Mass turn one deep striking is a problem that needs some adjustment. However, can we agree that although the deep striking assaulting units are still viable, still just as strong, they'll just be bringing there potency to bear on turn 2 rather than turn 1, that that isn't actually the BIG problem to the assault armies. Would you agree that the BIG problem is that assault based deep striking armies now have to

answer the question of what you do with the other half of the army that doesn't deep strike, especially if you go second. That other half will have to endure two rounds of fire before your assault half shows up, this is what "breaks" the assault lists and probably makes them unplayable competitively. The lists work because the assaulting units command the opponents attention, providing pseudo protection

for your backfield static units. Now the opponent gets to take there 2000 points and casually annihilate your 1000 points over two turns, then when your other 1000 points show up, they have a major advantage and will deal with it easily. I think this beta rule doesn't go far enough. I think to achieve balance you need to restrict turn one deep striking to your deployment zone, but ALSO restrict turn one

shooting into your opponents deployment zone. Do you agree with any of that?

I think this isn't the first thread that discusses both the FAQ, and this problem.

That said, it's a real problem people (especially melee armies), will be facing; and one that isn't properly address enough by people arguing in favor of the new ruling.

So... balance out your opponent not being able to shoot at the half of the army you have in reserve, by not allowing them to shoot at the half you don't have in reserve?

That doesn't seem practical. Unless you mean nightfighting style 'restrict'.

Make matched play use the Night Fight rules. There, all but 1 of your units is now -3 to hit. Hurts Gunlines, buffs assault and close range firefight armies and lowers first turn alpha strike.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Make matched play use the Night Fight rules. There, all but 1 of your units is now -3 to hit. Hurts Gunlines, buffs assault and close range firefight armies and lowers first turn alpha strike.

I'd be very happy with this.

This doesn't make that much sense to me. The combined effect of these is just that your opponent has an extra turn to move units around before you hit them while you have an extra turn to shoot at their infiltrators with half of your army. That's not much of a nerf to deep striking. It's not clear that it's a nerf to it at all. Maybe you want to argue that the new restriction on how much power you can deep strike is alone sufficient, but the other beta rule and what you're proposing don't seem to add much on top of that.

IG has literally been shooting into my deployment zone since I began playing 40K... I still manage to do 50/50 or better against them without resorting to sleazy deep strike trickery.

I'm grinning at the thought of starting Banshees in a Wave Serpent on the deployment line, running them out of the transport turn 1 with their psychic support for 8+3+d6" (or a flat 6 with the stratagem)... and then if I NEED to Quicken them, there's that. And then charging them 2d6+3", or if I need a more reliable charge, using the Biel-tan Aspect Warrior stratagem for another +2" or +3" depending on army, and some rerolls.

Then after that easter basket of jackassery, loading 10 Guardians and their platform onto the Serpent and following the banshees up the field and supporting them with some Shuriken dakka.

I mean, it probably isn't good... but it is an easy turn 1 assault without deep strike. 17" + 2d6+(3 or 5 or 6) assault. May be able to get deeper than with Webway Strike.

Btw: Are there actually REAL melee armies? The most melee army I've seen was still augmented with a fair amount of fire support.

But then you're assaulting their front line with *banshees*. Good luck if it's anything but Marines...

Dionysodorus wrote:
This doesn't make that much sense to me. The combined effect of these is just that your opponent has an extra turn to move units around before you hit them while you have an extra turn to shoot at their infiltrators with half of your army. That's not much of a nerf to deep striking. It's not clear that it's a nerf to it at all. Maybe you want to argue that the new restriction on how much power you can deep strike is alone sufficient, but the other beta rule and what you're proposing don't seem to add much on top of that.

I'm not sure what you don't understand or don't find imbalanced. If you are facing a gunline that is 2000 points of pure fire power. And you're blood angels with 1000 points tied up in assault units (sanguinary guard, death company, etc) all deep striking, and another 1000 points for some troops choices and complimentary fire support, and the blood angles player gets second turn - the 2000 points of pure gunline has two full turns of shooting to decimate the blood angels 1000 points of troops and various other odds and ends, all before the real strength of the army shows up. Do you see this as lopsided and therefore problematic?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Purifying Tempest wrote:

Btw: Are there actually REAL melee armies? The most melee army I've seen was still augmented with a fair amount of fire support.

Blood Angels is the big one here, there whole codex is designed with the real strengths being in deep striking melee units, unless you consider the baal predator the stand out of the codex.

shooting is all powerful in 7th and 8th and now we finally got a buff in 8th only to have it taken away.

Deepstriking my Kommandos into my enemies deployment zone kept me from losing 120 boyz turns 1-2 and allowing me to have a chance of reaching his lines without being utterly destroyed.

Bharring wrote:
But then you're assaulting their front line with *banshees*. Good luck if it's anything but Marines...

I said it probably wasn't good. More for fun than anything. Then again the people I play with bring just as much "for the lols" as we bring for efficiency. Never know if it is a joke you're running into or if it is something that is about to maul you. I think the game is missing a good bit of "I did it for the lols"... well, maybe not the game, but dakka definitely is.

But, the assertion is that melee armies/units/whatever are dead because of the FAQ changes to Deep Strike... and that example kind of spits in the face of the assertion.

I guess I could give a more practical example of any chaos unit in a Renegade Legion advancing + warp time to get to melee turn 1. Or Warp Talons. But none of these models are inherently broken and require some finesse to do these things with... thus it is labeled bad.

Purifying Tempest wrote:

Bharring wrote:
But then you're assaulting their front line with *banshees*. Good luck if it's anything but Marines...

I said it probably wasn't good. More for fun than anything. Then again the people I play with bring just as much "for the lols" as we bring for efficiency. Never know if it is a joke you're running into or if it is something that is about to maul you. I think the game is missing a good bit of "I did it for the lols"... well, maybe not the game, but dakka definitely is.

But, the assertion is that melee armies/units/whatever are dead because of the FAQ changes to Deep Strike... and that example kind of spits in the face of the assertion.

I guess I could give a more practical example of any chaos unit in a Renegade Legion advancing + warp time to get to melee turn 1. Or Warp Talons. But none of these models are inherently broken and require some finesse to do these things with... thus it is labeled bad.

Let me clarify, assault units that have a viable way of assaulting turn 1 without using deep strike, your banshee example, shining spears, one blood angels unit using the forlorn fury stratagem, various tyranid shenanigans, are unaffected, buy their are a few codices that really rely on deep striking multiple units that synergize with one another to work. Even forlorn fury for BA, any good BA melee unit is going to have some amount of character support buffing it, forlorn fury does nothing for that scenario. There are very real whole armies deeply affected by this, again, competitively. Sure in a casual game this rule won't break your army. But if you were striving to win a big tournament with a BA army, good luck after this change.

Here is a problem with limiting shooting first turn:
I already know I can successfuly run an assault list that starts 100% on the table. It is a Kraken horde list.
If you cripple shooting first turn, my horde will happily overrun any shooting opposition, escpecially if I happen to get first turn.

We had a good balance in archetypes so far, but they broke it.
Now fixing it will be very hard, because the balance is not just a two way seesaw.

So what you're saying is... the armies that were designed to get there early on can get there regardless... the only difference now is 1) the volume which can do it and 2) they have to be deployed instead of held in reserve to do it turn 1?

Meanwhile, things like Plasma took a much harder nerf to their deep striking tactics... from the same nerf. And much more of them were affected, at the top levels, than the swarms of Death Company and Tyranid guys who actually favored melee over a safe drop site for dakka.

The surgical nature of deep strike ranged attacks were much more unfair in the competitive scene than getting overran with... whatever model has an axe today. And it largely boiled down to Rapid Fire 1 with 24" range is always going to fire twice in the 9-12" band... Assault units out of deep strike without Warp Time or shenanegans still only have a 44% chance to make that 9" charge.

Well, how do you balance vs an on-board assault list in a game where the receiving side (probably gunline, but definitely not pure CC) has a 50/50 chance of either getting an extra turn of shooting or losing a whole turn of shooting (depending on how you look at it)?

You can't really balance the IG Gunline vs footslogging bug horde if you don't know if the gunline will have 1 or 2 turns of unfettered shooting until the first few dicerolls. That's such a huge swing that it'll decide too many games.

So what's the alternative?

Purifying Tempest wrote:
IG has literally been shooting into my deployment zone since I began playing 40K... I still manage to do 50/50 or better against them without resorting to sleazy deep strike trickery.

I'm grinning at the thought of starting Banshees in a Wave Serpent on the deployment line, running them out of the transport turn 1 with their psychic support for 8+3+d6" (or a flat 6 with the stratagem)... and then if I NEED to Quicken them, there's that. And then charging them 2d6+3", or if I need a more reliable charge, using the Biel-tan Aspect Warrior stratagem for another +2" or +3" depending on army, and some rerolls.

Then after that easter basket of jackassery, loading 10 Guardians and their platform onto the Serpent and following the banshees up the field and supporting them with some Shuriken dakka.

I mean, it probably isn't good... but it is an easy turn 1 assault without deep strike. 17" + 2d6+(3 or 5 or 6) assault. May be able to get deeper than with Webway Strike.

Btw: Are there actually REAL melee armies? The most melee army I've seen was still augmented with a fair amount of fire support.

Well there's khorne daemon and slaanesh daemon that are almost pure 100% melee, and heavily geared towards that. Both those army are now more or less DoA now.

Also, just want to say that those bandshee wont be able to move out of their transport turn 1. They are outside of the game (transport) and being set up turn 1, so they will have to be placed inside the deployment zone, like everyone else.
And like people said, you'll mostly be charging guardsman, cultist, brimstone, etc, all alone because the rest of the deep strike wont arrive until a turn later, so those banshee will kill one unit, then promptly get shot.

VoidSempai wrote:

Purifying Tempest wrote:
IG has literally been shooting into my deployment zone since I began playing 40K... I still manage to do 50/50 or better against them without resorting to sleazy deep strike trickery.

I'm grinning at the thought of starting Banshees in a Wave Serpent on the deployment line, running them out of the transport turn 1 with their psychic support for 8+3+d6" (or a flat 6 with the stratagem)... and then if I NEED to Quicken them, there's that. And then charging them 2d6+3", or if I need a more reliable charge, using the Biel-tan Aspect Warrior stratagem for another +2" or +3" depending on army, and some rerolls.

Then after that easter basket of jackassery, loading 10 Guardians and their platform onto the Serpent and following the banshees up the field and supporting them with some Shuriken dakka.

I mean, it probably isn't good... but it is an easy turn 1 assault without deep strike. 17" + 2d6+(3 or 5 or 6) assault. May be able to get deeper than with Webway Strike.

Btw: Are there actually REAL melee armies? The most melee army I've seen was still augmented with a fair amount of fire support.

Well there's khorne daemon and slaanesh daemon that are almost pure 100% melee, and heavily geared towards that. Both those army are now more or less DoA now.

Also, just want to say that those bandshee wont be able to move out of their transport turn 1. They are outside of the game (transport) and being set up turn 1, so they will have to be placed inside the deployment zone, like everyone else.
And like people said, you'll mostly be charging guardsman, cultist, brimstone, etc, all alone because the rest of the deep strike wont arrive until a turn later, so those banshee will kill one unit, then promptly get shot.

You're saying Slaanesh wasn't DoA already? What codex are you referencing, so I can get my friend some help for his army!

Also, the banshees are not "arriving", they are "disembarking".

And yes, they will be charging a screen, if I cannot punch a hole in a line with the rest of my army. But I'm the type of gent that will crash 14 Death Company models into 10 Cultists because the carnage is hilarious. Charging banshees into Guardsmen isn't that much more of a stretch for me.

 peteralmo wrote:

Dionysodorus wrote:
This doesn't make that much sense to me. The combined effect of these is just that your opponent has an extra turn to move units around before you hit them while you have an extra turn to shoot at their infiltrators with half of your army. That's not much of a nerf to deep striking. It's not clear that it's a nerf to it at all. Maybe you want to argue that the new restriction on how much power you can deep strike is alone sufficient, but the other beta rule and what you're proposing don't seem to add much on top of that.

I'm not sure what you don't understand or don't find imbalanced. If you are facing a gunline that is 2000 points of pure fire power. And you're blood angels with 1000 points tied up in assault units (sanguinary guard, death company, etc) all deep striking, and another 1000 points for some troops choices and complimentary fire support, and the blood angles player gets second turn - the 2000 points of pure gunline has two full turns of shooting to decimate the blood angels 1000 points of troops and various other odds and ends, all before the real strength of the army shows up. Do you see this as lopsided and therefore problematic?

I don't understand what this has to do with what I said. Like I said, it sounds to me like you get basically all of what you want by getting rid of the new "can't deep strike outside of your deployment zone on turn 1" restriction. Why would you keep it and instead add another new rule where the combined effect of them is basically a wash?

Also, the banshees are not "arriving", they are "disembarking".

And yes, they will be charging a screen, if I cannot punch a hole in a line with the rest of my army. But I'm the type of gent that will crash 14 Death Company models into 10 Cultists because the carnage is hilarious. Charging banshees into Guardsmen isn't that much more of a stretch for me.

"Furthermore, in matched play games, any unit that arrives on the battlefield during a player’s first turn must be deployed wholly within the controlling player’s deployment zone ."
Since there's no definition to arriving on the battlefield, let's take a look at the transport rules and the reinforcement rules

"Many units have the ability to be set up on the battlefield mid-turn, " and "Typically, this happens at the end of the Movement phase, but it can also happen during other phases. Units that are set up in this manner ... "

"When a unit disembarks, set it up on the battlefield so that all of its models are within 3" of the transport"

you set up the unit mid-turn, so that seems to fulfill the requirement for being reinforcement.

Seems to be worded as saying you can't disembark outside of deployment zone turn 1 to me, even though I agree it ridiculous and stupid. Even worse, a transport being blown up turn 1 by the enemie, if it was outside the deployment zone, would kill all it's passenger because they couldn't be placed within 3" of the transport and also within the deployment zone.

And trust me, I have no advantage of playing these rule this way, I want to play assault chaos space marine, so before I used deepstrike, now I need to use lots of transport. But that seems like an unintended consequence of the new ruling and it sucks. :(

There's an FAQ that things disembarking from a Drop POd are not arriving from Reserves.

I'd argue it's an erratta, but it'd be *very* hard to claim disembarking from a Drop Pod is not arriving from Reserves while disembarking from a Serpent that started the game on the table is.

VoidSempai wrote:

Well there's khorne daemon and slaanesh daemon that are almost pure 100% melee, and heavily geared towards that. Both those army are now more or less DoA now.

If I had the time and money i'm fairly confident that I could prove that wrong. When I get time maybe someone could challenge me on Table Top Simulator?

 Daedalus81 wrote:

VoidSempai wrote:

Well there's khorne daemon and slaanesh daemon that are almost pure 100% melee, and heavily geared towards that. Both those army are now more or less DoA now.

If I had the time and money i'm fairly confident that I could prove that wrong. When I get time maybe someone could challenge me on Table Top Simulator?

It's not that I don't believe you, and you could certainly prove me wrong, but khorne has, what... exactly 1 shooty unit? (that is very good mind you)
so, 3 x 100 points, you have 300 points right here. the rest of the 1700 points are all melee focussed. You'll need at least 700 points on the board turn 1, and the rest in deepstrike. So now you have to use 700 points of melee, non shooty, no transport, daemon, plus an average of 9 shots at S8 AP-2, Dam2, to try to kill the ennemie screen before you can charge with the bloodthirster and bloodletters waiting in deepstrike. And try not to get tabled, because you're almost all T3 or T4, Sv 5++.

VoidSempai wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

VoidSempai wrote:

Well there's khorne daemon and slaanesh daemon that are almost pure 100% melee, and heavily geared towards that. Both those army are now more or less DoA now.

If I had the time and money i'm fairly confident that I could prove that wrong. When I get time maybe someone could challenge me on Table Top Simulator?

It's not that I don't believe you, and you could certainly prove me wrong, but khorne has, what... exactly 1 shooty unit? (that is very good mind you)
so, 3 x 100 points, you have 300 points right here. the rest of the 1700 points are all melee focussed. You'll need at least 700 points on the board turn 1, and the rest in deepstrike. So now you have to use 700 points of melee, non shooty, no transport, daemon, plus an average of 9 shots at S8 AP-2, Dam2, to try to kill the ennemie screen before you can charge with the bloodthirster and bloodletters waiting in deepstrike. And try not to get tabled, because you're almost all T3 or T4, Sv 5++.

I wouldn't even deepstrike. Well, maybe a unit or two of BL, but that's it. One skullcannon, one soulgrinder, and two BTs. Letters and other HQs to fill out 2 battalions for 13 CP.

Bharring wrote:
There's an FAQ that things disembarking from a Drop POd are not arriving from Reserves.

I'd argue it's an erratta, but it'd be *very* hard to claim disembarking from a Drop Pod is not arriving from Reserves while disembarking from a Serpent that started the game on the table is.

Ah but Reserves is a significant thing there.
The Tactical Reserves rule, despite its name, does not say it applies to units arriving from Reserve but to units that arrive on the battlefield.

So while you are not arriving from reserve, you are still arriving on the battlefield. (this is for things like Veil of Darkness, on Wings of Fire, Gate, ect)

However I do not believe that disembarking from a transport is 'arriving on the battlefield'. It is already on the battlefield inside its transport.

Also note that the faq did not say a unit from a Drop Pod is not arriving from Reserves, mere that you cannot shoot a unit disembarking from a transport that arrived from reserves (Because the unit arrives on the battlefield while still embarked and is therefor not a legal target when the enemy is allowed to respond with shooting)

Dionysodorus wrote:

 peteralmo wrote:

Dionysodorus wrote:
This doesn't make that much sense to me. The combined effect of these is just that your opponent has an extra turn to move units around before you hit them while you have an extra turn to shoot at their infiltrators with half of your army. That's not much of a nerf to deep striking. It's not clear that it's a nerf to it at all. Maybe you want to argue that the new restriction on how much power you can deep strike is alone sufficient, but the other beta rule and what you're proposing don't seem to add much on top of that.

I'm not sure what you don't understand or don't find imbalanced. If you are facing a gunline that is 2000 points of pure fire power. And you're blood angels with 1000 points tied up in assault units (sanguinary guard, death company, etc) all deep striking, and another 1000 points for some troops choices and complimentary fire support, and the blood angles player gets second turn - the 2000 points of pure gunline has two full turns of shooting to decimate the blood angels 1000 points of troops and various other odds and ends, all before the real strength of the army shows up. Do you see this as lopsided and therefore problematic?

I don't understand what this has to do with what I said. Like I said, it sounds to me like you get basically all of what you want by getting rid of the new "can't deep strike outside of your deployment zone on turn 1" restriction. Why would you keep it and instead add another new rule where the combined effect of them is basically a wash?

This is definitely not a wash, the gunline army has at least a full turn to move and shoot at units outside your opponents deployment zone before deep strikers arrive. That turn of movement can be used to strategically set yourself up in the best position to receive those deep strikers, and to screen off potential landing sites for those deep strikers. Before, if the assault army went first, you had no such turn for tactical adjustment.

VoidSempai wrote:

Also, the banshees are not "arriving", they are "disembarking".

And yes, they will be charging a screen, if I cannot punch a hole in a line with the rest of my army. But I'm the type of gent that will crash 14 Death Company models into 10 Cultists because the carnage is hilarious. Charging banshees into Guardsmen isn't that much more of a stretch for me.

"Furthermore, in matched play games, any unit that arrives on the battlefield during a player’s first turn must be deployed wholly within the controlling player’s deployment zone ."
Since there's no definition to arriving on the battlefield, let's take a look at the transport rules and the reinforcement rules

"Many units have the ability to be set up on the battlefield mid-turn, " and "Typically, this happens at the end of the Movement phase, but it can also happen during other phases. Units that are set up in this manner ... "

"When a unit disembarks, set it up on the battlefield so that all of its models are within 3" of the transport"

you set up the unit mid-turn, so that seems to fulfill the requirement for being reinforcement.

Seems to be worded as saying you can't disembark outside of deployment zone turn 1 to me, even though I agree it ridiculous and stupid. Even worse, a transport being blown up turn 1 by the enemie, if it was outside the deployment zone, would kill all it's passenger because they couldn't be placed within 3" of the transport and also within the deployment zone.

And trust me, I have no advantage of playing these rule this way, I want to play assault chaos space marine, so before I used deepstrike, now I need to use lots of transport. But that seems like an unintended consequence of the new ruling and it sucks. :(

So units who have not disembarked from a transport after turn 3 are removed from play?

Now that is funny.

Although the beta rule only says arrives (not arrives from reserves), the above blob specifically gives context to the rules that the beta rule is referencing. I mean, it could be cleaned up a bit by GW (like they did with the Smite rule where it now adds +1 WC instead of -1 cast roll), but I'm pretty sure to use your line of interpretation is inherently wrong due to "units embarked on a vehicle turn 3 are destroyed because they haven't arrived".

Anyways, not like I am a great player, and everything still could work, you just lose 3 inches and access to stuff like warp time and quicken... but I am pretty sure the rule is going to work counter to your interpretation.

Purifying Tempest wrote:

VoidSempai wrote:

Also, the banshees are not "arriving", they are "disembarking".

And yes, they will be charging a screen, if I cannot punch a hole in a line with the rest of my army. But I'm the type of gent that will crash 14 Death Company models into 10 Cultists because the carnage is hilarious. Charging banshees into Guardsmen isn't that much more of a stretch for me.

