposes of the Haemotrope Reactor?
3) Morale in 40k has been binary, but generally meaningless in many situations. Truth be told, I'm not entirely sure what it should be replaced with. Although disruption tokens ala Epic would be neat, I doubt the system would scale upward. Maybe a "three-tiered" morale system that is "Pass, Shaken, Routed" ala Kings of War? Or maybe make it four tiers, so there's "Fleeing" vs "Routed". Maybe replace "sweeping advances" with a free round of melee attacks? On a side note, 6th removed the rule that a unit could not Rally if there was an enemy unit within 6" of it, meaning the old trick of attempting to escort routed units off-table was no longer an option.
4) Admittedly, that was an issue with 7th. Barrage weapons were better for sniper duty than actual sniper weapons. Being able to dictate the direction the attack came from for purposes of cover was admittedly rather cool.

Started in 3rd editon.

7th edition was the edition I hated most.

8th edition is fun with the right people. It is abysmal with the powergaming crowd simply because the game falls apart.

I wouldn't play 7th edition. I'll still play 8th edition. It needs work though.

We need some advanced rules. We need some terrain rules that matter. We need to start cutting down on mortal wounds. Its gotten nonsensical.

I really wish that they didn't have Command Points as something you spammed to maximize them; remember when they said that Command Points would be a reward for playing fluffy armies? And instead, it's just soup and spam lists to get as many CPs as possible because they are way too good.

Thats the approach I took in writing Grand Crusade. You get Campaign Points for making a narrative style army as opposed to how they do it now which is just... very gamey.

I enjoy 8th, but if I'm being honest, I am starting to like it less than 7th, despite the fact that the ork index is far and away better than the 7th ed codex.

There's just a lot of rules that seem unfair and unbalanced.

My biggest problem is falling back. I hate that it's free, guaranteed, unchallenged, and a large amount of units (and armies) can do it without penalty, or with a trifling penalty.

I honestly feel that it would be a fine mechanic, if there were just some kind of test for it to go off, and if the unit falling back took damage for trying, like a melee overwatch. I mean, when I charge, I have to brave overwatch and have a chance to fail. I feel that it's fair that if you wish to undo my charge, you need to take similar risks.

Aura abilities, and character rules in general, are also starting to get a bit under my skin. I think that if aura abilities were limited to affecting one unit per phase, characters like G-man would instantly become more balanced. But having a single model buffing an entire army doesn't seem reasonable.

Cover basically only works for small, elite armies, and is a massive boon for them. For horde armies, you may as well not play with cover unless it's a gigantic cardboard box with absolutely no LOS. And even if you do you get cover by some miracle, the benefit you gain is almost useless.

I'm probably in the minority in this, and I guess I am in general, but I actually liked the 7th ed psychic phase, though I do recognize it became pretty ungainly in psychic-heavy lists. But the current 'pass a test on 2d6' is a little dull in my opinion.

Lastly........I'm honestly not sure I'm a fan of command re-rolls. I feel the game becomes a bit more pure, for lack of a better word, once everyone is out of command points. I like the stratagem system on the whole, don't get me wrong, but I guess I don't like re-rolls.

7th wasn't perfect, but 8th certainly isn't shaping up to be the 'most playtested edition ever' it was sold to us as.

Then again, everybody's a critic.

I am also in that same minority that felt that the 7e Psyker system had potential if the numbers were adjusted to make Psykers scale in a sane manner. The largest issue was that the Warp Charge ratio meant that the system scaled logarithmically if you tried to use each individual Psyker, and worked better as battery-casting for one or two super-casters, and individual armies only amplified this issue. Even with the issues that 7e Psykers had, they were still *mostly* manegable (minus Invisibility) until Wrath of Magnus. Which was: "You know, Thousand Sons are the Psyker Traitors, so they need a really low ceiling for Warp Charge. Let's let Daemons get Heralds Anarchic and Blue Horrors." "But what about Magnus?" "Oh, we'll give him a Psyker power that lets him recycle Warp Charge."