"Furthermore, in matched play games, any unit that arrives on the battlefield during a player’s first turn must be deployed wholly within the controlling player’s deployment zone ."
Since there's no definition to arriving on the battlefield, let's take a look at the transport rules and the reinforcement rules

"Many units have the ability to be set up on the battlefield mid-turn, " and "Typically, this happens at the end of the Movement phase, but it can also happen during other phases. Units that are set up in this manner ... "

"When a unit disembarks, set it up on the battlefield so that all of its models are within 3" of the transport"

you set up the unit mid-turn, so that seems to fulfill the requirement for being reinforcement.

Seems to be worded as saying you can't disembark outside of deployment zone turn 1 to me, even though I agree it ridiculous and stupid. Even worse, a transport being blown up turn 1 by the enemie, if it was outside the deployment zone, would kill all it's passenger because they couldn't be placed within 3" of the transport and also within the deployment zone.

And trust me, I have no advantage of playing these rule this way, I want to play assault chaos space marine, so before I used deepstrike, now I need to use lots of transport. But that seems like an unintended consequence of the new ruling and it sucks. :(

So units who have not disembarked from a transport after turn 3 are removed from play?

Now that is funny.

Although the beta rule only says arrives (not arrives from reserves), the above blob specifically gives context to the rules that the beta rule is referencing. I mean, it could be cleaned up a bit by GW (like they did with the Smite rule where it now adds +1 WC instead of -1 cast roll), but I'm pretty sure to use your line of interpretation is inherently wrong due to "units embarked on a vehicle turn 3 are destroyed because they haven't arrived".

Anyways, not like I am a great player, and everything still could work, you just lose 3 inches and access to stuff like warp time and quicken... but I am pretty sure the rule is going to work counter to your interpretation.

Oh I do hope so, it's just that right now, when reading the rule, one could make a very strong case that things cannot disembark outside deployment zone. And yes, thing that go into transport after turn 3 should theoretically die. I know it sounds silly, and it's not HIWPI, but, personally, I would not like to play that basilisk can shoot without needing LoS, and it's still the rules you know :s .

I guess i'm still super salty after the faq. Leave me be for a while and i'll prep right up soon enough .

Watch out for those transports... they get really salty late in the game. One could argue that they are very toxic late in the game!

 peteralmo wrote:
Mass turn one deep striking is a problem that needs some adjustment. However, can we agree that although the deep striking assaulting units are still viable, still just as strong, they'll just be bringing there potency to bear on turn 2 rather than turn 1, that that isn't actually the BIG problem to the assault armies. Would you agree that the BIG problem is that assault based deep striking armies now have to

answer the question of what you do with the other half of the army that doesn't deep strike, especially if you go second. That other half will have to endure two rounds of fire before your assault half shows up, this is what "breaks" the assault lists and probably makes them unplayable competitively. The lists work because the assaulting units command the opponents attention, providing pseudo protection

for your backfield static units. Now the opponent gets to take there 2000 points and casually annihilate your 1000 points over two turns, then when your other 1000 points show up, they have a major advantage and will deal with it easily. I think this beta rule doesn't go far enough. I think to achieve balance you need to restrict turn one deep striking to your deployment zone, but ALSO restrict turn one

shooting into your opponents deployment zone. Do you agree with any of that?

This is a long response so I put a spoiler for part of it

So here's my view on this.....it's just my opinion, but I feel like alpha strikes were a problem. Essentially they leave nothing but chaff on the board in case they don't get first turn, then, whether they get first or second turn, they strike in and take a huge portion of points from their opponent's shooting list (in theory). Then the person who got hit is playing catch-up the rest of the game while the alpha striker only loses the units they didn't mind losing because the heavy hitters and high priority units weren't on the board. They're allowed to deep-strike in and attack from the strongest position (both figuratively and literally) that they can choose.

Well, it seems your opinion is based on false information, because the only deepstriking lists that won tournaments are flyrant lists (if you discount defensive deepstrike with reapers, which is still possible).
And those don't even try to get into combat turn 1. They are mostly shooty flyrants, that will only attack on turn 2.

Flyrant got triple nerfed in FAQ, so no reason to break the entire game over it as well.

To me, whether the group people call "shooting armies" are better than what people call "assault armies" is not actually important. The very idea that of there only being two kinds of lists, and them needing to be just as good as each other is too simplistic for what might be one of the most complicated games out there.

To me, the following things are actually important when it comes to this game (roughly in order of importance):

1. The game should be fun.
2. All factions should be roughly equivalent in power.
3. List building should be a very important part of the tactical process.
4. All faction's intended build types should be reasonably effective.
5. All units should be worth taking in some kind of list.

To me, the new deepstrike changes were due to a change being needed in the game due to #1 for the following reasons:

1) Being able to hold the majority of your army off the table, whether it was a shooty or assaulty unit, makes going first or second somewhat meaningless and that isn't fun.
1a) Going second against an army with significant deep-strike abilities means all you get to do to defend against it is your deployment, and that's not fun.
1b) Going first against an army with deep-strike gives you one turn to position, but there may not be anything of value to kill.
2) Being forced to defend against deep-striking lists by taking large numbers of bubble-wrap units in every single list is boring, makes all lists look very similar, and is not fun.

To sum things up, deep-striking a large portion of your army on turn one allows for little to no counter play on your opponent's part, and that doesn't make for a fun game. Every good army has to take a lot of bubble wrap, and many units and army builds are rendered useless due to their inability to defend against it.

All of these things being fixed are more important than shooting armies being better or assault armies being worse than they were previously. I would much rather have a shooting oriented game that is enjoyable, than an assault dominated one that is not.

Currently, the role of deep-strike is to have 1-2 units show up later in the game at an important time to mess things up. That might not be as immediately exciting when you compare it to how things were, but it is still fun (look at how the current DS is still better than previous edition's versions), and allows for some counter-play.

To move on to #2 (All factions should be roughly equivalent in power), I would argue that the FAQ changes overall (namely the removal of 3+ of the same unit and fixing things like poxwalkers) have helped move us in this direction. With the exception of GK (whose poorly designed army is based off of the un-fun deep-strike concept and suffering from the fact that marine and terminator profiles are overpriced), I think we can safely say that the FAQ overall helped even out the competitiveness of the factions. It might have moved some books up and other books down, but i think in general we are closer to the middle. I can only see this as a positive thing. Even if there was only one good build per codex, if they were all similarly likely to win games then that would be an unprecedented level of balance success, independent of whether or not every type (shooty, assaulty, etc) of list stood the same chance. Obviously this means that some armies need to be buffed, and i would agree, but not at the cost of the game being fun, so GW needs to find non-deepstrike spam ways to make those armies better.

Number #3 (List building should be a very important part of the tactical process) is a bit of a counter point to the next two points (4. All faction's intended build types should be reasonably effective, and 5. All units should be worth taking in some kind of list).

I think that it is okay for there to be a meta, and i also think it is okay form certain list ideas not to be very good if they violate rule #1. For example, if an army build can hold everything of value in reserve and then blow you away on the first turn no matter how you deploy, how you set up terrain, or what mission you are playing, and is generally not fun to play against, then it doesn't deserve to exist. On the flip side, just because I want to make an army made completely out of scout marines, doesn't mean that GW owes it to me make that a competitive list. To me, the game is healthiest when the best way to win is for most players to aim for a take all comers lists with a variety of units that fulfill different roles, rather than just spam the same unit over and over, or to abuse a game mechanic. Things like the 0-3 limitation help this, and i think the deep-strike changes do as well. I think it is perfectly fine if there are no good mostly deep-strike armies if it makes the game more fun, and there are other builds that are available. And in the case of the current GK, the overall fun of the game trumps them having a decent build (in the short term, anyway. Obviously I think GK should be tinkered with to get on the level of other books).

That being said, I think with #4 (All faction's intended build types should be reasonably effective) is important as well. If GW makes Black Templars the "Assaulty Marines" but then doesn't make them any good at assault (or much else for that matter), then that seems like a problem to me. GK being the "show up and mess you up while being durable and smitey" army should be a viable strategy as well, and so on through every faction. Doing anything else almost seems like false advertising. Complaints like "I want assaulty Tau" seem less legitimate (or at least low priority) to me, since it doesn't seem clear that GW intends for them to be that way. But in the end, the game in general being fun is more important than your army being able to play to all of it's builds, so it is GW's difficult task to figure out a way to make the armies both good and fun to play with / against. I feel like the current changes do make the game more fun to play, and hope that GW will do more to make bad units and army builds better moving forward.

#5 (All units should be worth taking in some kind of list) is mostly just the dream. Ideally, each unit is decent at something, and could see a place in a type of list that could win a game against another competitive list. But this can't come at the cost of the game being fun, and it isn't as important as #2-4.

Hopefully any of that made sense, but in the end i think nerfing super deep-strike armies for the good of the game is totally worth it, and this FAQ is a good step in moving the game towards a better place of balance. The first thing they have to do is remove the things that make the game not fun to play, and only then can they go about tweaking armies and units to make things closer to a perfect balanced state. If the result of this FAQ is that shooting armies make the game not fun, then i hope they do something about that too. I have heard some plausible solutions such as everything counts as moving on turn one, and others. However, I think between proper missions, terrain, and army composition, we actually won't see as many classic "gunline" dominating the meta as much as some have suggested. Mobility is still doing to be very important in most game types, and fast assault units will still definitely have a place in the game.

jdc366, thanks for a phenomenal post. It deserves his own thread for all to see the magnificence of it.

I know people will arguee "Baaah, fun is subjetive!". But actually , most developers look for un-fun mechanics, and those are the first ones they want and try to correct.

jcd386 wrote:
To me, whether the group people call "shooting armies" are better than what people call "assault armies" is not actually important. The very idea that of there only being two kinds of lists, and them needing to be just as good as each other is too simplistic for what might be one of the most complicated games out there.

To me, the following things are actually important when it comes to this game (roughly in order of importance):

1. The game should be fun.
2. All factions should be roughly equivalent in power.
3. List building should be a very important part of the tactical process.
4. All faction's intended build types should be reasonably effective.
5. All units should be worth taking in some kind of list.

To me, the new deepstrike changes were due to a change being needed in the game due to #1 for the following reasons:

1) Being able to hold the majority of your army off the table, whether it was a shooty or assaulty unit, makes going first or second somewhat meaningless and that isn't fun.
1a) Going second against an army with significant deep-strike abilities means all you get to do to defend against it is your deployment, and that's not fun.
1b) Going first against an army with deep-strike gives you one turn to position, but there may not be anything of value to kill.
2) Being forced to defend against deep-striking lists by taking large numbers of bubble-wrap units in every single list is boring, makes all lists look very similar, and is not fun.

To sum things up, deep-striking a large portion of your army on turn one allows for little to no counter play on your opponent's part, and that doesn't make for a fun game. Every good army has to take a lot of bubble wrap, and many units and army builds are rendered useless due to their inability to defend against it.

All of these things being fixed are more important than shooting armies being better or assault armies being worse than they were previously. I would much rather have a shooting oriented game that is enjoyable, than an assault dominated one that is not.

Currently, the role of deep-strike is to have 1-2 units show up later in the game at an important time to mess things up. That might not be as immediately exciting when you compare it to how things were, but it is still fun (look at how the current DS is still better than previous edition's versions), and allows for some counter-play.

To move on to #2 (All factions should be roughly equivalent in power), I would argue that the FAQ changes overall (namely the removal of 3+ of the same unit and fixing things like poxwalkers) have helped move us in this direction. With the exception of GK (whose poorly designed army is based off of the un-fun deep-strike concept and suffering from the fact that marine and terminator profiles are overpriced), I think we can safely say that the FAQ overall helped even out the competitiveness of the factions. It might have moved some books up and other books down, but i think in general we are closer to the middle. I can only see this as a positive thing. Even if there was only one good build per codex, if they were all similarly likely to win games then that would be an unprecedented level of balance success, independent of whether or not every type (shooty, assaulty, etc) of list stood the same chance. Obviously this means that some armies need to be buffed, and i would agree, but not at the cost of the game being fun, so GW needs to find non-deepstrike spam ways to make those armies better.

Number #3 (List building should be a very important part of the tactical process) is a bit of a counter point to the next two points (4. All faction's intended build types should be reasonably effective, and 5. All units should be worth taking in some kind of list).

I think that it is okay for there to be a meta, and i also think it is okay form certain list ideas not to be very good if they violate rule #1. For example, if an army build can hold everything of value in reserve and then blow you away on the first turn no matter how you deploy, how you set up terrain, or what mission you are playing, and is generally not fun to play against, then it doesn't deserve to exist. On the flip side, just because I want to make an army made completely out of scout marines, doesn't mean that GW owes it to me make that a competitive list. To me, the game is healthiest when the best way to win is for most players to aim for a take all comers lists with a variety of units that fulfill different roles, rather than just spam the same unit over and over, or to abuse a game mechanic. Things like the 0-3 limitation help this, and i think the deep-strike changes do as well. I think it is perfectly fine if there are no good mostly deep-strike armies if it makes the game more fun, and there are other builds that are available. And in the case of the current GK, the overall fun of the game trumps them having a decent build (in the short term, anyway. Obviously I think GK should be tinkered with to get on the level of other books).

That being said, I think with #4 (All faction's intended build types should be reasonably effective) is important as well. If GW makes Black Templars the "Assaulty Marines" but then doesn't make them any good at assault (or much else for that matter), then that seems like a problem to me. GK being the "show up and mess you up while being durable and smitey" army should be a viable strategy as well, and so on through every faction. Doing anything else almost seems like false advertising. Complaints like "I want assaulty Tau" seem less legitimate (or at least low priority) to me, since it doesn't seem clear that GW intends for them to be that way. But in the end, the game in general being fun is more important than your army being able to play to all of it's builds, so it is GW's difficult task to figure out a way to make the armies both good and fun to play with / against. I feel like the current changes do make the game more fun to play, and hope that GW will do more to make bad units and army builds better moving forward.

#5 (All units should be worth taking in some kind of list) is mostly just the dream. Ideally, each unit is decent at something, and could see a place in a type of list that could win a game against another competitive list. But this can't come at the cost of the game being fun, and it isn't as important as #2-4.

Hopefully any of that made sense, but in the end i think nerfing super deep-strike armies for the good of the game is totally worth it, and this FAQ is a good step in moving the game towards a better place of balance. The first thing they have to do is remove the things that make the game not fun to play, and only then can they go about tweaking armies and units to make things closer to a perfect balanced state. If the result of this FAQ is that shooting armies make the game not fun, then i hope they do something about that too. I have heard some plausible solutions such as everything counts as moving on turn one, and others. However, I think between proper missions, terrain, and army composition, we actually won't see as many classic "gunline" dominating the meta as much as some have suggested. Mobility is still doing to be very important in most game types, and fast assault units will still definitely have a place in the game.

All of these things being fixed are more important than shooting armies being better or assault armies being worse than they were previously. I would much rather have a shooting oriented game that is enjoyable, than an assault dominated one that is not.

You don't find melee-centric armies fun, because your opponent gets to actually use their models and play the game (you have to react to it). Guess what - as a melee-faction, I have to react to shooting armies, or I straight lose.

How does shooting counter melee armies? Screens.
How does melee armies counter shooting? Deep striking.

It's not fun losing all my models to shooting - there's no movement, tactics, or strategy; it's just point-and-click, and maybe rolling some dice.

I play Orks. I'm not allowed to shoot, either by GW's standards, or by the communities. I'm not allowed to have durable units - the only thing I've got is numbers. And frankly, having to slog all the way across the board to try and punch something, only to have it fall back and delete me with no penalties; is frankly absurd - this change gives shooting factions even MORE power, when they were ALREADY problematic by design.

And now, those screens have even MORE time to get into better positions; meaning it's that much further I have to go before I can attack something I actually want to (giving you yet another round of death dealing).

If the only way for meele to counter shooting is by having 60% of his army charge you turn one, then we have a very big problem at hand.

And that negates the fact that theres a ton of armies that aren't only meele or only shooting but a mix of both. Or even the fact that a ton of shooting armies based their strenght in deepstriking.

Stop making the deepstriking beta-rule as something that only affects meele.

fe40k wrote:
You don't find melee-centric armies fun, because your opponent gets to actually use their models and play the game (you have to react to it). Guess what - as a melee-faction, I have to react to shooting armies, or I straight lose.

I don't think the statement was intended to imply that shooting games are fun and assault games aren't. He could just as easily have written "I would much rather have an assault oriented game that is enjoyable, than an shooting dominated one that is not," or more simply "I would rather have a game that is enjoyable than one that is not." The point is to make the game fun first, and let that shape the style of game it is.

fe40k wrote:
I play Orks... This change gives shooting factions even MORE power, when they were ALREADY problematic by design.

No, I think you've got that the wrong way around. The shooting armies are fine - it's Orks, as a faction, that are "problematic by design". A slow, fragile and totally melee-centric army like the Orks can't really be fun in a game like 40k. They need a re-design that focuses on their other elements with a better balance of shooting and melee, and tones down the absurdity of just swamping the opponent with 180+ Boyz as their only effective build.

Deep striking in turn one was only one half of the problem.
The other still is that there are too many units out there which can deep strike close to the enemy (>9'' away).
This is aggravated by the use of strategems.

 kadeton wrote:

fe40k wrote:
I play Orks... This change gives shooting factions even MORE power, when they were ALREADY problematic by design.

No, I think you've got that the wrong way around. The shooting armies are fine - it's Orks, as a faction, that are "problematic by design". A slow, fragile and totally melee-centric army like the Orks can't really be fun in a game like 40k. They need a re-design that focuses on their other elements with a better balance of shooting and melee, and tones down the absurdity of just swamping the opponent with 180+ Boyz as their only effective build.

You mean like introducing units with a primary purpose of shooting? Kind of like: Lootas, Burnas, Mek Gunz, Big Gunz, Killa Kanz, Morkanauts, gorkanautz, Stompa, Flash Gitz, Big Shoota Boyz, Tank Bustas, Gun Wagonz, Battlewagonz, Deff Koptas, Dakka Jetz, Burna Bommas, Blitza Bommas, Wazbom Blastajet, Warbikerz, Skorcha buggies, Buggies, Big Trakz.

We have a plethora of shooty units, most of which are either entirely focused on shooting or heavily focused on shooting. Talk to any player on here who isn't an ork player and they will likely start complaining that Ork shooting can't be good because then they would be better or as good as their army. There is nothing wrong with a melee centric army, in fact it adds to the flavor of the game dramatically, the problem I see is the handful of Gunline Players who complain that their precious gun lines shouldn't have to worry about CC or have to factor in strategies beyond target priority. Not that long ago I remember reading a post here on dakkadakka where someone said that melee should be completely removed from the game, apparently the idea of using a battle axe in the 41st millennia was just over the top unbelievable for him. Daemons possessing people with psychic powers, a God emperor sitting on a golden toilet and Terminator style robots appearing under our feet while Giant space bugs invade from space is fine, you just can't use an axe.

Gunline players complained about alpha deep striking armies, completely forgetting the reason we have alpha deep striking armies is because Gunlines literally get to use the majority of their gunline in an alpha strike EVERY GAME. Someone posted here as well that the recent big tournament that most of the deep striking armies used SHOOTING deep striking forces not Melee oriented deep strikers. But this doesn't matter, we can't simply solve that by limiting deep striking units, we have to nerf CC armies across the board, because that is what is needed right? *End Rant*

Maybe you should make a more balanced list that doesn't involve 50% of the list in reserves?

I think the whole point of the new TacRes rule is for you to use deep strike as a tactical manuever and not as "HAH I HAVE HALF MY ARMY IN YOUR FACE!! EAT PLASMA DOUBLE TAP!!!!"

They did limit deepstrike, they made it so you can't drop in near the enemy till turn 2, it just nerfed CC armies in the process since they were over reliant on deepstrike to get their units where they need to go. GW should probably take a look at transports again to make them more viable or at the very least cheaper for people to run, should help with getting units where they need to be and keeping important units alive for an extra turn or two.

I do admit some of the points costs and rules for Orks need to be addressed (for the better).
The main viable strategy is the minimum 3x30 boyz with supporting characters with force fields (creeping doom).
Heck, just getting a new vehicle that could hold 30 (32?) models would stop some of the grumbling as long as it did not cost a fortune in points (and blowing it up would not cost more in boyz that just hoofing it).
I found I had to lean heavily on assault cannons to have a hope of surviving the inevitable blob of boyz grabbing my guys, which gives me less points for lascannons if the sneaky git fits in a battlewagon.

The changes to deep strike still do not change the need for "bubble-wrap" that shooty armies need to pay tax on.
Yes, it does give at least a turn to unload rather than not at all for some squads that normally got eaten by the turn 1 deep strike.
The remaining army on the board still gets to make use of cover (you play with terrain right?) BUT yeah Orks have trouble hiding 30 boyz behind a tree.

I agree that any element of the game that lets you destroy units before the player can even move them or take any kind of action (where cover will not even factor-in) needed to be addressed.

All of this would be greatly mitigated if GW could see fit to go to unit activation... I keep looking at this issue as the root cause of all the other complaints and issues we have had with reserves.
We could at least get down to the business of arguing what "unit" has too much capability in one activation to be "fair".

 gbghg wrote:
They did limit deepstrike, they made it so you can't drop in near the enemy till turn 2, it just nerfed CC armies in the process since they were over reliant on deepstrike to get their units where they need to go. GW should probably take a look at transports again to make them more viable or at the very least cheaper for people to run, should help with getting units where they need to be and keeping important units alive for an extra turn or two.