Siphon Magic is arguably the worst-designed power of 7th, and arguably made Invisibility look sane.

That said, I did like that it allowed for move-cast-move, since this was something that *any* army with Psykers could do (and given that the three main "no Psyker" armies had at least one form of Jetpack movement, it was a wash afaik). For all the complaints that Eldar and Tau were "unfair" since they could move after shooting, I honestly haven't seen as much complaint about the matter from Guard Players now that Tallarn tanks get this option...

ANYWAY, it's not so much that I "like" 7th (I did enjoy the few games I got), so much as I feel it's easier to strip that system down rather than to build a game out of 8th.

I prefer 8th edition psychic by far. It remembers me more 3rd edition and has what I want from the phase: simple buffs you choose and you can even tailor you strategy on, with a simple resolution mechanic.

I can see people wanting more nuance in things like terrain or deepstrike/infiltration, and even more risk, but 7th psychic phase was an utter abomination.

Nevermore.

Morale immunity should never have been a thing.

8th psychic phase is OK.

Smite should be removed completely. Each discipline (for ex, Librarius) should get a Primaris power that can be cast multiple times per turn.

Any spammable power should be far weaker than what smite is.

Wayniac wrote:
I really wish that they didn't have Command Points as something you spammed to maximize them; remember when they said that Command Points would be a reward for playing fluffy armies? And instead, it's just soup and spam lists to get as many CPs as possible because they are way too good.

I think this is more of a problem of the "mix armies with a shared keyword".
Armies now DO have more structure compared to the old formation spam, IMHO, and the detachments that include troops give you more CP that can make a difference. I really appreciate that. I appreciate less soups, so yeah, people that stated that soup-less armies should get more CP in a way or another, have a point.

Synapse should be: "Use the Leadership of the synapse unit and halve morale casualties (rounding down)."

Summary Execution should be: "Halve morale casualties (rounding up)."

 Kaiyanwang wrote:
I prefer 8th edition psychic by far. It remembers me more 3rd edition and has what I want from the phase: simple buffs you choose and you can even tailor you strategy on, with a simple resolution mechanic.

I can see people wanting more nuance in things like terrain or deepstrike/infiltration, and even more risk, but 7th psychic phase was an utter abomination.

Nevermore.

3rd Psyker Powers might as well have not existed if you weren't playing Eldar ("Guide Starcannons", or "Fortune my Seer Council of Infinite Warlocks"), or Pete Haines Chaos, where you got to experience the joys of fishing for Siren. ("Neener neener, you can't attack me."). Orks didn't even *have* Psykers, Tyranids were primarily a "take Warp Blast dummy, because its your only low AP gun", and Guard? Your Sanctioned Psyker rolled a random power, the most notable one being a D6 shot "move or fire" lasgun. Guard Psykers were so bad, even their signiature attack was a flashlight!

5e Psykers were flawed in that Marine Librarians got 2 Psyker Powers, period, and the internal balance was obviously lacking. ("Gee, do I take Smite, or do I take Null Zone?"). Tyranids became "Take Catalyst/Paroxysm, dummy!" And you also got to experience the comical nature of "when do I actually cast a power anyway?" since "game turn vs player turn" was ambiguously defined, some psychic powers could be cast in the enemy turn, the Eldar powers were cast "at the start of the turn," yet Eldritch Storm and Mind War were Psychic Shooting Attacks and thus cast in your Shooting Phase, leading to contradiction as to when either power could be actually cast! In retrospect, an actual phase for Psychic powers was the right choice, at least if GW was still sticking to phases.

7th is simple enough to fix, both on a power and a core mechanic system. Replace "all or nothing" casting with "degrees of success" both for casting and denial, and make individual powers not so roulette-worthy. Maybe make Denial a 5+ base instead of a 6 base (Incidentally, if one rolled 3 successes on a blessing, rolling 18 dice to deny would only have about a 60% chance of stopping it. 4 successes and it drops to about 36%).