This really hits on something I've been thinking about for a long time, improving transports dramatically so that cc armies don't need to rely on deep strike so much.

Yes lowering transport cost is a good start. But I think the real revolution in list building would come if you allowed disembarkation at the END of the movement phase. I think this would transform cc armies overnight. Currently disembarking before movement is just a clunky awkward non-starter for cc armies.

In fact, I think I'll start a new thread about it in proposed rules lol.

I'm kind of anticipating people saying it won't work because of flyers extreme movement characteristic, they would basically guarantee mass turn 1 charges. It would still work, but you basically restrict the rule to any vehicles with the supersonic rule, or with a move characteristic greater than 20", something along those lines.

So to resume, shooty armies ruining enemy units turn 1 is good, but deepstriking 50% max of your army is bad ? Are we using different maths here ?
Obviously losing units isn't fun for both. Overprotecting gunlines won't make it fun IMO as well.

I started a blood angels list. I also have a grey knights army. Both have in common the use of deepstriking. See what problem i'm running into ? It's not about losing units anymore, it's about having armies that won't be even viable thanks to that faq. If i can't make impact turn 1, why should i play those armies ? I have to change chapters because people don't like getting into cc ? Do we need a good old 7th edition with bikes spam again ?

Blood angels and grey knights are barely played in tournaments, and they aren't winning. So deepstrike isn't the problem.
Tyranids wins are due to op units spam, like always, which issue was poorly addressed in this faq.

Gunlines had and still have protections against DS, screens, 9" range, stratagems.

Last argument, considering this faq goes officially live. If i play a DS army with let's say 40% of units in reserve (not that abusive, and IS fun to play to me at least), and i get the 2nd turn. It will be 100% of my foe's army against 60% of mine TWICE. How is that fair, balanced and fun ?

Again DS isn't the problem, or you would see way more red/grey armies in tournaments.

rixazur wrote:
So to resume, shooty armies ruining enemy units turn 1 is good, but deepstriking 50% max of your army is bad ? Are we using different maths here ?
Obviously losing units isn't fun for both. Overprotecting gunlines won't make it fun IMO as well.

Strawman. Ignores powerful shooting elements that use deepstrike

I started a blood angels list. I also have a grey knights army. Both have in common the use of deepstriking. See what problem i'm running into ? It's not about losing units anymore, it's about having armies that won't be even viable thanks to that faq. If i can't make impact turn 1, why should i play those armies ? I have to change chapters because people don't like getting into cc ? Do we need a good old 7th edition with bikes spam again ?

Jury is still out on using abilities like GOI turn 1. Common sense points to allowing it.

Blood angels and grey knights are barely played in tournaments, and they aren't winning. So deepstrike isn't the problem.

Irrelevant. All armies used deepstrike. These armies performed poorly for other reasons. BA actually has admirable qualities that got it to top tables.

Tyranids wins are due to op units spam, like always, which issue was poorly addressed in this faq.

Are we reading the same FAQ?

Gunlines had and still have protections against DS, screens, 9" range, stratagems.

Some of them did. None of them could effectively guard against shooting deepstrikes that shot past the screen.

Last argument, considering this faq goes officially live. If i play a DS army with let's say 40% of units in reserve (not that abusive, and IS fun to play to me at least), and i get the 2nd turn. It will be 100% of my foe's army against 60% of mine TWICE. How is that fair, balanced and fun ?

Potentially yes since you're placing a scissors versus their paper and can effectively turn off parts of their army since they are by definition a gun line.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

rixazur wrote:
So to resume, shooty armies ruining enemy units turn 1 is good, but deepstriking 50% max of your army is bad ? Are we using different maths here ?
Obviously losing units isn't fun for both. Overprotecting gunlines won't make it fun IMO as well.

Strawman. Ignores powerful shooting elements that use deepstrike

I started a blood angels list. I also have a grey knights army. Both have in common the use of deepstriking. See what problem i'm running into ? It's not about losing units anymore, it's about having armies that won't be even viable thanks to that faq. If i can't make impact turn 1, why should i play those armies ? I have to change chapters because people don't like getting into cc ? Do we need a good old 7th edition with bikes spam again ?

Jury is still out on using abilities like GOI turn 1. Common sense points to allowing it.

Blood angels and grey knights are barely played in tournaments, and they aren't winning. So deepstrike isn't the problem.

Irrelevant. All armies used deepstrike. These armies performed poorly for other reasons. BA actually has admirable qualities that got it to top tables.

Tyranids wins are due to op units spam, like always, which issue was poorly addressed in this faq.

Are we reading the same FAQ?

Gunlines had and still have protections against DS, screens, 9" range, stratagems.

Some of them did. None of them could effectively guard against shooting deepstrikes that shot past the screen.

Last argument, considering this faq goes officially live. If i play a DS army with let's say 40% of units in reserve (not that abusive, and IS fun to play to me at least), and i get the 2nd turn. It will be 100% of my foe's army against 60% of mine TWICE. How is that fair, balanced and fun ?

Potentially yes since you're placing a scissors versus their paper and can effectively turn off parts of their army since they are by definition a gun line.

I really don't think you're giving the full implications of the FAQ their due. You seem to feel everything will be fine. Again, I think BA, which was scraping and clawing to secure a spot on the competitive scene will take a serious hit from this, and GK, well this is just kicking them while they're down lol.

rixazur wrote:
So to resume, shooty armies ruining enemy units turn 1 is good, but deepstriking 50% max of your army is bad ? Are we using different maths here ?
Obviously losing units isn't fun for both. Overprotecting gunlines won't make it fun IMO as well.

I started a blood angels list. I also have a grey knights army. Both have in common the use of deepstriking. See what problem i'm running into ? It's not about losing units anymore, it's about having armies that won't be even viable thanks to that faq. If i can't make impact turn 1, why should i play those armies ? I have to change chapters because people don't like getting into cc ? Do we need a good old 7th edition with bikes spam again ?

Blood angels and grey knights are barely played in tournaments, and they aren't winning. So deepstrike isn't the problem.
Tyranids wins are due to op units spam, like always, which issue was poorly addressed in this faq.

Gunlines had and still have protections against DS, screens, 9" range, stratagems.

Last argument, considering this faq goes officially live. If i play a DS army with let's say 40% of units in reserve (not that abusive, and IS fun to play to me at least), and i get the 2nd turn. It will be 100% of my foe's army against 60% of mine TWICE. How is that fair, balanced and fun ?

Again DS isn't the problem, or you would see way more red/grey armies in tournaments.

Shooty armies deep striking 50% of the army equipped with plasmagun equivalents are ruining the game.

Not sure how many people have tried the new beta rules but had my first game with them last night. Nids vs. Thousand Sons.

I actually rather liked the new limitations on deepstriking. Rather than each of us dumping the rest of our armies onto the tablet T1, being forced to wait til turn 2 ensured that there were two interest spikes in the game and a far more interesting setup for counterplay. The game felt far more dynamic and didn't feel like it had resolved itself by the end of round 2.

Interestingly enough, I decimated my friend's list previously when I could deepstrike near his lines on T1. Target saturation was too much for his list and tying up just a few units led to a massive imbalance. This game felt far more fair and he pulled out a solid victory that was exciting and fun to play to the end.

 peteralmo wrote:


I really don't think you're giving the full implications of the FAQ their due. You seem to feel everything will be fine. Again, I think BA, which was scraping and clawing to secure a spot on the competitive scene will take a serious hit from this, and GK, well this is just kicking them while they're down lol.

I'm stepping cautiously. I'm certain there will be issues.

I would say anyone discounting it before playing 10 games is not giving it a proper shake. GK could see some relief from the meta requirements of the past and increased CP. They're not going to take top tables until some other tweaks, but I don't think they're out entirely. (Depends on the GOI interpretation)

I have decided to actually play with it a couple of times before passing judgement.

I've played long enough to realize what I think is going to go down in my head, even with all the mathhammering in the world, it generally doesn't always go down that way. I could end up being surprised at how it changes the game.

SemperMortis wrote:

 kadeton wrote:
A slow, fragile and totally melee-centric army like the Orks can't really be fun in a game like 40k. They need a re-design that focuses on their other elements with a better balance of shooting and melee, and tones down the absurdity of just swamping the opponent with 180+ Boyz as their only effective build.

You mean like introducing units with a primary purpose of shooting? Kind of like: Lootas, Burnas, Mek Gunz, Big Gunz, Killa Kanz, Morkanauts, gorkanautz, Stompa, Flash Gitz, Big Shoota Boyz, Tank Bustas, Gun Wagonz, Battlewagonz, Deff Koptas, Dakka Jetz, Burna Bommas, Blitza Bommas, Wazbom Blastajet, Warbikerz, Skorcha buggies, Buggies, Big Trakz.

Yeah, those are things that exist... but out of everything on that list, only Tankbustaz, Mek/Big Gunz and mmmmaybe Dakkajets aren't complete garbage and actively detrimental to your list (as an alternative to taking more Boyz). Making those units actually worth their points, while reducing how hilariously overpowered a basic unit of Boyz is in melee, would essentially fix the Orks' gameplay problems.

etb342 wrote:
Not sure how many people have tried the new beta rules but had my first game with them last night. Nids vs. Thousand Sons.

I actually rather liked the new limitations on deepstriking. Rather than each of us dumping the rest of our armies onto the tablet T1, being forced to wait til turn 2 ensured that there were two interest spikes in the game and a far more interesting setup for counterplay. The game felt far more dynamic and didn't feel like it had resolved itself by the end of round 2.

Interestingly enough, I decimated my friend's list previously when I could deepstrike near his lines on T1. Target saturation was too much for his list and tying up just a few units led to a massive imbalance. This game felt far more fair and he pulled out a solid victory that was exciting and fun to play to the end.

Don't you dare actually suggest that one should try something before passing judgement on it!

You will be told that those changes are obvious and you don't need to test them, because 2+2=4 or something like that! (Spoiler: It has been proven on this forum that every time such arguments are made, they are proven wrong 90% of the times within a month).

I wonder if it will lead to more reactive (and thus interesting) play during deployment. If your opponent starts reserving deepstrike units, or has lots of melee units deployed which will take a turn to close, or you can see a place to hide from his big guns with half your army, you put stuff in deepstrike reserve (it's almost always optional during deployment). If they put down a gunline, you might want to keep everything on the field to avoid being defeated in 2 halves....

One alternative that springs to mid as a counteridea; what if everybody could keep any number of units in reserve (except immobile ones) and they could all march on from your table edge on any turn (or use deepstrike abilities as normal), and we only check for defeat by having no units on the field from turn 3 onwards. Everyone can avoid shooting alphastrike (or deepstrike melee alpha strike) from the player with turn 1, nobody has to have half their army destroyed before deepstrike reserves arrive, BUT - hide off the table too long and your opponent controls it (and it then massively ahead in VPs typically)...

The main complaint I'm getting from my group is that if they have to deepstrike turn 2 then it will be turn 3 or later before they can get to my back line tanks and artillery. Whereas they were enjoying getting there turn 2 and locking a big chunk of my list in my deployment zone for most of the game. They want to ignore this rule as its in beta currently, but hey if I lose the vote in my group then at least nothing changes.

 gbghg wrote:
They did limit deepstrike, they made it so you can't drop in near the enemy till turn 2, it just nerfed CC armies in the process since they were over reliant on deepstrike to get their units where they need to go. GW should probably take a look at transports again to make them more viable or at the very least cheaper for people to run, should help with getting units where they need to be and keeping important units alive for an extra turn or two.

Unfortunately both Tyranid transports are deep Strike oriented. Honestly I had thought about repainting to jormungundir pre-FAQ because I thought it sounded cool and fluffy to have all these tunnel things coming up everywhere like tremors. Now I think I will just push over 200 fearless gants with FNP and untargetable characters at people with hiveguard out of LOS because that's what it will take to weather the storm of shooting in my area.

 Lion of Caliban wrote:
The main complaint I'm getting from my group is that if they have to deepstrike turn 2 then it will be turn 3 or later before they can get to my back line tanks and artillery. Whereas they were enjoying getting there turn 2 and locking a big chunk of my list in my deployment zone for most of the game. They want to ignore this rule as its in beta currently, but hey if I lose the vote in my group then at least nothing changes.

If they ignore this rule, their feedback will be worth feth all and they'll be completely unprepared and behind the curve when it goes live.

The biggest problem is Sly Marbo doesn't have an exception to the beta rules.

CDShaddock wrote:

 gbghg wrote:
They did limit deepstrike, they made it so you can't drop in near the enemy till turn 2, it just nerfed CC armies in the process since they were over reliant on deepstrike to get their units where they need to go. GW should probably take a look at transports again to make them more viable or at the very least cheaper for people to run, should help with getting units where they need to be and keeping important units alive for an extra turn or two.

Unfortunately both Tyranid transports are deep Strike oriented. Honestly I had thought about repainting to jormungundir pre-FAQ because I thought it sounded cool and fluffy to have all these tunnel things coming up everywhere like tremors. Now I think I will just push over 200 fearless gants with FNP and untargetable characters at people with hiveguard out of LOS because that's what it will take to weather the storm of shooting in my area.

Tyranids will be one of the few armies that can guarantee turn 1 charges without deep strike.

I feel like you can just hide behind sight blocking terrain for the first turn and then only be exposed to faster moving shoota elements on the second turn. So half your army should be able to stick on the board if defensive enough.

Plagueuu Marines have always been difficult to wheedle out of cover in any edition, so if they make up half your army and the other half is the deep striking Khorne death machines you could be OK.

 Imateria wrote:

CDShaddock wrote:

 gbghg wrote:
They did limit deepstrike, they made it so you can't drop in near the enemy till turn 2, it just nerfed CC armies in the process since they were over reliant on deepstrike to get their units where they need to go. GW should probably take a look at transports again to make them more viable or at the very least cheaper for people to run, should help with getting units where they need to be and keeping important units alive for an extra turn or two.

Unfortunately both Tyranid transports are deep Strike oriented. Honestly I had thought about repainting to jormungundir pre-FAQ because I thought it sounded cool and fluffy to have all these tunnel things coming up everywhere like tremors. Now I think I will just push over 200 fearless gants with FNP and untargetable characters at people with hiveguard out of LOS because that's what it will take to weather the storm of shooting in my area.

Tyranids will be one of the few armies that can guarantee turn 1 charges without deep strike.

You may be able to with Kraken. Not so much with any of the others. Best bet is to just build pure fearless horde and dominate space until that gets adjusted because of complaints By shooting alpha armies showing the math that they don't have enough bullets to clear the bodies before the game ends on turn 3

fe40k wrote:

jcd386 wrote:
To me, whether the group people call "shooting armies" are better than what people call "assault armies" is not actually important. The very idea that of there only being two kinds of lists, and them needing to be just as good as each other is too simplistic for what might be one of the most complicated games out there.

To me, the following things are actually important when it comes to this game (roughly in order of importance):

1. The game should be fun.
2. All factions should be roughly equivalent in power.
3. List building should be a very important part of the tactical process.
4. All faction's intended build types should be reasonably effective.
5. All units should be worth taking in some kind of list.

To me, the new deepstrike changes were due to a change being needed in the game due to #1 for the following reasons:

1) Being able to hold the majority of your army off the table, whether it was a shooty or assaulty unit, makes going first or second somewhat meaningless and that isn't fun.
1a) Going second against an army with significant deep-strike abilities means all you get to do to defend against it is your deployment, and that's not fun.
1b) Going first against an army with deep-strike gives you one turn to position, but there may not be anything of value to kill.
2) Being forced to defend against deep-striking lists by taking large numbers of bubble-wrap units in every single list is boring, makes all lists look very similar, and is not fun.

To sum things up, deep-striking a large portion of your army on turn one allows for little to no counter play on your opponent's part, and that doesn't make for a fun game. Every good army has to take a lot of bubble wrap, and many units and army builds are rendered useless due to their inability to defend against it.

All of these things being fixed are more important than shooting armies being better or assault armies being worse than they were previously. I would much rather have a shooting oriented game that is enjoyable, than an assault dominated one that is not.

Currently, the role of deep-strike is to have 1-2 units show up later in the game at an important time to mess things up. That might not be as immediately exciting when you compare it to how things were, but it is still fun (look at how the current DS is still better than previous edition's versions), and allows for some counter-play.

To move on to #2 (All factions should be roughly equivalent in power), I would argue that the FAQ changes overall (namely the removal of 3+ of the same unit and fixing things like poxwalkers) have helped move us in this direction. With the exception of GK (whose poorly designed army is based off of the un-fun deep-strike concept and suffering from the fact that marine and terminator profiles are overpriced), I think we can safely say that the FAQ overall helped even out the competitiveness of the factions. It might have moved some books up and other books down, but i think in general we are closer to the middle. I can only see this as a positive thing. Even if there was only one good build per codex, if they were all similarly likely to win games then that would be an unprecedented level of balance success, independent of whether or not every type (shooty, assaulty, etc) of list stood the same chance. Obviously this means that some armies need to be buffed, and i would agree, but not at the cost of the game being fun, so GW needs to find non-deepstrike spam ways to make those armies better.

Number #3 (List building should be a very important part of the tactical process) is a bit of a counter point to the next two points (4. All faction's intended build types should be reasonably effective, and 5. All units should be worth taking in some kind of list).

I think that it is okay for there to be a meta, and i also think it is okay form certain list ideas not to be very good if they violate rule #1. For example, if an army build can hold everything of value in reserve and then blow you away on the first turn no matter how you deploy, how you set up terrain, or what mission you are playing, and is generally not fun to play against, then it doesn't deserve to exist. On the flip side, just because I want to make an army made completely out of scout marines, doesn't mean that GW owes it to me make that a competitive list. To me, the game is healthiest when the best way to win is for most players to aim for a take all comers lists with a variety of units that fulfill different roles, rather than just spam the same unit over and over, or to abuse a game mechanic. Things like the 0-3 limitation help this, and i think the deep-strike changes do as well. I think it is perfectly fine if there are no good mostly deep-strike armies if it makes the game more fun, and there are other builds that are available. And in the case of the current GK, the overall fun of the game trumps them having a decent build (in the short term, anyway. Obviously I think GK should be tinkered with to get on the level of other books).

That being said, I think with #4 (All faction's intended build types should be reasonably effective) is important as well. If GW makes Black Templars the "Assaulty Marines" but then doesn't make them any good at assault (or much else for that matter), then that seems like a problem to me. GK being the "show up and mess you up while being durable and smitey" army should be a viable strategy as well, and so on through every faction. Doing anything else almost seems like false advertising. Complaints like "I want assaulty Tau" seem less legitimate (or at least low priority) to me, since it doesn't seem clear that GW intends for them to be that way. But in the end, the game in general being fun is more important than your army being able to play to all of it's builds, so it is GW's difficult task to figure out a way to make the armies both good and fun to play with / against. I feel like the current changes do make the game more fun to play, and hope that GW will do more to make bad units and army builds better moving forward.

#5 (All units should be worth taking in some kind of list) is mostly just the dream. Ideally, each unit is decent at something, and could see a place in a type of list that could win a game against another competitive list. But this can't come at the cost of the game being fun, and it isn't as important as #2-4.

Hopefully any of that made sense, but in the end i think nerfing super deep-strike armies for the good of the game is totally worth it, and this FAQ is a good step in moving the game towards a better place of balance. The first thing they have to do is remove the things that make the game not fun to play, and only then can they go about tweaking armies and units to make things closer to a perfect balanced state. If the result of this FAQ is that shooting armies make the game not fun, then i hope they do something about that too. I have heard some plausible solutions such as everything counts as moving on turn one, and others. However, I think between proper missions, terrain, and army composition, we actually won't see as many classic "gunline" dominating the meta as much as some have suggested. Mobility is still doing to be very important in most game types, and fast assault units will still definitely have a place in the game.

All of these things being fixed are more important than shooting armies being better or assault armies being worse than they were previously. I would much rather have a shooting oriented game that is enjoyable, than an assault dominated one that is not.

You don't find melee-centric armies fun, because your opponent gets to actually use their models and play the game (you have to react to it). Guess what - as a melee-faction, I have to react to shooting armies, or I straight lose.

How does shooting counter melee armies? Screens.
How does melee armies counter shooting? Deep striking.

It's not fun losing all my models to shooting - there's no movement, tactics, or strategy; it's just point-and-click, and maybe rolling some dice.

I play Orks. I'm not allowed to shoot, either by GW's standards, or by the communities. I'm not allowed to have durable units - the only thing I've got is numbers. And frankly, having to slog all the way across the board to try and punch something, only to have it fall back and delete me with no penalties; is frankly absurd - this change gives shooting factions even MORE power, when they were ALREADY problematic by design.

And now, those screens have even MORE time to get into better positions; meaning it's that much further I have to go before I can attack something I actually want to (giving you yet another round of death dealing).

I play mono Khorne Daemons list, I make orks shooting look plentiful, compared to the fact I can only run 3 units of shooting in a 1000-2000 point list. The rest of the list has NO RANGED WEAPONS (BTW if your wondering bout bloodthirsters, i use the D-axe ones. Cause other ones can't deal with hordes as well), 300 points of shooting. That's it.

Galas wrote:If the only way for meele to counter shooting is by having 60% of his army charge you turn one, then we have a very big problem at hand.

And that negates the fact that theres a ton of armies that aren't only meele or only shooting but a mix of both. Or even the fact that a ton of shooting armies based their strenght in deepstriking.

Stop making the deepstriking beta-rule as something that only affects meele.

The problem is that this rule effects deep strike melee more disproportionately than shooting deep strike. In fact Scion plasma/Obliterator bombs are still there, they just have to chill for a turn. But guess what that means for them, they get to go for more targets because the screening units that were protecting those targets are now dead

kadeton wrote:

fe40k wrote:
You don't find melee-centric armies fun, because your opponent gets to actually use their models and play the game (you have to react to it). Guess what - as a melee-faction, I have to react to shooting armies, or I straight lose.

I don't think the statement was intended to imply that shooting games are fun and assault games aren't. He could just as easily have written "I would much rather have an assault oriented game that is enjoyable, than an shooting dominated one that is not," or more simply "I would rather have a game that is enjoyable than one that is not." The point is to make the game fun first, and let that shape the style of game it is.

fe40k wrote:
I play Orks... This change gives shooting factions even MORE power, when they were ALREADY problematic by design.

No, I think you've got that the wrong way around. The shooting armies are fine - it's Orks, as a faction, that are "problematic by design". A slow, fragile and totally melee-centric army like the Orks can't really be fun in a game like 40k. They need a re-design that focuses on their other elements with a better balance of shooting and melee, and tones down the absurdity of just swamping the opponent with 180+ Boyz as their only effective build.

Again, I run Khorne daemons. A 7/8th army what is ONLY melee, at least orks have guns. And were even more slow and fragile than orks, at only T3 for grunts and T4 for calvary, trust me. Orks have it good compared to us

peteralmo wrote:

 gbghg wrote:
They did limit deepstrike, they made it so you can't drop in near the enemy till turn 2, it just nerfed CC armies in the process since they were over reliant on deepstrike to get their units where they need to go. GW should probably take a look at transports again to make them more viable or at the very least cheaper for people to run, should help with getting units where they need to be and keeping important units alive for an extra turn or two.

This really hits on something I've been thinking about for a long time, improving transports dramatically so that cc armies don't need to rely on deep strike so much.

Yes lowering transport cost is a good start. But I think the real revolution in list building would come if you allowed disembarkation at the END of the movement phase. I think this would transform cc armies overnight. Currently disembarking before movement is just a clunky awkward non-starter for cc armies.

In fact, I think I'll start a new thread about it in proposed rules lol.

I'm kind of anticipating people saying it won't work because of flyers extreme movement characteristic, they would basically guarantee mass turn 1 charges. It would still work, but you basically restrict the rule to any vehicles with the supersonic rule, or with a move characteristic greater than 20", something along those lines.

This wouldn't work for daemons. At all, we have no transports. At all. No daemons army has any transport that they can use, and we can't even use allies transports

A.T. wrote:
So... balance out your opponent not being able to shoot at the half of the army you have in reserve, by not allowing them to shoot at the half you don't have in reserve?

That doesn't seem practical. Unless you mean nightfighting style 'restrict'.

This. Unless you're playing on a mostly bald table, then there will be cover to hide behind. And you should refuse to play on a mostly bald table.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Make matched play use the Night Fight rules. There, all but 1 of your units is now -3 to hit. Hurts Gunlines, buffs assault and close range firefight armies and lowers first turn alpha strike.

At my FLAGS, for tournament and league games we rolls a d6. On a 1 it's first turn Night Fight, on a 6 it's 6th turn Night Fight. 2-5 means no Night Fight. So this addresses the problem but only "solves" it 1/6 the time. I wouldn't be too keen on the idea of playing EVERY GAME with turn 1 Night Fight rules. I'd flat out refuse games with any Tau player.

phydaux wrote:

A.T. wrote:
So... balance out your opponent not being able to shoot at the half of the army you have in reserve, by not allowing them to shoot at the half you don't have in reserve?

That doesn't seem practical. Unless you mean nightfighting style 'restrict'.

This. Unless you're playing on a mostly bald table, then there will be cover to hide behind. And you should refuse to play on a mostly bald table.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Make matched play use the Night Fight rules. There, all but 1 of your units is now -3 to hit. Hurts Gunlines, buffs assault and close range firefight armies and lowers first turn alpha strike.

At my FLAGS, for tournament and league games we rolls a d6. On a 1 it's first turn Night Fight, on a 6 it's 6th turn Night Fight. 2-5 means no Night Fight. So this addresses the problem but only "solves" it 1/6 the time. I wouldn't be too keen on the idea of playing EVERY GAME with turn 1 Night Fight rules. I'd flat out refuse games with any Tau player.

Why though? They will do worse under -1 to hit than you will unless you are house ruling the old blacksun filters into existence. Every single argument about deep strike being worthless for assault armies seems to forget shooting armies cannot do anything to harm the deep striking half of your army. That's the tradeoff. Why should you get into charge range, immunity to an entire round of shooting for half your army, and better defense for the things that aren't. All for essentially free. I'd rather see something along the lines of positive incentives for melee armies. The simplest would be that deep strikes on turn 2 can be at exactly 9 inches away. Now you only have to make an 8 inch charge and your odds go up considerably. Especially considering things like charge rerolls and command point rerolls. You can even make it so on turn 3 they can deep strike exactly 8 inches away. If something is bad you don't have to make other things worse to match, you can make the bad thing better instead.

I like that solution. Not a fan of the power level mechanic re: deep strike, though. Holy crap, they just will not let us not use power level.

 DominayTrix wrote:

phydaux wrote:

A.T. wrote:
So... balance out your opponent not being able to shoot at the half of the army you have in reserve, by not allowing them to shoot at the half you don't have in reserve?

That doesn't seem practical. Unless you mean nightfighting style 'restrict'.

This. Unless you're playing on a mostly bald table, then there will be cover to hide behind. And you should refuse to play on a mostly bald table.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Make matched play use the Night Fight rules. There, all but 1 of your units is now -3 to hit. Hurts Gunlines, buffs assault and close range firefight armies and lowers first turn alpha strike.

At my FLAGS, for tournament and league games we rolls a d6. On a 1 it's first turn Night Fight, on a 6 it's 6th turn Night Fight. 2-5 means no Night Fight. So this addresses the problem but only "solves" it 1/6 the time. I wouldn't be too keen on the idea of playing EVERY GAME with turn 1 Night Fight rules. I'd flat out refuse games with any Tau player.

Why though? They will do worse under -1 to hit than you will unless you are house ruling the old blacksun filters into existence. Every single argument about deep strike being worthless for assault armies seems to forget shooting armies cannot do anything to harm the deep striking half of your army. That's the tradeoff. Why should you get into charge range, immunity to an entire round of shooting for half your army, and better defense for the things that aren't. All for essentially free. I'd rather see something along the lines of positive incentives for melee armies. The simplest would be that deep strikes on turn 2 can be at exactly 9 inches away. Now you only have to make an 8 inch charge and your odds go up considerably. Especially considering things like charge rerolls and command point rerolls. You can even make it so on turn 3 they can deep strike exactly 8 inches away. If something is bad you don't have to make other things worse to match, you can make the bad thing better instead.

There is just one small but glaring problem. Most melee heavy armies don't survive the first turn shooting because of the amount of firepower that armies can pour down range. The fact that we take half of our army into deep strike isn't so that we can get into close combat easier, it's more the fact we can use the deep striking part of the army to shield the rest of the army that needs to walk up the field.

I can tell you now, I usually have armies that have upward of 20+ units, I don't deep strike half of my army but rather units that i know are more effective at tying up my opponents shooting. It's the backline that usually gets the job done as my opponent is too focused on my "Distraction Carnifex" units that when they focus on my units that are walking up the table, it's already too late.

Taking away that first turn distraction basically makes my advancing army swiss cheese, the amount of firepower needed to take out majority T3/T4 units is hilariously small when you can concentrate all your firepower on things that wont reach you in at least 2 turns. Hense why if there is gonna be a rule to hamstring melee based armies, why is there not a rule to hamper shooting based armies.

Cause at the moment, everyone is perfectly fine with a whole gunline army tabling a melee army turn one without any form of retaliation. That is not fun, that is a disgrace.

Melee is already facing an uphill battle, what with fall back mechanic and whatnot. So adding this rule would just make melee irrelevant in any 40k game that is competitive

I'll have to play some games against deepstrike heavy armies before I can render actual judgement on the new beta rules but as of right now I feel like half the rules are good, the other half maladjusted.

I like the 50% of power level (though it could be changed to points), facing someone who had 6 units of basic cultists on the ground and deepstruck, for all intents and purposes, their entire army wasn't fun.

I like the no warptime/quicken after deepstrike since that was a combo that a lot of armies had no way of countering (if the units had fly and you have no anti-psykers).

But the whole deepstrike within your own deployment zone turn 1 should probably just be changed to units deepstriking turn 1 cannot fire ranged weapons, with no spatial restrictions other than over 9" away from closest enemy units.

Force both player's minimum 25% of army unit's/point's to reserve. Pure gunline's now have less first turn firepower.
Reserve's without DS or similar ability can only be deployed on own deployment zone turn 2+.

There is just one small but glaring problem. Most melee heavy armies don't survive the first turn shooting because of the amount of firepower that armies can pour down range. The fact that we take half of our army into deep strike isn't so that we can get into close combat easier, it's more the fact we can use the deep striking part of the army to shield the rest of the army that needs to walk up the field.

I can tell you now, I usually have armies that have upward of 20+ units, I don't deep strike half of my army but rather units that i know are more effective at tying up my opponents shooting. It's the backline that usually gets the job done as my opponent is too focused on my "Distraction Carnifex" units that when they focus on my units that are walking up the table, it's already too late.

Taking away that first turn distraction basically makes my advancing army swiss cheese, the amount of firepower needed to take out majority T3/T4 units is hilariously small when you can concentrate all your firepower on things that wont reach you in at least 2 turns. Hense why if there is gonna be a rule to hamstring melee based armies, why is there not a rule to hamper shooting based armies.

Cause at the moment, everyone is perfectly fine with a whole gunline army tabling a melee army turn one without any form of retaliation. That is not fun, that is a disgrace.

Melee is already facing an uphill battle, what with fall back mechanic and whatnot. So adding this rule would just make melee irrelevant in any 40k game that is competitive

This is completely correct and runs along the same line of argument I was putting forth when the FAQ first dropped. For many armies the turn 1 deep strikers served the absolutely key role of commanding the opponents attention so that your slow moving other half actually had time to move up the board. By restricting turn 1 deep strike you have now fundamentally changed the entire list building process, regardless of whether the deep striking units themselves are just as "statistically killy" on turn 2 as they are on turn 1. The other half of the army can no longer be built without extreme defense. Where before you could safely move up more fragile units, now you must have units that can either hide and stay stationary, units covered in heavy armor ala transports, or units that can stack -1 modifiers. The change actually stymies and retards list building diversity among assault armies, you're now basically forced into a smaller elite assault force coming in on turn 2 backed up by a gunline of some sort.

And to everyone saying some variation of "why should assault armies have all this deference thrown at them," whether it be night fighting or restrictions on shooting into your opponents deployment zone? You people need to have a long look in the mirror and be able to admit to yourselves "shooting is fundamentally stronger and more effective in this game than melee, at a baseline level, and at every subsequent factor thereafter." The one example where melee "feels" stronger than shooting is when you can tie up an expensive tank or shooting unit with a minimal little squad of assaulters, which is completely avoidable via screening. What is assaulting units equivalent to overwatch? Is there a rule called blade deflection or something, when an assault unit gets shot at they roll a D6 for each shot and on a 6 one shot bounces back at the firer? Or some equivalent to flamer auto-hits? Certainly no. There is no draw back or hurdles associated with sitting back and going point-click fire everything at you while remaining stationary, it's the least strategic way of playing 40k. I know because I play all types of armies, from gunlines to pure assault. Guard or Tau gunlines is pure mathhammer, have I built my list in such a way that it can statistically blow my opponent off the table before he ties me up. The strategic wherewithal and frankly sheer luck that goes into being successful with an assault based army is fairly large. For example, if you're an assault based army and you don't "make the charge," many times the game is effectively over. A single charge phase of a few key failed charges and the game is decided. What is the shooting equivalent of that? "Oh shucks, my ideal target is out of range, I guess I'll just shoot at something else." Do assault units have backup plans if they fail the charge? Of course not, they stand there and get shot to pieces. Rant over. So please please please stop the line of rhetoric that shooting armies and melee armies are equally effective and that one deserves no more rules help than the other.

 kadeton wrote:
Making those units actually worth their points, while reducing how hilariously overpowered a basic unit of Boyz is in melee, would essentially fix the Orks' gameplay problems.

I am sorry....what? How are Ork boyz "hilariously overpowered" in melee? As it stands right now, the 30 boyz have to walk up the table, getting blasted for at least 2 turns, and then face overwatch and THEN successfully complete a charge. After they get into CC, assuming they are lucky and dont lose 10 boyz they each get 4 attacks which usually means anywhere from 20-80 attacks, depending entirely upon how many boyz you can get into CC and how many are left alive. Those attacks are S4 NO AP and hit on 3s. they are basically equivalent to Bolter shots. They work wonders against most units that aren't T5 or higher but I don't see how they are "Hilariously overpowered" you will have to explain that to me, especially since if they are so damned good, why aren't they winning events.

SemperMortis wrote:

 kadeton wrote:
Making those units actually worth their points, while reducing how hilariously overpowered a basic unit of Boyz is in melee, would essentially fix the Orks' gameplay problems.

I am sorry....what? How are Ork boyz "hilariously overpowered" in melee? As it stands right now, the 30 boyz have to walk up the table, getting blasted for at least 2 turns, and then face overwatch and THEN successfully complete a charge. After they get into CC, assuming they are lucky and dont lose 10 boyz they each get 4 attacks which usually means anywhere from 20-80 attacks, depending entirely upon how many boyz you can get into CC and how many are left alive. Those attacks are S4 NO AP and hit on 3s. they are basically equivalent to Bolter shots. They work wonders against most units that aren't T5 or higher but I don't see how they are "Hilariously overpowered" you will have to explain that to me, especially since if they are so damned good, why aren't they winning events.

Perhaps he's talking about internal balance? I mean, compared to all Ork's other options they are 'hilarious overpowered'.

But on a serious note, if Ork Boyz are stopping the Ork Codex from getting good gubbins I'm happy to see them toned down a bit.

SemperMortis wrote:
I am sorry....what? How are Ork boyz "hilariously overpowered" in melee? As it stands right now, the 30 boyz have to walk up the table, getting blasted for at least 2 turns, and then face overwatch and THEN successfully complete a charge. After they get into CC, assuming they are lucky and dont lose 10 boyz they each get 4 attacks which usually means anywhere from 20-80 attacks, depending entirely upon how many boyz you can get into CC and how many are left alive. Those attacks are S4 NO AP and hit on 3s. they are basically equivalent to Bolter shots. They work wonders against most units that aren't T5 or higher but I don't see how they are "Hilariously overpowered" you will have to explain that to me, especially since if they are so damned good, why aren't they winning events.

I said "Boyz in melee", not "A single unit of Boyz getting shot by an entire army while they cross the board". For their points, Ork Boyz have the most effective close-combat attacks of any unit in the game. Yes, better than Khorne Berserkers, better than Genestealers, better than... whatever else you're thinking of. Volume of attacks is king under this edition's To Wound chart. Yeah, their attacks are "basically equivalent to Bolter shots" - if Space Marines cost 6 points per model and could fire four bolter shots each, Space Marines would be the strongest army in the game by a vast margin.

The reasons why people aren't winning high-profile tournaments with Orks are many, but the big one is that fielding 200+ Orks simply isn't feasible in a timed-game environment. Many Ork players also find that style of play dull, and would rather field an army with some other elements, even though that makes it less competitive.

Boyz are what's propping the Ork army up at the moment. They only have one competitive build, which is just to cram in as many Boyz as you can, along with the characters that provide buffs to Boyz. If Boyz were reduced in effectiveness, the weaknesses of every other goddamn thing in the Ork list would become glaringly apparent, and there would be a greater chance for Orks to become an army with more than one competitive choice.

That few are bothering to realize that playing on barren tables is a huge reason why gunlines will dominate you without your turn 1 alpha strike makes me sad.

 auticus wrote:
That few are bothering to realize that playing on barren tables is a huge reason why gunlines will dominate you without your turn 1 alpha strike makes me sad.

This is good and well at a local game, or a home game. But at a major tournament where you can't control every piece of terrain do you really want to show up with an assault based army now? Hoping the terrain works out?

 peteralmo wrote:
You people need to have a long look in the mirror and be able to admit to yourselves "shooting is fundamentally stronger and more effective in this game than melee, at a baseline level, and at every subsequent factor thereafter."

Correct. And that's how it should be in a game full of guns. Objecting to this is like complaining that, in an ancient-era historical game, hitting people with swords is required and shooting units are support elements at best.

The issue is not that shooting is good, or that pure melee armies are bad, it's that players keep making terrible melee armies and expecting them to work. Stop doing this and the "bias" in 40k is no longer a problem. Start taking heavy shooting elements and treat your melee units as support elements like they should be. Failing to make a charge with one of your support elements is not a game-losing failure when the rest of your army is capable of winning the game in other ways.

 Peregrine wrote:

 peteralmo wrote:
You people need to have a long look in the mirror and be able to admit to yourselves "shooting is fundamentally stronger and more effective in this game than melee, at a baseline level, and at every subsequent factor thereafter."

Correct. And that's how it should be in a game full of guns. Objecting to this is like complaining that, in an ancient-era historical game, hitting people with swords is required and shooting units are support elements at best.

I don't object to it at all. Just figure out a way to nerf hive tyrant spam without screwing over every other assault based army that never won a damn thing at a major event.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
The biggest problem is Sly Marbo doesn't have an exception to the beta rules.

He doesn't need one, concealed explosives only requires him to deepstrike onto the board, you can target any unit on the board irrespective of distance. So turn 1 deepstrike him into your deployment zone, detonate concealed explosives on target of choice then send him back into reserves at the start of turn 2 to drop wherever he likes turn 3.

 peteralmo wrote:
This is good and well at a local game, or a home game. But at a major tournament where you can't control every piece of terrain do you really want to show up with an assault based army now? Hoping the terrain works out?

Then stop showing up at tournaments that fail to use adequate terrain. If the TO puts out an empty table then say "no thanks" and go home. Force the tournaments to change or die and they will have to change.

 Peregrine wrote:

 peteralmo wrote:
You people need to have a long look in the mirror and be able to admit to yourselves "shooting is fundamentally stronger and more effective in this game than melee, at a baseline level, and at every subsequent factor thereafter."

Correct. And that's how it should be in a game full of guns. Objecting to this is like complaining that, in an ancient-era historical game, hitting people with swords is required and shooting units are support elements at best.

The issue is not that shooting is good, or that pure melee armies are bad, it's that players keep making terrible melee armies and expecting them to work. Stop doing this and the "bias" in 40k is no longer a problem. Start taking heavy shooting elements and treat your melee units as support elements like they should be. Failing to make a charge with one of your support elements is not a game-losing failure when the rest of your army is capable of winning the game in other ways.

If the game designers build into the core game the concept that pure melee armies cannot and should not succeed there should be some sort of communication to that end. WARNING, include a sizeable shooting element in your armies or you will not succeed. But we both no they don't see it that way. In fact some armies have virtually no shooting at all. No, if they fully expect there to be pure melee armies, then they need to recognize how inferior they are at a baseline level to pure long range shooting armies and not purposely hamper / nerf them.

 peteralmo wrote:
If the game designers build into the core game the concept that pure melee armies cannot and should not succeed there should be some sort of communication to that end.

Why? GW provides no list-building advice of any kind and expects players to figure it out.

In fact some armies have virtually no shooting at all.

Which army is that?

Non-Tzeench Chaos Daemons. Nurg/Slaan has soulgrinder (Hot Garbage) and Khorne has that + Skullcannon, which is actually pretty good.

Orks Lets be real here, as much as they technically have guns in their army, against a 1/3 of opponents (CT Raven guard equivilant) they either dont move and are out-shot, or do move and LITERALLY CANNOT HIT THEIR OPPONENT.
In fact, I'm going to say this right now. The DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA stratagem should be a rule tied to all non-pistol/auto-hit ork ranged weapons natively. On top of that, maybe give Lootas/Flash Gitz a rule, lets Call it Luck of Mork. They count all negative hit modifiers as positive. Have your aliotic rangers hiding with the Totally Fair & Balanced stratagem giving them -4 to hit somehow? Guess what.. those Lootas are now hitting on 2's with exploding dice on all shots.

And on the whole "But eeets the fuuuuutuuuuuuure!!!! Only guns should matter!!!!!". Are you saying that armor tech hasn't also progressed substantially? Even in the current day, infantry body armor is advancing almost as fast as weapon technology. To the point I wouldn't be surprised if by 2050 we are reading headlines about USMC Assault Squads with riot shields and long swords charging the enemy whilst being largely impervious to small arms fire. This is a future with 7 foot tall 5 foot wide space orks who can pull the arms off of a genetically engineers post-human demigod wearing a tank. If you could feasibly wear the magic-armor from an Abrams as infantry armor, you too would equip an army of jarheads with chainsaws and tank-suits to go full Evil Dead on the opponent's main force.