8th has Psychic Focus, which exists as a "balance" against stuff like an Ork player Da Jumping an entire army, while similarly ensuring that powers like Eadbanger will never see play.

Yeah, there was a lot of good in 7th. The stuff AROUND the core might've been gak, but the core of the system was pretty solid. Not perfect, of course-it can definitely be improved. But better than 8th.

I'm liking 8th better than previous editions, but there is much room for improvement.

 MagicJuggler wrote:


7th is simple enough to fix, both on a power and a core mechanic system. Replace "all or nothing" casting with "degrees of success" both for casting and denial, and make individual powers not so roulette-worthy. Maybe make Denial a 5+ base instead of a 6 base (Incidentally, if one rolled 3 successes on a blessing, rolling 18 dice to deny would only have about a 60% chance of stopping it. 4 successes and it drops to about 36%).

I was probably biased for 3rd but I meant: power as a dangerous selected "special equipment" helping the strategy. No randumb.
I fail to get why one should fix 8th psychic system of all of them. It does not even affect all the armies.
7th edition one is so clunky that is better just to trash it and start from scratches.

I have played 8th only a little, and I really have no interest to play it much more. The game is way way too abstracted. Sure 7th was too clunky at places, but now they went to other extreme and removed all the flavour and cinematics from the game. Everything is so bland in 8th - shoot, hit, count wounds, remove models. Nothing interesting or memorable ever happens and the game board looks boring as all the infantry are in clumps, vehicles dont leave craters etc.

It is just so uninteresting.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kaiyanwang wrote:
I prefer 8th edition psychic by far. It remembers me more 3rd edition and has what I want from the phase: simple buffs you choose and you can even tailor you strategy on, with a simple resolution mechanic.

I can see people wanting more nuance in things like terrain or deepstrike/infiltration, and even more risk, but 7th psychic phase was an utter abomination.

Nevermore.

7th edition Psychic phase was actually an improvement over how things worked in 6th system. The old Psychic system simply broke down when Codeci like Space Wolves came out and flooded the game with Psychic powers. It was nearly impossible to keep track on who had done what in which phase. 7th edition put them all in one place and removed lot of ambiguity.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Corrode wrote:

ERJAK wrote:
It's weird how big a deal Mortal wounds are for people. Coming from Sigmar, there's barely any in 40k by comparison. Even full smite spam armies don't do as many mortal wounds as things like Disciples of Tzeentch or Blades of Khorne do incidentally.

They're also not even new to 40k - they've existed at least since 5th and Jaws of the World Wolf, calling them "mortal wounds" just codifies the old "removed from play" mechanic.

And before that, for example Mind Worm from 4th edition DA Codex. (though that power was really weak).
Lots of AoS players have complained about Mortal Wound spam, tho.

Did the 8th edition rulebook come with free rose tinted glasses or something?

Even though the Psychic phase sucked in 7th, it was still an improvement over the psychic in 4th, 5th and 6th edition. They should have probably made it more akin the the fantasy magic phase.

Mortal wounds by themselves aren't bad. Being able to spam mortal wounds is the problem.

 Kaiyanwang wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:


7th is simple enough to fix, both on a power and a core mechanic system. Replace "all or nothing" casting with "degrees of success" both for casting and denial, and make individual powers not so roulette-worthy. Maybe make Denial a 5+ base instead of a 6 base (Incidentally, if one rolled 3 successes on a blessing, rolling 18 dice to deny would only have about a 60% chance of stopping it. 4 successes and it drops to about 36%).

I was probably biased for 3rd but I meant: power as a dangerous selected "special equipment" helping the strategy. No randumb.
I fail to get why one should fix 8th psychic system of all of them. It does not even affect all the armies.
7th edition one is so clunky that is better just to trash it and start from scratches.