I guess what a lot of us Make Melee Great Again folks are saying is... we just want our plastic armydudes be able to hit your plastic armydudes with swords on a relatively equal standing as yours do with magic space elf snowflake guns. Perhaps let our Punch-Tank5000 be able to weather a few turns of fire from your ShootTank30,000. Unfortunately it seems that 40k is going back to 5th edition with IG/Eldar parking lot, BDSM Leafblower and Razorback Spam. Only thing we're missing is the obligatory fan-spank GW will give to spacewolves so we can once again bend knee to our thunderwolf overlords.

StarHunter25 wrote:
Non-Tzeench Chaos Daemons. Nurg/Slaan has soulgrinder (Hot Garbage) and Khorne has that + Skullcannon, which is actually pretty good.

Demons shouldn't exist as a separate army. I'll grudgingly accept that GW has committed to the lunacy of "use your WHFB army on round bases", but I reject the idea that it needs to be considered relevant balance-wise.

Orks Lets be real here, as much as they technically have guns in their army, against a 1/3 of opponents (CT Raven guard equivilant) they either dont move and are out-shot, or do move and LITERALLY CANNOT HIT THEIR OPPONENT.
In fact, I'm going to say this right now. The DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA stratagem should be a rule tied to all non-pistol/auto-hit ork ranged weapons natively. On top of that, maybe give Lootas/Flash Gitz a rule, lets Call it Luck of Mork. They count all negative hit modifiers as positive. Have your aliotic rangers hiding with the Totally Fair & Balanced stratagem giving them -4 to hit somehow? Guess what.. those Lootas are now hitting on 2's with exploding dice on all shots.

IOW, orks have shooting and their biggest problem is a badly-designed system of stacking -1 penalties. Fix that instead of trying to break the game by making them a melee army.

And on the whole "But eeets the fuuuuutuuuuuuure!!!! Only guns should matter!!!!!". Are you saying that armor tech hasn't also progressed substantially? Even in the current day, infantry body armor is advancing almost as fast as weapon technology. To the point I wouldn't be surprised if by 2050 we are reading headlines about USMC Assault Squads with riot shields and long swords charging the enemy whilst being largely impervious to small arms fire. This is a future with 7 foot tall 5 foot wide space orks who can pull the arms off of a genetically engineers post-human demigod wearing a tank. If you could feasibly wear the magic-armor from an Abrams as infantry armor, you too would equip an army of jarheads with chainsaws and tank-suits to go full Evil Dead on the opponent's main force.

The problem with this argument is that any armor that is invulnerable to bullets is almost certainly invulnerable to a pointy stick. The response will be escalating the use of heavy weapons, not creating units with nothing but pointy sticks and hoping they can somehow reach the enemy. This isn't tabletop 40k with its broken scaling that allows units to reach melee range before the game ends.

I guess what a lot of us Make Melee Great Again folks are saying is... we just want our plastic armydudes be able to hit your plastic armydudes with swords on a relatively equal standing as yours do with magic space elf snowflake guns.

And what I'm saying is that this is not an acceptable outcome. Melee should be weaker than shooting, period. It should be a supporting element at best, and designing an entire army around it while neglecting shooting should mean losing every game. Accept that 40k is not an ancient-era historicals game and stop trying to play it like one.

I still stand by the solution is to make melee better, not make shooting worse. What would make melee viable in this scenario without touching shooting? Bonuses to charge? All units start in cover until your first turn? If its just a flat -1 to hit, eldar will still shoot you off the table with hit bonuses and natura bs 3+

 Peregrine wrote:

And what I'm saying is that this is not an acceptable outcome. Melee should be weaker than shooting, period. It should be a supporting element at best, and designing an entire army around it while neglecting shooting should mean losing every game. Accept that 40k is not an ancient-era historicals game and stop trying to play it like one.

Then, if we follow your reasoning, GW should give equal chance in both melee and shooting to all factions, which is not the case today.

Today, some armies are good at shooting, others are good in melee; if the game is not balanced around this FACT, and not your personal wishes, some armies have an advantage, others do not, depending on the FOTM rules.

You sound angry that your gunlines cannot systematically obliterate the opponent, maybe you forgot 40k is just a game.

Siegfriedfr wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

And what I'm saying is that this is not an acceptable outcome. Melee should be weaker than shooting, period. It should be a supporting element at best, and designing an entire army around it while neglecting shooting should mean losing every game. Accept that 40k is not an ancient-era historicals game and stop trying to play it like one.

Then, if we follow your reasoning, GW should give equal chance in both melee and shooting to all factions, which is not the case today.

Today, some armies are good at shooting, others are good in melee; if the game is not balanced around this FACT, and not your personal wishes, some armies have an advantage, others do not, depending on the FOTM rules.

You sound angry that your gunlines cannot systematically obliterate the opponent, maybe you forgot 40k is just a game.

Indeed you are correct. 40k is a game.

In a galaxy of dudes or ladies wearing armour that would shrug rockets, the best way to kill them is to stab them in the weak points of their armour.

Remember people, history has told us that as long as there is a weapon (Bow, Gun, Rocket) there has always been something to try and block it (Chainmail Armour, Cevlar, Compositite reactive armour)

So having people shrug off RPG rounds with futuristic power armour or because they do not actually exist in this dimension is a perfectly resonable reason why that same thing cant just run a sword through you

Half range or -1 to hit for the first player turn seems like an elegant way of redressing the balance between shooting and melee. It doesn't prevent the defensive player from setting out their layers of battleline that shield their army, but that is tactical movement which should be encouraged.

It is fine for shooting to be more effective than melee, but then that should be reflected in the point costs of those units!

 Peregrine wrote:

 peteralmo wrote:
You people need to have a long look in the mirror and be able to admit to yourselves "shooting is fundamentally stronger and more effective in this game than melee, at a baseline level, and at every subsequent factor thereafter."

Correct. And that's how it should be in a game full of guns. Objecting to this is like complaining that, in an ancient-era historical game, hitting people with swords is required and shooting units are support elements at best.

The issue is not that shooting is good, or that pure melee armies are bad, it's that players keep making terrible melee armies and expecting them to work. Stop doing this and the "bias" in 40k is no longer a problem. Start taking heavy shooting elements and treat your melee units as support elements like they should be. Failing to make a charge with one of your support elements is not a game-losing failure when the rest of your army is capable of winning the game in other ways.

Horse gak. This isn't a hard sci-fi universe, it's fantasy in space. Khorne Daemons have just as much right to exist as Imperial Guard, and if GW wants to advertise Khorne as an option then they need to make it viable to run.

 Crimson wrote:
It is fine for shooting to be more effective than melee, but then that should be reflected in the point costs of those units!

No, because then melee units become powerful again. They may not be elite anymore, but with that cost reduction you can swarm with hordes of melee troops and still win. Stop expecting pointy sticks to be effective.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Horse gak. This isn't a hard sci-fi universe, it's fantasy in space. Khorne Daemons have just as much right to exist as Imperial Guard, and if GW wants to advertise Khorne as an option then they need to make it viable to run.

Khorne demons can exist. You can take a unit of them as your melee unit in a shooting-focused CSM army. Demons in general should never have been a complete army, and this is demonstrating why.

 Peregrine wrote:

No, because then melee units become powerful again. They may not be elite anymore, but with that cost reduction you can swarm with hordes of melee troops and still win. Stop expecting pointy sticks to be effective.

And you should be able to. Equal points worth of pointy sticks versus laser pointers should make a fair game where both sides have a decent chance of winning.

And this is a fantasy game. Melee weapons exist, melee units exist. These should be usable. If I wanted to play a realistic gunline simulation I could play Bolt Action. In 40K I want my space marines to punch tanks and giant space monsters with their power fists.

 Crimson wrote:
And you should be able to. Equal points worth of pointy sticks versus laser pointers should make a fair game where both sides have a decent chance of winning.

Nope. That's like arguing that an army with no anti-tank weapons should be able to win against tanks. Badly designed lists should not win. Lists that try to do something that is against the design principles of the game should not win. Your pointy sticks should get wiped off the table 100% of the time because it's a stupid and anti-fluffy list.

And this is a fantasy game.

No it isn't. It's a hybrid scifi/WWII game with some superficial fantasy elements in the fluff.

Melee weapons exist, melee units exist. These should be usable.

Sure, and those units/weapons can be usable as long as you treat them as support elements for the shooting core of your army. The issue is not that melee combat exists at all, it's that melee-only armies exist and people expect them to be something other than a joke.

 Peregrine wrote:

Nope. That's like arguing that an army with no anti-tank weapons should be able to win against tanks. Badly designed lists should not win. Lists that try to do something that is against the design principles of the game should not win. Your pointy sticks should get wiped off the table 100% of the time because it's a stupid and anti-fluffy list.

Pointy sticks vs infantry is not no anti-tank versus tanks situation. Stabbing infantry is exactly what the pointy sticks are for.

No it isn't. It's a hybrid scifi/WWII game with some superficial fantasy elements in the fluff.

And those scifi elements include loads of scifi melee weapons! (And I would definitely call it space fantasy rather than scifi.)

Sure, and those units/weapons can be usable as long as you treat them as support elements for the shooting core of your army. The issue is not that melee combat exists at all, it's that melee-only armies exist and people expect them to be something other than a joke.

But currently they're really not that usable, even as support elements. It is usually just better to use your points for more shooty stuff instead of investing in melee.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 peteralmo wrote:
You people need to have a long look in the mirror and be able to admit to yourselves "shooting is fundamentally stronger and more effective in this game than melee, at a baseline level, and at every subsequent factor thereafter."

Correct. And that's how it should be in a game full of guns. Objecting to this is like complaining that, in an ancient-era historical game, hitting people with swords is required and shooting units are support elements at best.

The issue is not that shooting is good, or that pure melee armies are bad, it's that players keep making terrible melee armies and expecting them to work. Stop doing this and the "bias" in 40k is no longer a problem. Start taking heavy shooting elements and treat your melee units as support elements like they should be. Failing to make a charge with one of your support elements is not a game-losing failure when the rest of your army is capable of winning the game in other ways.

Horse gak. This isn't a hard sci-fi universe, it's fantasy in space. Khorne Daemons have just as much right to exist as Imperial Guard, and if GW wants to advertise Khorne as an option then they need to make it viable to run.

Or orks. No h2h armies, no orks.

 Crimson wrote:
Pointy sticks vs infantry is not no anti-tank versus tanks situation. Stabbing infantry is exactly what the pointy sticks are for.

Of course that's what it is. An army with no anti-tank weapons is a badly designed army that should not be considered in balance discussions, and the fact that it automatically loses a lot of games is fine and even desirable. An army with nothing but pointy sticks is a similarly terrible army concept, and its failure is desired. The solution is not to complain that your pointy sticks are not winning, it's to stop bringing an army with nothing but pointy sticks to a shooting game.

And those scifi elements include loads of scifi melee weapons! (And I would definitely call it space fantasy rather than scifi.)

Yep, weapons which you can still use in a shooting army. For example, the sergeant in your heavy weapon squad can have an awesome scifi power weapon.

But currently they're really not that usable, even as support elements. It is usually just better to use your points for more shooty stuff instead of investing in melee.

Shrug. That's outside the scope of this thread, dealing with the FAQ and its changes to pure-melee armies. Armies which used deep striking melee units in a support role are fine, just like armies that used deep striking plasma in a support role are fine. The only armies which are significantly hurt by the change are ones that went all-in on deep strike and can't win without it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

tneva82 wrote:
Or orks. No h2h armies, no orks.

Orks have guns.

CassianSol wrote:

Half range or -1 to hit for the first player turn seems like an elegant way of redressing the balance between shooting and melee. It doesn't prevent the defensive player from setting out their layers of battleline that shield their army, but that is tactical movement which should be encouraged.

Er no.... Not all shooting armies care about -1 to hit the same way. Tau will shoot like orks. Imperial guard most likely will too. Orks basically cannot shoot first turn which makes them even more reliant on melee. Eldar and Marines will continue to high five each other as they shoot you off the table with at worst 4+ and usually 3+ after some form of modifier. Or in the case of dark reapers they flat out will not care. Any army that already has a -1 to hit at range will be even more invulnerable on turn 1. You think screens are oppressive now? Now you have no real way to shoot the way clear. Make melee better if you want to fix this. Maybe +1 attack the turn a unit deep strikes since it is an ambush out of nowhere. If half your army is getting shot off the board turn 1 it sounds like both a positioning and terrain problem. More ways to get cover could also go a long ways for fixing this too. Forests giving cover for being wholly within 3 inches or whatever. Reducing the distance apart you have to be on turns 2 and 3 when you deep strike could help to both find holes in screens and guarantee making it in. This is a beta rule, come up with plenty of creative options. The goal is to make both shooting and melee armies fun and exciting to play.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
It is fine for shooting to be more effective than melee, but then that should be reflected in the point costs of those units!

No, because then melee units become powerful again. They may not be elite anymore, but with that cost reduction you can swarm with hordes of melee troops and still win. Stop expecting pointy sticks to be effective.

Yes and that is generally how they should work. Go look at plenty of Sci-fi sources where this is the case (Starship troopers, Aliens, even plenty of examples in 40k fluff supporting melee centric forces that far out number the enemy and "win") 40k is not a universe were no melee should happen, plenty of armies have it as a significant part of their design and pay extra for those stats even on shooting units. So either those stats need to carry less value compared to shooting based stats, or the army with the cheapest guns always wins.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
And you should be able to. Equal points worth of pointy sticks versus laser pointers should make a fair game where both sides have a decent chance of winning.

Nope. That's like arguing that an army with no anti-tank weapons should be able to win against tanks. Badly designed lists should not win. Lists that try to do something that is against the design principles of the game should not win. Your pointy sticks should get wiped off the table 100% of the time because it's a stupid and anti-fluffy list.

I agree but what a badly designed list should be based on the relative strengths and weaknesses inherent in a faction. Armies should not really be 0 Shooting and 100% melee, but 60-70% melee focus makes sense for a lot of factions based on how they have been designed.

And this is a fantasy game.

No it isn't. It's a hybrid scifi/WWII game with some superficial fantasy elements in the fluff.

The fantasy elements are hardly superficial, psykers are a core part of the fluff, Space Orks are a core part of the fluff, Travel through a Daemon infested warp is a key part of the fluff. The fluff is largely based around fantastical gods. IT is far closer to science fantasy than sci fi by any stretch. In fact the science part of basically everything takes a back seat to the fantasy aspect at every turn.

Melee weapons exist, melee units exist. These should be usable.

Sure, and those units/weapons can be usable as long as you treat them as support elements for the shooting core of your army. The issue is not that melee combat exists at all, it's that melee-only armies exist and people expect them to be something other than a joke.

I largely agree, that armies need some balance, but melee centric factions exist and pay points to be good at melee combat. All "long range" shooting armies to me should really be relegated to a similar tier as all melee armies. As in not competitive, the game should encourage (and I feel it largely does encourage) somewhat balanced armies. People have this idea that melee is way underpowered and yet most top table armies at GT have a reasonably sizable melee portion to their army, because melee combat is a powerful tool.

I agree but what a badly designed list should be based on the relative strengths and weaknesses inherent in a faction. Armies should not really be 0 Shooting and 100% melee, but 60-70% melee focus makes sense for a lot of factions based on how they have been designed.

This is a point Peregrine is stubbornly refusing to see. Even if every army could/should have some shooting elements, it's perfectly appropriate, fluffy, and even intuitive based on how the codex is written that some armies will be 2/3's melee. Those armies shouldn't be hamfistedly nerfed to deal with a few problem units, half of witch aren't even melee units, but rather deep striking shooty units.

It's funny I could swear the tanks worst enemy is infantry, which is why you never send them alone into forests or urban areas.

One of the things that appeals to me about 40k is the ridiculous anachronism that allows all sorts of fighting styles to merge and bump heads with each other without an obvious winner. There are many sci-fi games out there that attempt some manner of justifiable "realism", and they can be lots of fun, but I like having things like cavalry charges vs. battletanks, and the soldiers firing a couple of volleys then charging in to batter each other with spikes and blades.

I wonder if we will see more speculative deepstriking in future - instead of committing to the better half of your army all set for deepstrike, just a few mid-value units ready to pop out and asassinate an exposed character or capture a weakly held objective on turns 2-3 (TBH I don't see why they also felt the need to ban deepstriking after turn 3...)

Mark.

In this thread:
"The game is all shooting and melee should play a support role."

"But GW released Daemons, that's proof they want melee to be viable."

"Your factual evidence contrary to my position is rejected because I personally disagree with it."

More or less, you don't even need daemons as an example. Plenty of factions rely heavily on melee and that is where their premier units and abilities lie.

Orks
Blood Angels
Space Wolves
Genestealer cult
daemons

among others are all armies where melee is at least a significant focus in the army, it isn't that they have no shooting, it is just that there is no viable way for those armies to act as primary shooting forces and compete with better shooting armies.

Yes, I think all of this is self-evident to 99% of the people here. I think it best to tune out the white noise of "only shooting deserves a place at the competitive table," and focus on solutions to help melee out. For example one thing I'm hearing often around the interwebs from FAQ apologists is "well, whats the big deal, you had to wait until turn 2 or later in 7th edition, you should be used to this." Such a classic false equivalency. We're not playing 7th edition, we're playing 8th, and the sheer volume and power pure shooting can put out turn 1 is so staggering, in my mind it leaves no justification for ever dropping melee down a notch or two in competitive viability without a mirror measure affecting turn 1 shooting. There's been so many ideas floated, from myself and others: No shooting into opponents deployment zone, turn 1 night fighting, changing vehicle disembarkation to happen at the end of movement rather than the beginning, keeping turn 1 deep strike but allowing all units to withdraw from combat still fire at -1 to hit, etc etc etc. Somewhere in there is a better alternative to the current big FAQ nerfing of majority melee armies.

To me the only change that needs to happen is that the deployment zone deepstrike restriction should be for the first player turn not battle round. That way each player gets 1 turn of shooting/moving prior to getting hit with deestrike elements. The real reason waiting until turn 2 is not big deal is that competitively you had to anyway, no one let you deepstrike assault anything of value turn 1, so it getting delayed is really a non-issue.

The better solution is to give melee armies some form if viable transport or stratagem to let them cross the board turn 1 and get charges off. Most of what you suggested are terrible blanket changes.

No shooting into DZ turn 1 is an awful idea that just pushes the game start back a turn, anything that leaves the deployment zone will just get shot to hell so people will turtle in it, then turn 2 rolls around and it's basically turn 1 from pre-faq.

Night fighting has merit but the way BS varies across factions affects some much worse than others and it will be particularly asinine when playing against any army with a -1 to hit trait, guard and tau are hitting on 6's and orks can't shoot at all.

I'm a fan of changing vehicle disembarking personally, would make chimeras more viable to run.

The last one seems viable but does nothing to stop deepstriking plasma, one of the intended targets of the nerf.

I like the concept of "One turn in your face, before I charge you". But the implementation is all over the board. For all it's problems, I think that's one thing 6E/7E did better.

It means you can't just run glass cannon CC units and expect to survive. But if shooting is overtuned, it means nothing survives until it gets into CC.

Bharring wrote:
I like the concept of "One turn in your face, before I charge you". But the implementation is all over the board. For all it's problems, I think that's one thing 6E/7E did better.

It means you can't just run glass cannon CC units and expect to survive. But if shooting is overtuned, it means nothing survives until it gets into CC.

The most entertaining part of all of this is that I run a glass cannon CC unit army (mono-Slaanesh) and generally expect to survive if I go first, because I can tie their screens up, stay locked in, and then murder them in their fight phase with follow up in my psychic phase before charging on into the guts of their army.

After this rule I think they need to bring back disembarking AFTER a transport has moved.

Unit that disembarks counts as moving but at least this way you have a chance at getting most of a melee army stuck in pretty quickly. (12" transport move, 3" disembark, 9" charge = 24")

Wraithguard out of a Serpent?

 peteralmo wrote:

 auticus wrote:
That few are bothering to realize that playing on barren tables is a huge reason why gunlines will dominate you without your turn 1 alpha strike makes me sad.

This is good and well at a local game, or a home game. But at a major tournament where you can't control every piece of terrain do you really want to show up with an assault based army now? Hoping the terrain works out?

Well we are talking about rules changes that affect all of us (yes i know beta rules for tournaments etc etc but where I live, tournament rules are the only rules no matter if its a home game or a store game) so turn 1 alpha strike melee armies that exist only because at adepticons there is no terrain so the rest of us have to deal with the lack of terrain at big tournaments by having to deal with turn 1 alpha striking in all of our games kind of sucks when if you had proper terrain in the first place the melee armies wouldn't be hit that hard by not getting their turn 1 garbage.

I really get the feeling that a few people on dakka are still suffering from a defeat or two in 5/6/7th where a well played and/or cheesy melee force killed all their tanks. I understand the site is called dakkadakka, but I don't think we need a separate board called ChoppaChoppa for a melee-leaning discussion on various tabletop/RPG games.

Anyhoo, I played a game last night and ran my scions for the first time in 8th, because prior I felt dirty running them. I know it's no secret to most here, but plasmagun scions are insane. They are basically unaffected by the beta deepstrike rules, what with being cheap both points and PL, as well as being immune to rule of 3. I had 1 squad (full squad with 4 plasma and vox) nearly quadruple its points in 2 turns. NOTHING should have that level of point efficiency in the game, while also being so inexpensive that losing half the unit is no deal. Scion weapon price nerf didn't go far enough. plasma and melta need to swap points, and grav chute impose a -1 to hit on all weapons fired. I understand it was likely a case of hot dice, but when I fire 4 overcharged plasmaguns and get 13 hits and evaporate a full health Dreadknight GM buffed by sanctuary t3 after having landed turn 2 and removing a stormtalon. Being someone who ran bloodletter bomb and was normally pretty happy when they managed to get a positive KPR. Little buggers out-scored all 3 of my knights in killpoints.

Next game I'm going to use my daemons for the first time with the beta rules, we'll see if they were hit as hard as I thought. Unfortunately for me flesh hounds have been out of stock almost constantly since the end of 7th, so my speed is going to be with thirsters, princes and crushers (kinda). Hopefully my trio of skullcannos can carry them as much as my havocs do in my CSM. I'm hoping to face either RG or eldar of some flavor to see if I move fast/durable enough with the landbound units so that the spend-CP-to-DS dudes aren't by themselves t2 when I open a 2nd front with them. We'll see if they can stand up to how well my rhino-rush berserkers have done for me so far in 8th.

Honestly with cheaper transports nobody would argue. Send the rhino to 30 pts (it's just a metal box anyways), price the rest of the transports around it, maybe give them all 2"-4" of movement more. That's it.

I can get behind GW's mindset for this one. There's "I am now able to charge T1" and then there's "Here's my entire army on your face, NOW.".

it means a lot that, the moment an edition allowed first turn charges, practically everyone turned to alpha strike armies. It shows that it is a very powerful ability.

Players who want to go deepstrike and charge can still do it, only from turn 2 onwards. That's ok, previous edition we couldn't even do that even if we wanted to. And it was second turn on a 3+ only, and then scatter rolls with mishaps etc.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

Bharring wrote:
I like the concept of "One turn in your face, before I charge you". But the implementation is all over the board. For all it's problems, I think that's one thing 6E/7E did better.

It means you can't just run glass cannon CC units and expect to survive. But if shooting is overtuned, it means nothing survives until it gets into CC.

The most entertaining part of all of this is that I run a glass cannon CC unit army (mono-Slaanesh) and generally expect to survive if I go first, because I can tie their screens up, stay locked in, and then murder them in their fight phase with follow up in my psychic phase before charging on into the guts of their army.

A few points:

1. You're an incredibly fast army, probably the fastest army in the game. Everything you're describing could have been done before this rule was implemented. You need not rely on DS with a fast army, in fact, you're better off NOT deep striking if you can move 20+ inches on turn 1.
2. You aren't facing people who are properly screening with scout moves, forcing you to move around the "alpha screen"
3. I would request you post a battle report of you versus a solid army. Tying up screens is never enough to win.

A decrease in points on 'pure' transports (rhinos and trucks basically) would be welcome, and perhaps a change to disembark rules. Get out before the transport moves and you act normally. Get out after and you can only move and charge. No advancing, psychic powers or shooting.

 Marmatag wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

Bharring wrote:
I like the concept of "One turn in your face, before I charge you". But the implementation is all over the board. For all it's problems, I think that's one thing 6E/7E did better.

It means you can't just run glass cannon CC units and expect to survive. But if shooting is overtuned, it means nothing survives until it gets into CC.

The most entertaining part of all of this is that I run a glass cannon CC unit army (mono-Slaanesh) and generally expect to survive if I go first, because I can tie their screens up, stay locked in, and then murder them in their fight phase with follow up in my psychic phase before charging on into the guts of their army.

A few points:

1. You're an incredibly fast army, probably the fastest army in the game. Everything you're describing could have been done before this rule was implemented. You need not rely on DS with a fast army, in fact, you're better off NOT deep striking if you can move 20+ inches on turn 1.
2. You aren't facing people who are properly screening with scout moves, forcing you to move around the "alpha screen"
3. I would request you post a battle report of you versus a solid army. Tying up screens is never enough to win.

1) This is true. (That's the joke! Where's that simpsons meme...)
2) I actually welcome people who push forwards, as it's much easier to guarantee the survival of my slower units if they have easy charge targets, since the enemy can't fall back. I can literally hide my expensive and fragile (For points) LOW in combat with a scout sentinel while she's on her way to blenderize the enemy gunline. So please, come closer.
3) What a "solid army" is is anyone's guess - mine's certainly not, because no one in their right mind takes Zarakynel, as she's atrociously bad for her points. And "tying up screens" isn't all I do - it just means the typical "fall back to shoot people to death" can't happen. It's like 7th edition, where the goal is to kill the enemy in their turn, and Slaanesh have a psychic power that gives them a way to compensate for bad dice and murder the enemy in their psychic phase to free their CC units up to charge the guns behind them.

Once melee units get to the gunline without harm, it's all over. You just have to nick a basilisk with a single daemonette and it's useless for the rest of the game, not to mention 90 daemonettes and their angry friends that hid in combat using Fiends. My tactics are actually really bad against armies without screens, because units like Hellblasters can just beat the fiends/seekers/daemonettes to death and then shoot. Last game I played, I blitzed into 10 Hellblasters near Azrael with 2 fiends, 5 seekers, and a seeker herald, killed a couple, and then between their regular attacks, banner attacks, and "For the Honour of the Chapter" they just beat my assault units to death and got to fire again. Had I hit a guardsmen squad with all those I'd've locked them up for sure, and then been able to wipe them out in my opponent's fight phase and charge the tanks (assuming there are tanks behind the guardsmen, which is standard practice).

topaxygouroun i wrote:
Honestly with cheaper transports nobody would argue. Send the rhino to 30 pts (it's just a metal box anyways), price the rest of the transports around it, maybe give them all 2"-4" of movement more. That's it.

This is why I can't take anyone's position on Dakka about balance seriously. These thoughts are so very clearly out of left field that they would unbalance the game.

You're telling me it's ok to pay 34 points for 11 T7 3+ wounds that has more fire power than 4 marines that cost 52 points?

The rhino is costed well enough. It MIGHT drop 5 or 10 points in the future, but there is NO way it will go to 30 and even paying the extra 40 points for 4 "overcosted" rhinos doesn't make them non-viable.

Yes the transport change was one I was personally pushing for and like the best of all the ideas put forth. You just need a simple restriction that the transport has to move under 20" in order to still disembark at the end of it's movement, that would address the transports that can be in your opponents deployment zone with a single movement phase.

How does a rhino have the firepower of 4 marines exactly?

And yes, 4 marines are troops, they help build detachments and earn CP and they have obsec in battleforged armies. All of which the rhino misses.

And it's not like anybody is playing tactical marines anyways right now. But with a cheap transport, they just might.

You cannot just slash costs of transport. Taking empty transports for their firepower is already prevalent. If most people are not using transports for their intended purpose, then there probably is a problem with the transport rules. Being able to disembark after the transport has moved (and then disembarking unit counting as having moved) might be a good change. And as suggested, there could be some cap on how far the transport can move and still be able to do this.

topaxygouroun i wrote:
How does a rhino have the firepower of 4 marines exactly?

And yes, 4 marines are troops, they help build detachments and earn CP and they have obsec in battleforged armies. All of which the rhino misses.

And it's not like anybody is playing tactical marines anyways right now. But with a cheap transport, they just might.

Two storm bolters. It's all they would take. 12 Rhinos in 1,400 points.

It would take 9 Catachan Manticores 6 turns to kill them all (ignoring the 4 shot limit).

2 HQ - 160

5 Scouts - 55 x 6
Rhino 2x SB - 34 x 6

2 HQ - 160

5 Scouts - 55 x 6
Rhino 2x SB - 34 x 6

412 points to spare

topaxygouroun i wrote:
How does a rhino have the firepower of 4 marines exactly?

It can have two stormbolters (and a hunter-killer missile.)

 Crimson wrote:
You cannot just slash costs of transport. Taking empty transports for their firepower is already prevalent. If most people are not using transports for their intended purpose, then there probably is a problem with the transport rules. Being able to disembark after the transport has moved (and then disembarking unit counting as having moved) might be a good change. And as suggested, there could be some cap on how far the transport can move and still be able to do this.

I have not witnessed people taking empty transports for shooting to be honest. Maybe they did in the past, but with battalions and brigades at +5/+12 CP now, perhaps this will tone down too. Perhaps they could even make the transports themselves cheap, but their additional guns more expensive. This way you could still have your cheap metal boxes. As it stands now, I'd rather have an extra marine squad than a transport. At any rate, rhinos at 70 pts is extremely high, and so are Devilfish at 120+.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

topaxygouroun i wrote:
How does a rhino have the firepower of 4 marines exactly?

And yes, 4 marines are troops, they help build detachments and earn CP and they have obsec in battleforged armies. All of which the rhino misses.

And it's not like anybody is playing tactical marines anyways right now. But with a cheap transport, they just might.

Two storm bolters. It's all they would take. 12 Rhinos in 1,400 points.

It would take 9 Manticores 6 turns to kill them all.

2 HQ - 160

5 Scouts - 55 x 6
Rhino 2x SB - 34 x 6

2 HQ - 150

5 Scouts - 55 x 6
Rhino 2x SB - 34 x 6

412 points to spare

And with what would you kill anything non-infantry in your list?

412 points for Combis on the sarges.

Or replace some with Tacs + LC (not enough for all).

Not great firepower, but that's 60 Boltgun scout-move bodies with reasonable resiliance, atop the 2 HQs and 12 Rhinos.

That style list has won tournies in the past (pre-8th).

Bharring wrote:
412 points for Combis on the sarges.

Or replace some with Tacs + LC (not enough for all).

Not great firepower, but that's 60 Boltgun scout-move bodies with reasonable resiliance, atop the 2 HQs and 12 Rhinos.

That style list has won tournies in the past (pre-8th).

I know but back then the rhinos were free (and marines had Objective super secured)

Ok then, not 30, but definitely not 70 either. I'm all well and fine with no deepstrike T1, but they have to give melee armies something. It can't be shooting nerfs because then we just delay the whole game by one turn, and turn 2 just becomes the new turn 1. So it has to be something that will let shooty people shoot and hth-ty people stay alive enough to hth next turn.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
In this thread:
"The game is all shooting and melee should play a support role."

"But GW released Daemons, that's proof they want melee to be viable."

"Your factual evidence contrary to my position is rejected because I personally disagree with it."

Thats Peregrine for you.

I don't know why people engage in his personal crusade of wanting W40K to be all about guns and squatting Tyranids and Daemons.

I would like to see a differentiation of "assault vehicles" and transports. The rules should allow a unit to either embark into a vehicle or exit a vehicle once per turn. That unit can exit at the end of the movement phase as long as it didn't embark earlier in the turn. If a unit leaves a transport at the end of the vehicle's movement then the unit counts as having moved for all purposes and if the vehicle advanced then the unit is also considered to have advanced. If the transport was an assault vehicle then exiting from the vehicle a unit would not be consider to have moved unless the vehicle advanced in which case the unit is considered to have moved but not advanced.

Assault vehicles would be those transports that have assault ramps and/or assault in their names. Land Raiders and Storm Ravens have had assault ramps in past editions. The Cestus assault ram would also fall under the assault vehicle term.

 Galas wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
In this thread:
"The game is all shooting and melee should play a support role."

"But GW released Daemons, that's proof they want melee to be viable."

"Your factual evidence contrary to my position is rejected because I personally disagree with it."

Thats Peregrine for you.

I don't know why people engage in his personal crusade of wanting W40K to be all about guns and squatting Tyranids and Daemons.

To be fair, it's practically impossible to have melee and shooting be equal. The problem is that melee completely shuts down shooting, and melee can't reach out to touch shooting all the time. This results in one sided fights where either the melee army is being shot off the board OR the shooty army is chopped to pieces in its own corner as it can't escape. GW made a mistake in compartmentalizing armies under either "shooty" or "stabby". Under any ruleset that simulates reality at all, shooting will always be superior. There's a reason people stopped using swords.

Since this game is set in a time where machine guns exist, it would simply be easier to have all armies be shooty as a baseline, with factions having varying degrees of melee. So Orks and Daemons would need good shooting while Tyranid shooting is respectable enough to work. Orks, of course would either need to have more shots, better ballistic skill, cheaper shooting or some special rules to help them out. This leaves Daemons as the only army with 0 shooting elements. For that the only solution I can think of would be to combine them with Chaos Cultists that have ranged options (similar to genestealer cults).

I also think it was a mistake to separate specialized factions like Grey Knights into their own codices since that only encourages mono-build instead of mixing. If Grey Knights had stayed in an inquisition codex, they could have had access to Scions and such.

Now, if the terrain rules were more in depth, then melee would have the honor of being the best way to clear buildings and such because they ignore shooting penalties. This would incentivize players to use both ranged and melee instead of one or the other.

I think a fix for transports would be to allow you to disembark after moving half speed. I think a good fix for most would also to be to bring back fire points on some transports.

Rhinos cannot feasibly go to 30 points, at that point you are basically looking at 2 for the price of one now. Also if other transports are re-costed around that what does a razorback cost? 77 points for a twin assault cannon. After all it is basically a Rhino with a gun on it. I think maybe 60 points at the lowest.

topaxygouroun i wrote:

Ok then, not 30, but definitely not 70 either. I'm all well and fine with no deepstrike T1, but they have to give melee armies something. It can't be shooting nerfs because then we just delay the whole game by one turn, and turn 2 just becomes the new turn 1. So it has to be something that will let shooty people shoot and hth-ty people stay alive enough to hth next turn.

If Rhinos go to 60 it'd be nice, but like I said above - is 20 to 40 points really the barrier?

I also think people need to stop trying to make everything turn 1 charge viable. Some armies have tools that let them do that. They get their niche. A rhino gets you a more reliable charge on turn 2 than a deepstrike on turn 1 without abilities/spells ever could. On top of that you get something to block overwatch - the thing gunlines like Tau do very well.

Dandelion wrote:

 Galas wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
In this thread:
"The game is all shooting and melee should play a support role."

"But GW released Daemons, that's proof they want melee to be viable."

"Your factual evidence contrary to my position is rejected because I personally disagree with it."

Thats Peregrine for you.

I don't know why people engage in his personal crusade of wanting W40K to be all about guns and squatting Tyranids and Daemons.

To be fair, it's practically impossible to have melee and shooting be equal. The problem is that melee completely shuts down shooting, and melee can't reach out to touch shooting all the time. This results in one sided fights where either the melee army is being shot off the board OR the shooty army is chopped to pieces in its own corner as it can't escape. GW made a mistake in compartmentalizing armies under either "shooty" or "stabby". Under any ruleset that simulates reality at all, shooting will always be superior. There's a reason people stopped using swords.

Since this game is set in a time where machine guns exist, it would simply be easier to have all armies be shooty as a baseline, with factions having varying degrees of melee. So Orks and Daemons would need good shooting while Tyranid shooting is respectable enough to work. Orks, of course would either need to have more shots, better ballistic skill, cheaper shooting or some special rules to help them out. This leaves Daemons as the only army with 0 shooting elements. For that the only solution I can think of would be to combine them with Chaos Cultists that have ranged options (similar to genestealer cults).

I also think it was a mistake to separate specialized factions like Grey Knights into their own codices since that only encourages mono-build instead of mixing. If Grey Knights had stayed in an inquisition codex, they could have had access to Scions and such.

Now, if the terrain rules were more in depth, then melee would have the honor of being the best way to clear buildings and such because they ignore shooting penalties. This would incentivize players to use both ranged and melee instead of one or the other.

I disagree with that assesment. I think you can have both work but a number of things need to happen.

1.) Terrain needs to be plentiful and preferably abstract.
2.) Shooting should be more expensive to make up for its increased efficiency over close combat. Orks, Nids, Daemons etc would work just fine as horde assault armies where the expectation is that they get mowed down on the way there in large numbers but if they get there it is an issue. For elite assault armies raise wound counts on models to allow them to soak damage as they advance but some still die. As such even imperial guardsman should cost more than the horde assault troops.
3.) Model count needs to go down (or table size up) to allow for more mobility, so shooting units can try to flee from assaulting armies not get trapped all the time.
4.) Make close combat units more deadly, if they hit non-dedicated close combat troops they should rout them quickly.
5.)Allow shooting into close combat
6.) Make psychology on the battle field meaningful they used to do this a bit with target priority checks, perhaps those need to be a thing again, but altered somewhat, require LD tests (and make the difficult) to target different units if some other units are say within 12" of the firing unit, check to see if there is a break if nearby squads get mauled etc.

I'm not sure how it would all work exactly but that is where I would look to start.

Breng77 wrote:

5.)Allow shooting into close combat

Pls no. Pistols are enough.

I'm all for big, fat terrain. Huge factories, dense forests with trees 10 times the size of a human (we are not fighting through orange-tree fields after all), hive cities. Make it big and large and plenty. Make it so reasonable sized monsters (see carnifex/dreadnought) can actually hide out of LoS of the big hitters if they want to for the first couple of turns.

Oh and edit the stupid cover rule for the monsters.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Pls no. Pistols are enough.

Yeah. That's like the whole point of the pistols...

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Breng77 wrote:

5.)Allow shooting into close combat

Pls no. Pistols are enough.

It might be limited to some extent but if you balance shooting and close combat you cannot have one turn the other off.

I think the main issue I had with transports was when the disembark occurred, allowing disembarkation at the end of the movement is key I think, they minute details around that can be fine-tuned of course. I was never anticipating a drastic price decrease in the transports themselves, though I do think the rhino is over-costed, I think it should probably be 50-60 points, somewhere in there. I also think with the new tactical reserves rule drop pods can surely come down to 60 points or so. As without the guaranteed turn 1 drop they really aren't that attractive.

Breng77 wrote:


I disagree with that assesment. I think you can have both work but a number of things need to happen.

1.) Terrain needs to be plentiful and preferably abstract.
2.) Shooting should be more expensive to make up for its increased efficiency over close combat. Orks, Nids, Daemons etc would work just fine as horde assault armies where the expectation is that they get mowed down on the way there in large numbers but if they get there it is an issue. For elite assault armies raise wound counts on models to allow them to soak damage as they advance but some still die. As such even imperial guardsman should cost more than the horde assault troops.
3.) Model count needs to go down (or table size up) to allow for more mobility, so shooting units can try to flee from assaulting armies not get trapped all the time.
4.) Make close combat units more deadly, if they hit non-dedicated close combat troops they should rout them quickly.
5.)Allow shooting into close combat
6.) Make psychology on the battle field meaningful they used to do this a bit with target priority checks, perhaps those need to be a thing again, but altered somewhat, require LD tests (and make the difficult) to target different units if some other units are say within 12" of the firing unit, check to see if there is a break if nearby squads get mauled etc.

I'm not sure how it would all work exactly but that is where I would look to start.

1) I already use plenty of terrain and would like more, but not everyone wants to for various reasons.
2) Which is something I believe is impossible in practice. How do you determine how much better shooting is versus melee over the course of any game? You run the risk of making shooting units not worth it. The point of balance is so fine that we would never see it happen. Just compare shoota boys to slugga boys, everything is the same except the shoota boy gets +1 shot usually but the slugga boy gets +1 attack. The shoota boy does less damage in shooting than the slugga boy does in combat so everyone takes slugga boys. Applying a blanket tax for shooting would just make 40k a melee game.
3) You can already do that.
4) Dedicated close combat units are already more deadly than shooting units. Especially with power weapons. They just don't get to hit as often. Allowing them into combat more often would skew the game towards melee even further.
5) Well, you already can with pistols and Fall Back exists so there's that. But allowing shooting units to fire into close combat would just make close combat strictly worse than shooting again no matter what else you do.
6) No thanks.

My problem with all melee or all shooty is the rock-paper-scissors effect it has on the game. How is running a horde of melee units into a gunline fun for anyone? Either you die on the way or you reach their lines and become unstoppable. You end up making hyper desperate melee armies, and super paranoid shooting armies.

Regardless of all the moaning about no more melee units being viable. There are still many ways to get a unit into melee on turn 1. Strategems, psychic powers, some abilities or effects, ridiculously fast movement, with advance and rerollable charge ranges, or just general exceptions like genecults... this change limits first turn assault melee it doesn’t remove it. I like the new rule and I think it needs to stay in some form. I think certain units need a price adjustment afterwards becuase tactical reserves is a lot less useful and I think select few units like drop pods need an entire rework to have reason to exist. But overall this faq limits reserve army based nonsense and limits alpha strikes that cripple most armies.

gungo wrote:
Regardless of all the moaning about no more melee units being viable. There are still many ways to get a unit into melee on turn 1. Strategems, psychic powers, some abilities or effects, ridiculously fast movement, with advance and rerollable charge ranges, or just general exceptions like genecults... this change limits first turn assault melee it doesn’t remove it. I like the new rule and I think it needs to stay in some form. I think certain units need a price adjustment afterwards becuase tactical reserves is a lot less useful and I think select few units like drop pods need an entire rework to have reason to exist. But overall this faq limits reserve army based nonsense and limits alpha strikes that cripple most armies.

I think everyone assumes the rule is here to stay. No one here is just flatly advocating for a repeal of the new rule. Rather we are brainstorming additional new rules changes to go along with the new beta rules that re-prop-up armies that weren't problematic, that were heavily affected by the new rules, and therefore took an undeserved nerf.

1.) GW needs to prescribe the minimum ammount and it needs to be high, or at least prescribe the ammount and type used to balance the game. Without this there can never be balance, if GW said use x % of the table as terrain, and it should be broken down into y types (abstracted) more people would use the right ammount that creates more balance between shooting and assault.