It affected a good deal of armies though, and still has its issues. Why dismiss the desire for a better system?

I agree with non-random powers. However, I preferred the "Decide how many dice you want to put into this power" decision, versus "here's 2d6, roll well." Besides, risking Perils for pushing a greater amount of Warp Charge is very iconically 40k, especially in the RPGs. Rebalance individual offending powers, and restructure powers as "degrees of success" rather than "must roll at least X successes", and *maybe* make the extremely "minor"/rote Psykers "Wyrds" (akin to Bound Spells pre-8th WHFB: Less powerful but automatically successful with 1 success).

Darsath wrote:
Even though the Psychic phase sucked in 7th, it was still an improvement over the psychic in 4th, 5th and 6th edition. They should have probably made it more akin the the fantasy magic phase.

4th did at least "try" to put some balancing mechanism in place, by having Psychic Powers cost points. Of course, I infamously remember the 4th Marine Codex where each Psychic Power had two separate point costs, that the second Psychic Power would cost more than if it was the only Psychic Power. Of course, even then, some powers were obviously better than the other ones. ("Gee, do I take Smite, or do I take Veil of Time?") Point-buy is a start, but powers aren't necessarily in a vacuum.

What I imagine would make the most sense would be: Each Discipline has 6 powers (or 3 maybe). A Psyker chooses their powers at *army creation* (being able to choose multiple disciplines to roll from pregame made Marine casters maybe a little too flexible). Each Discipline has 4 Basic Powers and 2 Advanced Powers, and for each Advanced Power a Psyker wants to know, it must know 2 Basic Powers from the same discipline. No "Endurance, Invisibility, Vortex of Doom" superpsyker that doesn't know how to cast Mental Fortitude!

4-6th Psychic system worked well as long as Space Magic was rare and most of it was not really powerful. Dark Angels Codex had 2 powers (Ezekiel knew a third). That was ALL you could have. And psychers who could cast more than 1 power were super rare, even supposedly powerful Psychers like Ezekiel were Mastery Level 1. Things went out of whack about halfway 5th edition with Space Wolves and then Grey Knights.

Now lets make it clear I did not actually LIKE 7th edition Psychic system very much, but it beat what was before it.

 Sim-Life wrote:
Did the 8th edition rulebook come with free rose tinted glasses or something?

As some one that never played anything before 5th edition id say no.

the more I see it played and the more I play it, the more I am convinced it is not only the worst edition of 40k but actually the worst miniature game currently produced. Even "Carnage" seems to be a better game than this "bucket of dice" time sink. I have never seen so many rules arguments over so few actual written rules in over 20 years of gaming. I am also disgusted with the amount of 2-3 turn wipe outs. This game is really badly done. I will believe "most playtested" if they admitted the playtesters actually hate gamers.

My buddy, a big primaris fan (I despise primaris) had me paint him up a blood ravens force (even hunted down the transfer sheet) from his starter primaris force and he was excited to play. went to the gw and watched him get tabled in 2 turns every fight (3 fights total) I played 1 game, with my grey knights, wiped out AM in 3 turns, was the most boring game i have ever played.

Still not as good as 3rd. But it is less of a clusterfrak then 7th. I just wish the indexes and rulebook were all together in ONE book like the 3rd ed. one was.

Something that's becoming more and more clear as I play:

Despite more opportunity than ever to have diverse, unique armies, the game feels incredibly flat even as codices are coming out.
Stats are way more variable now, but are more stratified than ever.
The AP system should be more variable, but since it eliminates abilities like Rending, it actually feels like it makes most AP feel unimportant - Anything past AP-3 feels superfluous most of the time.
Damage SHOULD be interesting, but 99 times out of a hundred, you can predict how much damage a weapon will deal just by looking at its other stats. There's *some* interesting variance here (For example, the Psycannon doing 4 shots with 1 damage, versus the Autocannon doing 2 shots with 2 damage,) but it's few and far between. Anti-tank weapons are universally d6 damage, close combat weapons are universally d3, unless they're the 'Good' version in which case they're 3, unless they're the 'Anti-armor' version in which case they're higher AP and 2.