2.) It isn't a blanket tax for shooting it is a higher valuation of things that make shooting better, BS, rate of fire, weapon profiles. Looking at Ork boyz compared to guardsman. They are largely the same in durability, Boyz are better in combat, and guardsman in shooting and are faster, Boyz cost 2 additional points. Why? Because GW values Close comabt ability higher than shooting ability.


3.) Not really meaningfully and still bring different types of units. The only way to reduce model count is points, and when some troops cost 4 points there is not a meaningful point cost which reduces army size, just toys, you can try to find larger tables, but that is also difficult to do for most people.

4.) No they are not. Dark Reapers are as deadly or more than any close combat unit. Take say Sanguinary guard vs Dark reapers look at number of "shots/attacks" how much they hit, wound and damage, and tell me that one is significantly more powerful than the other. I also never said let them get there more often, at least not a full strength. I said when they do get there combat should be over.

5.) Pistols can only shoot into combats when in combat, and at no other time. Fall back (without fly) means those shooting units cannot fire, so only other units can fire, and that assumes they don't get locked in. It doesn't make close combat worse than shooting no matter what you do, it is a matter of points. At current the game comes down to shooting must kill things before they can fight, if you could shoot into combat this would no longer be the case and so the power of shooting could be toned down.

6.) OK, it just means that the only way to effect models is death.

It is only RPS because currently for one to succeed the other must utterly fail. As for running hordes into a gunline ask ork players, if it were at all effective I'm sure they would be fine with it. What you describe is the current state of the game, either you die before you hit their lines, or you hit their lines and win. The only difference now is that largely you never hit their lines, and that what I suggest doesn't end up with a situation where once hit shooting armies auto lose.

#4) "Dark Reapers are as deadly or more than any close combat unit" TH VV are clearly more deadly in CC than Reapers are at shooting. Per model or point. And TH VV are considered terrible.

You are simply quite incorrect at a factual level. At least on that point.

Bharring wrote:
#4) "Dark Reapers are as deadly or more than any close combat unit" TH VV are clearly more deadly in CC than Reapers are at shooting. Per model or point. And TH VV are considered terrible.

You are simply quite incorrect at a factual level. At least on that point.

That entirely depends on the target, against single wound T4 or less infantry Reapers are better dealing 0.8888889 wounds per model vs 0.83333, or 38.25 points per wound vs 38.4. Though against 4+ saves or better Hammers are slightly better against 5+ or 6+ the reapers are better. But they are certainly at least as deadly it is not a big gap so I wouldn't say they are clearly more deadly in CC than reapers are in shooting unless we are talking about things where 3 damage matters, then they have twice the number of attacks so would be better. Against a culexus assassin the comparison isn't. close. It is true though that the ability to apply said damage matters. So if it is that much harder to apply those thunder hammers to the target why are they not significantly cheaper? To allow for some of them dying before they even do anything.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
"But GW released Daemons, that's proof they want melee to be viable."

False. GW releasing demons is proof that they wanted to let people use their WHFB armies in 40k as a way to drive sales. This was a huge mistake, both fluff-wise and rules-wise, and it hasn't been repeated. Every other "melee" faction has shooting units, demons are the lone exception to the rule. The solution is to stop acknowledging demons as an independent army.

Breng77 wrote:

Bharring wrote:
#4) "Dark Reapers are as deadly or more than any close combat unit" TH VV are clearly more deadly in CC than Reapers are at shooting. Per model or point. And TH VV are considered terrible.

You are simply quite incorrect at a factual level. At least on that point.

That entirely depends on the target, against single wound T4 or less infantry Reapers are better dealing 0.8888889 wounds per model vs 0.83333, or 38.25 points per wound vs 38.4. Though against 4+ saves or better Hammers are slightly better against 5+ or 6+ the reapers are better. But they are certainly at least as deadly it is not a big gap so I wouldn't say they are clearly more deadly in CC than reapers are in shooting unless we are talking about things where 3 damage matters, then they have twice the number of attacks so would be better. Against a culexus assassin the comparison isn't. close. It is true though that the ability to apply said damage matters. So if it is that much harder to apply those thunder hammers to the target why are they not significantly cheaper? To allow for some of them dying before they even do anything.

Thunder Hammers are a whole extra model and i'm not quite sure why people consider VV terrible.

A 3 attack CS VV is 48 points per wound done to T4 3+ and 18 points per wound vs T3 5+. A DR is 57 and 38 respectively.

Stop taking all TH/SS. One in a squad is more than enough.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
"But GW released Daemons, that's proof they want melee to be viable."

False. GW releasing demons is proof that they wanted to let people use their WHFB armies in 40k as a way to drive sales. This was a huge mistake, both fluff-wise and rules-wise, and it hasn't been repeated. Every other "melee" faction has shooting units, demons are the lone exception to the rule. The solution is to stop acknowledging demons as an independent army.

That doesn't change the fact that some armies are designed to use melee as their primary means of dealing damage and other armies are designed to be better at shooting. Shooting cannot be the be all end all if some armies are better at it than others.

Fine, there are some targets at which a Dark Reaper shooting edges out a TH VV in CC. But the bulk of the targets go to that TH VV. It's still safe to say TH VV are more deadly in CC than Dark Reapers, if the target is unspecified. And that was jsut the first example.

My point is that saying that Reapers are more deadly at shooting than anything is at CC is clearly incorrect. The example shows that.

Breng77 wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
"But GW released Daemons, that's proof they want melee to be viable."

False. GW releasing demons is proof that they wanted to let people use their WHFB armies in 40k as a way to drive sales. This was a huge mistake, both fluff-wise and rules-wise, and it hasn't been repeated. Every other "melee" faction has shooting units, demons are the lone exception to the rule. The solution is to stop acknowledging demons as an independent army.

That doesn't change the fact that some armies are designed to use melee as their primary means of dealing damage and other armies are designed to be better at shooting. Shooting cannot be the be all end all if some armies are better at it than others.

The point is that all armies should be designed around shooting being the mainstay of the game. Melee is a way to shake things up. If guns exist in the game, then they really should be better than swords, because that's why guns exist. Melee is already too skewed relative to guns, a guardsman has the same strength as his gun. Why is a dreadnought fist stronger than a railgun shot?

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Breng77 wrote:

Bharring wrote:
#4) "Dark Reapers are as deadly or more than any close combat unit" TH VV are clearly more deadly in CC than Reapers are at shooting. Per model or point. And TH VV are considered terrible.

You are simply quite incorrect at a factual level. At least on that point.

That entirely depends on the target, against single wound T4 or less infantry Reapers are better dealing 0.8888889 wounds per model vs 0.83333, or 38.25 points per wound vs 38.4. Though against 4+ saves or better Hammers are slightly better against 5+ or 6+ the reapers are better. But they are certainly at least as deadly it is not a big gap so I wouldn't say they are clearly more deadly in CC than reapers are in shooting unless we are talking about things where 3 damage matters, then they have twice the number of attacks so would be better. Against a culexus assassin the comparison isn't. close. It is true though that the ability to apply said damage matters. So if it is that much harder to apply those thunder hammers to the target why are they not significantly cheaper? To allow for some of them dying before they even do anything.

Thunder Hammers are a whole extra model and i'm not quite sure why people consider VV terrible.

A 3 attack CS VV is 48 points per wound done to T4 3+ and 18 points per wound vs T3 5+. A DR is 57 and 38 respectively.

Stop taking all TH/SS. One in a squad is more than enough.

Dark reapers are only 38.5 points against T4 3+ saves, and 25.5 points against T3 5+, so the VV is only better against chaff in this case, against anything with a good save or higher T, or FNP reapers come out ahead.
And in that case look at 2 wounds or 3 wound models and points per dead model. It is about target in that instance. Against Primaris T4 3+ 2 wounds, to kill a model takes 96 points of 3 attack VV, and only 38 of Reapers. IF 3 wounds then 76.5 points of reapers and 144 points of VV.






Automatically Appended Next Post:

Dandelion wrote:

Breng77 wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
"But GW released Daemons, that's proof they want melee to be viable."

False. GW releasing demons is proof that they wanted to let people use their WHFB armies in 40k as a way to drive sales. This was a huge mistake, both fluff-wise and rules-wise, and it hasn't been repeated. Every other "melee" faction has shooting units, demons are the lone exception to the rule. The solution is to stop acknowledging demons as an independent army.

That doesn't change the fact that some armies are designed to use melee as their primary means of dealing damage and other armies are designed to be better at shooting. Shooting cannot be the be all end all if some armies are better at it than others.

The point is that all armies should be designed around shooting being the mainstay of the game. Melee is a way to shake things up. If guns exist in the game, then they really should be better than swords, because that's why guns exist. Melee is already too skewed relative to guns, a guardsman has the same strength as his gun. Why is a dreadnought fist stronger than a railgun shot?

Doing that severly limits the design space for armies as it comes down to cost BS and durability and that is it. Melee fits just fine into a world with guns. IMO it should largely be in the form of alien hordes if you want guns to be the primary for humans sure. Further other games exist where shooting really is the only thing there is. Why should all games be that way when the fluff does not support that idea. I mean in a world where nuking planets from orbit exists why use a gun. As for the strength thing that is a matter of a limited D6 system.

Breng77 wrote:
1.) GW needs to prescribe the minimum ammount and it needs to be high, or at least prescribe the ammount and type used to balance the game. Without this there can never be balance, if GW said use x % of the table as terrain, and it should be broken down into y types (abstracted) more people would use the right ammount that creates more balance between shooting and assault.

2.) It isn't a blanket tax for shooting it is a higher valuation of things that make shooting better, BS, rate of fire, weapon profiles. Looking at Ork boyz compared to guardsman. They are largely the same in durability, Boyz are better in combat, and guardsman in shooting and are faster, Boyz cost 2 additional points. Why? Because GW values Close comabt ability higher than shooting ability.


3.) Not really meaningfully and still bring different types of units. The only way to reduce model count is points, and when some troops cost 4 points there is not a meaningful point cost which reduces army size, just toys, you can try to find larger tables, but that is also difficult to do for most people.

4.) No they are not. Dark Reapers are as deadly or more than any close combat unit. Take say Sanguinary guard vs Dark reapers look at number of "shots/attacks" how much they hit, wound and damage, and tell me that one is significantly more powerful than the other. I also never said let them get there more often, at least not a full strength. I said when they do get there combat should be over.

5.) Pistols can only shoot into combats when in combat, and at no other time. Fall back (without fly) means those shooting units cannot fire, so only other units can fire, and that assumes they don't get locked in. It doesn't make close combat worse than shooting no matter what you do, it is a matter of points. At current the game comes down to shooting must kill things before they can fight, if you could shoot into combat this would no longer be the case and so the power of shooting could be toned down.

6.) OK, it just means that the only way to effect models is death.

It is only RPS because currently for one to succeed the other must utterly fail. As for running hordes into a gunline ask ork players, if it were at all effective I'm sure they would be fine with it. What you describe is the current state of the game, either you die before you hit their lines, or you hit their lines and win. The only difference now is that largely you never hit their lines, and that what I suggest doesn't end up with a situation where once hit shooting armies auto lose.

1) We don't need GW to mandate required terrain. In fact, I think GW doesn't want to mandate anything except the basic gameplay. The most you'll get is GW suggesting a certain amount of terrain for tournaments.

2) Ork shooting is strictly worse than Ork melee. So apparently if you make shooting too expensive it becomes useless. Who's taking flash gitz outside of fun games? As I pointed out earlier, it is practically impossible to properly point melee vs ranged under the current rules.
A shoota boy is about 3-4 times as deadly as a guardsmen in close combat while not being too far behind in shooting. That's why they cost 2 extra points. Though if you wanted to be rigorous, you wouldn't have picked Guardsmen since they are undercosted right now. Compare the shoota boy to a fire warrior and see who's paying more for the privilege of shooting. Heck, an Ogryn is 30 pts to get 3 S 5 shots followed by 3-4 S5 ap -1 attacks in close combat while a crisis suit with a single burst cannon is 50 pts to get 4 S5 shots, give him an ATS and he's 62 pts. Seems like shooting is already more expensive than melee. So it's not as simple as points costs.

3) There are only 2 ways to adjust model count: smaller games or larger boards. Neither is affected by the main rules. Unless you had something else in mind?

4) I don't actually know the stats of Dark Reapers but they seem to be a problem unit so they're not the best example for averages. However, I have noticed that dedicated melee units tend to get more attacks with higher strength than most dedicated ranged units.

5) If you fall back, everything else can shoot it. Allowing shooting into close combat removes one of the only things melee can do right now, shut down guns.

6) Or morale, which is another way of dying I guess. Though I would like to see a morale rule that doubles the number of models removed for failing a check while in CC.

The way I see it though, 40k is about guns and bigger guns. Guns should be the main focus of the game. Melee is a neat way to shake things up. If we have to break 20 years of Orks being bad at shooting to do it then so be it.

Dandelion wrote:

Breng77 wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
"But GW released Daemons, that's proof they want melee to be viable."

False. GW releasing demons is proof that they wanted to let people use their WHFB armies in 40k as a way to drive sales. This was a huge mistake, both fluff-wise and rules-wise, and it hasn't been repeated. Every other "melee" faction has shooting units, demons are the lone exception to the rule. The solution is to stop acknowledging demons as an independent army.

That doesn't change the fact that some armies are designed to use melee as their primary means of dealing damage and other armies are designed to be better at shooting. Shooting cannot be the be all end all if some armies are better at it than others.

The point is that all armies should be designed around shooting being the mainstay of the game. Melee is a way to shake things up. If guns exist in the game, then they really should be better than swords, because that's why guns exist. Melee is already too skewed relative to guns, a guardsman has the same strength as his gun. Why is a dreadnought fist stronger than a railgun shot?

Because the railgun shot isn't covered in a matter-disrupting field, while the Dreadnought fist is.

The assumption that guns are always better than swords assumes that the guns have better hitting power than the swords. If there's some way of making a melee weapon that cannot be replicated at range and the armour/defensive technology is good enough that you need that melee power to reliably break through guns will be much worse than melee.

Breng77 wrote:

Doing that severly limits the design space for armies as it comes down to cost BS and durability and that is it. Melee fits just fine into a world with guns. IMO it should largely be in the form of alien hordes if you want guns to be the primary for humans sure. Further other games exist where shooting really is the only thing there is. Why should all games be that way when the fluff does not support that idea. I mean in a world where nuking planets from orbit exists why use a gun. As for the strength thing that is a matter of a limited D6 system.

Considering that every army has both ranged and melee (aside from demons) I don't see how design would be any different. Orks can keep their melee but their shooting would just be effective for a change.
(nuking something is a way of shooting btw )


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:


Because the railgun shot isn't covered in a matter-disrupting field, while the Dreadnought fist does.

The assumption that guns are always better than swords assumes that the guns have better hitting power than the swords. If there's some way of making a melee weapon that cannot be replicated at range and the armour/defensive technology is good enough that you need that melee power to reliably break through guns will be much worse than melee.

Matter-disruption is techno-magic to make melee seem like a better idea than it is. The kinetic force of a railgun shot doesn't need help. It has enough force to obliterate anything it wants to. Current rail gun designs suffer from being destroyed each time they fire. Besides, if you can make power swords, you can shoot power swords.

Breng77 wrote:


Dark reapers are only 38.5 points against T4 3+ saves, and 25.5 points against T3 5+, so the VV is only better against chaff in this case, against anything with a good save or higher T, or FNP reapers come out ahead.
And in that case look at 2 wounds or 3 wound models and points per dead model. It is about target in that instance. Against Primaris T4 3+ 2 wounds, to kill a model takes 96 points of 3 attack VV, and only 38 of Reapers. IF 3 wounds then 76.5 points of reapers and 144 points of VV.

The one I did is consistent with my own figures - what is your formula?

Besides that - VV can fight on both turns - DR shoot once (barring abilities). Obviously you need to *get* to combat, but the benefits quickly stack up.

@dandilion - if orks aren’t skewed to melee (yes you can improve their shooting, but the basis of their army is still melee) then they aren’t the same army. If shooting is always better than melee being a melee focused army with average shooting will always lose to a shooting focused force. Daemons actually have some shooting as well, but melee is a primary source of their offense as it should be.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Breng77 wrote:


Dark reapers are only 38.5 points against T4 3+ saves, and 25.5 points against T3 5+, so the VV is only better against chaff in this case, against anything with a good save or higher T, or FNP reapers come out ahead.
And in that case look at 2 wounds or 3 wound models and points per dead model. It is about target in that instance. Against Primaris T4 3+ 2 wounds, to kill a model takes 96 points of 3 attack VV, and only 38 of Reapers. IF 3 wounds then 76.5 points of reapers and 144 points of VV.

The one I did is consistent with my own figures - what is your formula?

Besides that - VV can fight on both turns - DR shoot once (barring abilities). Obviously you need to *get* to combat, but the benefits quickly stack up.

Points cost divided by average wounds caused by the model. Beyond that yes sometimes VV get to swing twice, but sometimes the enemy falls back, or dies in the first round, or kills the vets etc. There is rarely a guarantee that a melee unit will swing on both turns.

GW messed up the balance when they introduced reliably falling back from combat.

It used to be that going 100% shooting army was risky, as you would have no reliable way to break up melees.
It was a good idea to include something with some kind of melee capability in your list just for that.
Now that falling back is the most reliable way to deal with that issue, simply adding more shooting units is a no-brainer.

So melee units (the ones worth taking) are now all balanced for the fact they get 1 round of melee and then die.
Combats used to be slower and last multiple rounds, but obviously that is no longer possible with these rules.
Most good melee units annihilate anything they attack in full force in a single round.

In turn this introduced stupid, contrieved mechanics into the game:
- congalined screens. Without any dedicated counter-melee units standing by, these would have been a liability before, but now are mandatory.
- all those turn 1 charges: arriving at the target with anything less than full force does not cut it, as you only get that one fighting phase. Units that can't do that see zero playtime.
- hostage taking: this is really the worst offender. A completely contrieved way of circumventing the failings in the rules, but again mandatory for most melee units.


Now they are trying to fix things on the wrong end, but the balance between melee and shooting is so messed up in the core rules, it quickly tilts either way with even small changes.
Less choices in list building, contrieved mechanics to play around the rules, bad internal balance with some uints spiking in power with little changes... all stems from that one error with fallback mechanic.

Breng77 wrote:
@dandilion - if orks aren’t skewed to melee (yes you can improve their shooting, but the basis of their army is still melee) then they aren’t the same army. If shooting is always better than melee being a melee focused army with average shooting will always lose to a shooting focused force. Daemons actually have some shooting as well, but melee is a primary source of their offense as it should be.

You're right, they wouldn't be the same army. They'd actually be fun to play for a change...
Orks weren't always melee centric. Back in 2nd they had BS 4+ while Warbosses had BS 3+ (applying 8th translations to it). In 3rd, GW decided to make Orks a melee horde with bad shooting. I believe that was a mistake and it has come back to bite them. (2nd edition also had modifiers btw...) Orks should be able to overrun other armies with either melee or ranged (preferably both at the same time), but still feel like you're being overrun. A tsunami of bullets and shells is incredibly Orky. The Bad Moons clan deliberately sets up gunlines in battle. Why should that be ignored in favor of melee only Orks? Giving Orks better shooting would not change their identity one bit.

Why can't all factions have shooty and stabby units worth their points? Sure Khorne might have more melee options than say Tau but those options should ideally be equivalent in points. Why bother having points if they don't represent actual worth?

Because some people think melee combat is fun and cool? Not everyone should get trapped in the static gunline doldrums like most-boring-faction-in-the-game IG is.

I think transports could help out (most) assault armies if you let passengers disembark at the start of the Charge phase. It’d need a few limits such as:

- a unit cannot disembark in this way if it embarked earlier that turn
- a unit cannot disembark in this way if the transport arrived from Reserves that turn
- a unit cannot disembark in this way if the transport moved more than X” (probably 9”?) total that turn

It outright kills shenanigans like Warp Time, MoveMoveMove! and ‘move again’ stratagems that are triggered in the movement, psychic or shooting phases. It prevents crazy fast flying transports moving 60” then disembarking units. The hard cap on total movement in one turn is 9” + 3” + base (so roughly 13”) - meaning that, while a Turn 1 Charge is possible, you’ll need a 10-ish inch charge to pull it off on a standard deployment. It doesn’t help shooting units at all, but provides assault units a bit of a movement boost (about an extra 7” or so movement) over just disembarking in the movement phase and then footslogging.

HMint wrote:

- hostage taking: this is really the worst offender. A completely contrieved way of circumventing the failings in the rules, but again mandatory for most melee units.

I really don't agree here. This differentiates the slow from the fast. It's easy to avoid hostage taking if you're aware. It's less easy if they're jumping over and pinning you from both sides.

Falling back does have a penalty. You can't shoot. Now if you're charging all fliers then, sure, it's a problem. But for the oft maligned AM - they don't fly. There are, however, some ways to claw that back. The next problem is that they only have so many orders in range of their units and if they order it will be without getting FRFSRF. Vox casters help, but I don't see a lot of AM paying 5 points per unit to have that and they'll still lose orders.

So, I think maybe the real problem is people coming down with uber melee units slamming into chaff, leaving nothing left in a small area and calling it a day. It's better to tie up as many units as possible in one go, which are what transports are really really good at.