With all that combined, it's hard to really care about much when picking a weapon, beyond getting the most reliable stats. Do you want S+1 or S+2? It doesn't matter, because you're wounding almost everything on either 3s or 5s whichever you pick, so who cares? AP-2 or AP-3? With as many enemies have invulns, does it matter?


We've only got a few codices out, and we've already got duplicates of most Chapter Tactic ability and Warlord Trait.

Almost all the relics feel pretty identical, with very few of them offering some kind of actual unique ability. There's the 'Better Melee Weapon', the 'Armor buff', the 'Basic Ranged Weapon Buff', a few special effects that are usually either so powerful as to be an auto-include (Steal command points on a 5+!) or so weak as to be completely ignored.
The different unique melee weapons seem to have a huge level of overlap, too, to make matters worse.



Strategems and psychic powers seem to be the only place where there's actually *some* true variance. There's a lot of repetition there, sure, but there's at least LESS repetition.

I've not played 40k in ages before coming back with 8th so can't really comment on how it compares to previous editions. But I've been having fun with the game, my only gripes so far have been the power of turn 1 alpha strikes and the lack of facing with vehicle weapons. While you could abstract that a tank is turning to bring all sides to bear it makes less sense if some of those guns are behind a building or something.

Blandhammer 40,000: In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, You All Look The Same To Me?

Seems to be the way it's going. Duplicated faction traits/stratagems/etc, duplicated special rules... nothing feels unique.

Starting to get bored already.

I want for once defend the choice of recycling traits and stratagems on different armies. Ryza and Alpha Legion have similarities, but do they play the same? I don't think so.
I find more bland the repetition of REROLLS, EVERYONE and the ubiquitous special characters.

@MagicJuggler: I suppose we have to agree to disagree, but nonetheless I respect your point - you don't want to roll the dice because DUDE ROLLIN IS FUN LOL but because you want a more nuanced game in the phase with risk calculation and whatnot. To me less is more, but hey.

I played during RT and quit after the great squatting. Came back for 8th and am thoroughly enjoying it so far.

the pace of the game is really fun and I love the fact that units die quickly and everything can kill everything.

The only thing I would change is unsquatting the Squats.

7th ed almost killed the hobby for me it was such a mess, i think they have done an admirable job of rebalancing and streamlining things though and I've really enjoyed 8th so far. the only complaint that i have is that i wish cover was covered in more detail and maybe modified the hit roll instead of increasing armor. the one thing I really like is how flexible list building is while maintaing a good balance.

 Kaiyanwang wrote:
@MagicJuggler: I suppose we have to agree to disagree, but nonetheless I respect your point - you don't want to roll the dice because DUDE ROLLIN IS FUN LOL but because you want a more nuanced game in the phase with risk calculation and whatnot. To me less is more, but hey.

I enjoy nuance. And risk-calculation is half the point of Psykers (not to mention Deathstrikes or Serpent Shields or other "in extremis" measures), so making Psykers cheap yet fairly reliable Mortal Wounds feels...off. I get where you're coming from and definitely do agree there are a lot of situations where less is more (assorted "+1 to do Kung Fu Wardance in a Challenge" bonuses were generally too low-level/granular to apply to 40k at a "company-level" IMO), but making Psychic powers "degrees of success" rather than "pass-fail" doesn't feel like it would necessarily overcomplicate things. Kings of War handles its (admittedly generic) magic as a "degrees of success" die-pool mechanic for example, where it works well enough.

Not perfect but much more enjoyable for me both 6th and 7th edition. I have encountered very few rules issues and have had a lot of fun games (@ 12 so far).

And I am looking forward to the upcoming Craftworld Codex.

It's bad in a different way than 7th. But still bad.