I don't have anything that lets my regular units shoot after falling back. In fact lots of people don't. Should there be some changes? Yea, but I don't think we have a clear picture of what those changes should be based on this assessment.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

kombatwombat wrote:
I think transports could help out (most) assault armies if you let passengers disembark at the start of the Charge phase. It’d need a few limits such as:

- a unit cannot disembark in this way if it embarked earlier that turn
- a unit cannot disembark in this way if the transport arrived from Reserves that turn
- a unit cannot disembark in this way if the transport moved more than X” (probably 9”?) total that turn

It outright kills shenanigans like Warp Time, MoveMoveMove! and ‘move again’ stratagems that are triggered in the movement, psychic or shooting phases. It prevents crazy fast flying transports moving 60” then disembarking units. The hard cap on total movement in one turn is 9” + 3” + base (so roughly 13”) - meaning that, while a Turn 1 Charge is possible, you’ll need a 10-ish inch charge to pull it off on a standard deployment. It doesn’t help shooting units at all, but provides assault units a bit of a movement boost (about an extra 7” or so movement) over just disembarking in the movement phase and then footslogging.

I'd rather just keep the current rules and charge turn 2 with heaps more reliability.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Because some people think melee combat is fun and cool? Not everyone should get trapped in the static gunline doldrums like most-boring-faction-in-the-game IG is.

Nowhere did I imply that melee should not be a significant part of the game, nor did I suggest that gunlines were better for the game.

Since it seems you missed my point, I'll break down my opinion for you:
- In a setting with guns, guns should be the primary means of engagement.
- Despite the existence of guns, many scenarios call for close quarters combat, as such melee should be a powerful support tool for armies. Much like how archers were used to support infantry in antiquity.
- All armies should have access to good shooting and good melee.
- Pure gunlines and pure melee should not be feasible against a balanced force.
- Loads of terrain is required to have an interesting game. A barren field requires no maneuvering to gain firing lanes. If you can clearly see the other deployment zone with most of your units... you need more terrain.

Now, before you say "but IG artillery", there are a few things to note:
- Other factions have artillery. ( and point costs are irrelevant to this discussion.)
- Artillery doesn't do enough damage on its own to win a game and forward elements such as infantry or tanks are required to take objectives.

Besides, the "all melee all day" crowd is their own worst enemy since they provoke the "all guns all day" crowd into turtling up and not moving. This then makes melee players more desperate, and ranged players more paranoid.

Dandelion wrote:

Breng77 wrote:
@dandilion - if orks aren’t skewed to melee (yes you can improve their shooting, but the basis of their army is still melee) then they aren’t the same army. If shooting is always better than melee being a melee focused army with average shooting will always lose to a shooting focused force. Daemons actually have some shooting as well, but melee is a primary source of their offense as it should be.

You're right, they wouldn't be the same army. They'd actually be fun to play for a change...
Orks weren't always melee centric. Back in 2nd they had BS 4+ while Warbosses had BS 3+ (applying 8th translations to it). In 3rd, GW decided to make Orks a melee horde with bad shooting. I believe that was a mistake and it has come back to bite them. (2nd edition also had modifiers btw...) Orks should be able to overrun other armies with either melee or ranged (preferably both at the same time), but still feel like you're being overrun. A tsunami of bullets and shells is incredibly Orky. The Bad Moons clan deliberately sets up gunlines in battle. Why should that be ignored in favor of melee only Orks? Giving Orks better shooting would not change their identity one bit.

Why can't all factions have shooty and stabby units worth their points? Sure Khorne might have more melee options than say Tau but those options should ideally be equivalent in points. Why bother having points if they don't represent actual worth?

Because if all options are equally useful for every faction then their really is no faction identity. If orks can make a shooting army that is as good as Tau the only reason to Play either becomes I like the models. Ork shooting units should not be terrible but the should be supporting pieces not the main focus of the army like people suggesting shooting be king think is a good idea.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I agree with you that all melee with no guns shouldn’t be a thing, but disagree that shooting should be primary. I think forces with 60-70% melee should be viable. In a list like that shooting is supporting a largely melee force.

HMint wrote:
GW messed up the balance when they introduced reliably falling back from combat.

It used to be that going 100% shooting army was risky, as you would have no reliable way to break up melees.
It was a good idea to include something with some kind of melee capability in your list just for that.
Now that falling back is the most reliable way to deal with that issue, simply adding more shooting units is a no-brainer.

So melee units (the ones worth taking) are now all balanced for the fact they get 1 round of melee and then die.
Combats used to be slower and last multiple rounds, but obviously that is no longer possible with these rules.
Most good melee units annihilate anything they attack in full force in a single round.

In turn this introduced stupid, contrieved mechanics into the game:
- congalined screens. Without any dedicated counter-melee units standing by, these would have been a liability before, but now are mandatory.
- all those turn 1 charges: arriving at the target with anything less than full force does not cut it, as you only get that one fighting phase. Units that can't do that see zero playtime.
- hostage taking: this is really the worst offender. A completely contrieved way of circumventing the failings in the rules, but again mandatory for most melee units.


Now they are trying to fix things on the wrong end, but the balance between melee and shooting is so messed up in the core rules, it quickly tilts either way with even small changes.
Less choices in list building, contrieved mechanics to play around the rules, bad internal balance with some uints spiking in power with little changes... all stems from that one error with fallback mechanic.

You made some great points here.

He is right.

You could say the fall back mechanic made 8th edition a mess.

Out of all the mechanics they have (Damage, Fall Back, 1" Measure, Multiple Overwatch, Detachments,ect.) Fall back has been both the most significant and the most hamstrung of all the rules.

With that one rule, Melee combat went from slugfest or brawl to a one round deathmatch.

Because of that, tactics that were VERY old suddenly became the norm once again.

Because of that, Melee and shooting became even more polarized and even the slightest tweak to the rules spells disaster for either side.


All because of one mechanic that was completely new:

Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the destroyer of 40k

Fall back

Fixing falling back is pretty hard. Units need to be able to fall back or melee is too strong, but falling back for free makes melee too weak.


Adding attacks of oppertunity is adding more dice rolls which slows the game down.

I would simply add in the caveat that if you fall back and your outnumbered, you suffer 1 mortal wound +1 for every 5 models over.


This means you arent leaving combat for free unless you already have a numerical advantage (which makes sense). It also punish's single model units (who tend to be durable enough to ignore chaff models usually) from being able to just jump around with impunity.

I wouldn't discard opportunity attacks just beacause it's more dice. Those could be very meaningfull dice.

Falling back isn't free.

mchammadad wrote:
He is right.

You could say the fall back mechanic made 8th edition a mess.

Out of all the mechanics they have (Damage, Fall Back, 1" Measure, Multiple Overwatch, Detachments,ect.) Fall back has been both the most significant and the most hamstrung of all the rules.

With that one rule, Melee combat went from slugfest or brawl to a one round deathmatch.

Because of that, tactics that were VERY old suddenly became the norm once again.

Because of that, Melee and shooting became even more polarized and even the slightest tweak to the rules spells disaster for either side.


All because of one mechanic that was completely new:

Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the destroyer of 40k

Fall back

We noticed this too, and put are trying opportunity attacks on a unit unless the unit falling back can fly. A "the unit being fallen back from may fight as if it were the fight phase before the unit falling back can move" style of rule. It doesn't REALLY change a whole lot, just gives the melee squad a chance to finish off the screen or whatever they jumped into before getting blasted off the table. It helps open things up for more melee-oriented units later in the game. Also, it never made sense to us that a squad of skirmishers would just sit there and watch guys walk away from them. In a skirmish, it is A LOT harder to safely move backwards and disengage an opponent than it is to continually move forward and press that engagement.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
Fixing falling back is pretty hard. Units need to be able to fall back or melee is too strong, but falling back for free makes melee too weak.


Adding attacks of oppertunity is adding more dice rolls which slows the game down.

I would simply add in the caveat that if you fall back and your outnumbered, you suffer 1 mortal wound +1 for every 5 models over.


This means you arent leaving combat for free unless you already have a numerical advantage (which makes sense). It also punish's single model units (who tend to be durable enough to ignore chaff models usually) from being able to just jump around with impunity.

Falling back isn't free. You cannot shoot the next turn unless you have fly. You are open to charges next turn unless you are significantly faster than the melee unit. You will be forced to shoot via overwatch assuming it isn't one of the units that denies it. You cannot choose your targets for overwatch, you simply have to take them in the order they charge. Rhino made it in? Now all 15 berserkers can get in without any danger. Shooting units will be hitting on 6s unless they have a flamer or another ability that usually only increases it to 5s. Even units that can fly have a drawback since they are now vulnerable to any anti-air. (remember the +1 to hit is usually against units that fly NOT flyers) Now compare this is with the fact that unless I am mistaken there isn't a single ability that can flat out deny you a charge like combat denies shooting. Sure the new charge rules and certain terrain pieces can deny you space to charge, but that is an entirely separate issue that should be fixed as well. Stop trying to make shooting worse, make melee better on its own. The game is more fun when both sides can do cool things.

Units that fall back from me that don't have Fly tend to have the same effect as having broken and routed from CC. I'm probably multicharging them + something else next turn.

My units that fall back tend to be similarly hosed.

 DominayTrix wrote:

 Eihnlazer wrote:
Fixing falling back is pretty hard. Units need to be able to fall back or melee is too strong, but falling back for free makes melee too weak.


Adding attacks of oppertunity is adding more dice rolls which slows the game down.

I would simply add in the caveat that if you fall back and your outnumbered, you suffer 1 mortal wound +1 for every 5 models over.


This means you arent leaving combat for free unless you already have a numerical advantage (which makes sense). It also punish's single model units (who tend to be durable enough to ignore chaff models usually) from being able to just jump around with impunity.

Falling back isn't free. You cannot shoot the next turn unless you have fly. You are open to charges next turn unless you are significantly faster than the melee unit. You will be forced to shoot via overwatch assuming it isn't one of the units that denies it. You cannot choose your targets for overwatch, you simply have to take them in the order they charge. Rhino made it in? Now all 15 berserkers can get in without any danger. Shooting units will be hitting on 6s unless they have a flamer or another ability that usually only increases it to 5s. Even units that can fly have a drawback since they are now vulnerable to any anti-air. (remember the +1 to hit is usually against units that fly NOT flyers) Now compare this is with the fact that unless I am mistaken there isn't a single ability that can flat out deny you a charge like combat denies shooting. Sure the new charge rules and certain terrain pieces can deny you space to charge, but that is an entirely separate issue that should be fixed as well. Stop trying to make shooting worse, make melee better on its own. The game is more fun when both sides can do cool things.

I think you may not find too many sympathetic ears here. In the context of a gunline the fallback is *nearly* free. OK the unit can't shoot, unless it has the fly keyword or an UM type rule, and that isn't a trivial number of units. But again in a gunline army where every element you have on the table will be able to blast the charging unit off the table the next turn, it basically feels free. The entire gunline is redundant in the sense that they all shoot well in theory. So your charge shut down one or two of my units, who are now forced to fall back, you still have 10-12 other shooty units available. To the melee player this absolutely seems *free*. Please don't try and jump through hoops talking about how getting to seamlessly fall back is this overly detrimental burden on your unit.

It's basically "free" if you discount the unit itself as lost.

Basically, the CC unit can't hide in CC is what you're complaining about?

Why should charging one or two of my units shut down the rest of my army?

 peteralmo wrote:


I think you may not find too many sympathetic ears here. In the context of a gunline the fallback is *nearly* free. OK the unit can't shoot, unless it has the fly keyword or an UM type rule, and that isn't a trivial number of units. But again in a gunline army where every element you have on the table will be able to blast the charging unit off the table the next turn, it basically feels free. The entire gunline is redundant in the sense that they all shoot well in theory. So your charge shut down one or two of my units, who are now forced to fall back, you still have 10-12 other shooty units available. To the melee player this absolutely seems *free*. Please don't try and jump through hoops talking about how getting to seamlessly fall back is this overly detrimental burden on your unit.

Which is why you should rope in as many units as possible instead of always investing in super ultra killy melee units that affect a small section of the army.

And that's why transports are incredibly useful.

Correct - that you can't hide in combat and be immune to shooting for most of the game is what is being complained about.

I would like to add, just as a reminder, that I fully advocate a change to allow all units that fall back to still shoot with a -1 to hit modifier, but the trade off would be that assault units get there turn 1 deep strike back.

I am not against the ability to fall back, I think being glued into combat forever is equally bad.
It just should not be 100% reliable. Players build their lists around reliable solutions.

Maybe make it a roll-off 2D6. If the unit falling back rolls higher, it is free and can even shoot.
If it rolls equal or less, it remains in combat and receives a -1 to hit on the following fight phase (something shooty units wouldn't care about, but would penalize CC units trying to switch targets).
Then some units could be better at chasing/falling back, like fly units and fast ones, maybe by adding in their movement characteristics.
Most vehicles are pretty fast, so this would make them somewhat resilant to being tied down in combat. Which I think makes sense, a vehicle being tagged by a grot making it unable to shoot is also one of those mechanics that feel a bit off.

It's not reliable. If the opponent rolls more than the difference in movement between the two units, it failed to save you for more than your own round of CC.

Why should IG be unable to drop heavy ordinance on you just because private Jim Bob didn't run away? Would their air support care, or even know, that he's still amongst their target?

Would a Helldrake not spew fire across some Banshees just because they're not done cutting up some random Cultists?

If the Guard/Cultists break, the demons or Banshees will just charge them next round. They didn't 'fall back' 'reliably' or 'free'.

And for non-chaff units? If you charge a Reaper squad, tie it up, and they fall back, sans stratagems, they're still 'tied up' for the round in that they're not shooting.

It comes down to how mcuh benefit should succeeding a charge give you? Currently, you strike first, you get the round of CC you wanted, and they can't shoot/move back without sacrificing their entire turn - so what you charged is fully locked down.

What you're asking for is that the benefit of charging being that the entire shooting aspects of the enemy be locked down once you succeed charging anything. Why would that be fair?

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 peteralmo wrote:


I think you may not find too many sympathetic ears here. In the context of a gunline the fallback is *nearly* free. OK the unit can't shoot, unless it has the fly keyword or an UM type rule, and that isn't a trivial number of units. But again in a gunline army where every element you have on the table will be able to blast the charging unit off the table the next turn, it basically feels free. The entire gunline is redundant in the sense that they all shoot well in theory. So your charge shut down one or two of my units, who are now forced to fall back, you still have 10-12 other shooty units available. To the melee player this absolutely seems *free*. Please don't try and jump through hoops talking about how getting to seamlessly fall back is this overly detrimental burden on your unit.

Which is why you should rope in as many units as possible instead of always investing in super ultra killy melee units that affect a small section of the army.

And that's why transports are incredibly useful.

Yeah it seems like this is turning into more and more of a "git gud" problem then an actual balance problem. If the melee player isn't tying up multiple units or getting significant damage done in their charge it seems like a misplay. If the melee player is charging an area where overwhelming firepower is waiting for them as soon as a single unit falls back that is a misplay. Exactly like you said, transports are great at tying up multiple units since most of them are big blocky and have already served their purpose. Speaking from experience, I have tabled a world eaters player who ran all his berserkers straight at 2 Y'Varhas. Multicharging every time. Leaving his rhinos behind to try to shoot the drones. I have also been tabled by the exact same list and exact same player who learned from his mistakes. While I don't like how 8th lends itself to tabling, the fact that those two matches can go completely opposite directions even against the "anti-melee tau boogeyman" shows that melee can be very useful if done correctly. Literally 0 enemy deep strikes were used by him both times. The biggest difference was charging correctly and using rhinos exactly like you keep advising to.

Bharring wrote:
It's not reliable. If the opponent rolls more than the difference in movement between the two units, it failed to save you for more than your own round of CC.

Why should IG be unable to drop heavy ordinance on you just because private Jim Bob didn't run away? Would their air support care, or even know, that he's still amongst their target?

Would a Helldrake not spew fire across some Banshees just because they're not done cutting up some random Cultists?

If the Guard/Cultists break, the demons or Banshees will just charge them next round. They didn't 'fall back' 'reliably' or 'free'.

And for non-chaff units? If you charge a Reaper squad, tie it up, and they fall back, sans stratagems, they're still 'tied up' for the round in that they're not shooting.

It comes down to how mcuh benefit should succeeding a charge give you? Currently, you strike first, you get the round of CC you wanted, and they can't shoot/move back without sacrificing their entire turn - so what you charged is fully locked down.

What you're asking for is that the benefit of charging being that the entire shooting aspects of the enemy be locked down once you succeed charging anything. Why would that be fair?

No one is saying that would be fair, or asking for that. What they are saying is that melee units have one shot to wipe a unit, if they fail to do so, said unit will fall back out of combat, this fall back move goes off automatically and cannot be prevented, and then the melee unit is free to be targeted or counter charged or whatever. Again this cheapens the value of melee again, where you effectively only ever have one round to get your damage off. I'm not saying that the unit should be stuck in combat and not be able to fall back, not only am I not saying that, I'm saying they should be able to fall back and still shoot with a -1 to hit, but that that ability is so inherently strong, the only fair flip side to that is to give assault all there toys back, turn 1 deep strike, turn 1 charging, etc.

I remember back in 5th edition when you couldn't break contact for free where I had a bunch of Leman Russ Tanks vs like 40 genestealers.

In 5th edition guard could blob, so I did just that, and had 50 guardsmen in a blob in front of my tanks.

The genestealers charged the guardsman blob, and wiped them all out except for 1 one-wound heavy weapons team (dice, I guess?). I was like "no problem, that heavy weapons team will fail leadership and run away, letting my tanks pound on the genestealers." after the genestealers all piled in and locked themselves up with the heavy weapons team.

Morale check? Snakeyes. Insane Heroism universal rule kicked in, Heavy Weapons Team didn't run.

So because of a single desperate man with a shovel hiding under the slain corpses of his foes, three squadrons of Leman Russ tanks just sat there sucking their thumbs eight feet in front of a gigantic mob of genestealers.

It was the least intuitive, least realistic, least sensible, and least fun I think I've ever had playing a gunline. Watching my tanks just sit there awaiting their inevitable death told me all I needed to know about how stupid the ability to lock things in combat was.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 peteralmo wrote:

No one is saying that would be fair, or asking for that. What they are saying is that melee units have one shot to wipe a unit, if they fail to do so, said unit will fall back out of combat, this fall back move goes off automatically and cannot be prevented, and then the melee unit is free to be targeted or counter charged or whatever. Again this cheapens the value of melee again, where you effectively only ever have one round to get your damage off. I'm not saying that the unit should be stuck in combat and not be able to fall back, not only am I not saying that, I'm saying they should be able to fall back and still shoot with a -1 to hit, but that that ability is so inherently strong, the only fair flip side to that is to give assault all there toys back, turn 1 deep strike, turn 1 charging, etc.

The fall back move does not "go off automatically." I play Slaanesh daemons. We have the speed to get around people. Just lock up a unit by surrounding literally one model with your consolidate move. People act like fall back is automatic, and I play an assault army and routinely prevent the enemy from falling back.

Except that CC units don't have just one chance to wipe out the unit. They have one chance before the opponent gets their next chance to maybe do something about it.

If you charge a Reaper squad with a Termie squad, and the Reapers fall back after 1 round of CC, the Termie squad is not dead. The CWE player can shoot (and/or charge) the Termie squad, yes. But the Reapers can't shoot. And anything shooting the Termies can't shoot other things. And any surviving Termies can charge the remaining Reapers next round for another round of CC - before the Reapers have had a chance to do anything.

If the CWE player devoted enough firepower to remove the Termies before their second chance at CCing the Reapers, then the Termies soaked a boatload of firepwoer that would have killed other threats - which are now one turn closer / will kill one more turn of stuff unopposed. If they haven't, the Termies eat more Reapers next turn.

What you're asking for is, if your Termies ever make it into CC with Reapers, the Reapers as a whole might as well be removed, and Termies should be allowed to charge into any other units with only overwatch in the way. Does that really make sense?

Breng77 wrote:

Because if all options are equally useful for every faction then their really is no faction identity. If orks can make a shooting army that is as good as Tau the only reason to Play either becomes I like the models. Ork shooting units should not be terrible but the should be supporting pieces not the main focus of the army like people suggesting shooting be king think is a good idea.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I agree with you that all melee with no guns shouldn’t be a thing, but disagree that shooting should be primary. I think forces with 60-70% melee should be viable. In a list like that shooting is supporting a largely melee force.

All options should be equally useful. Are you suggesting that flash gitz should always be inefficient simply because they use big guns? And you're attaching too much importance to melee vs ranged as a faction identity. Orks are characterized by excessive violence, (and funny mishaps) which involves both shooting and melee. This forum is even called "dakkadakka". Even World Eaters have access to good shooting, (well, as good as marine shooting is). Tyranids also have solid shooting options. And, considering that most people pick factions they like the look of, why force them into very specific playstyles?
-"Oh, you picked Orks? Well, you're stuck doing melee all the time until you pay $1000 to play Tau."
-"But I don't like Tau"
-"How about Admech?"
-"But I like Orks..."

This isn't a MOBA where you can swap characters out on the fly.

List themes can double down on either shooting or melee, but the army as a whole needs to offer both.
If a player wants to make a 70% shooty Orks then he should not feel hamstrung for doing so. And again, the fluff 100% supports shooting focused Orks (either Bad Moonz or Freebooterz).

Though, keep in mind, I am not asking to nerf melee, just that I believe everyone should have capable shooting as a minimum.

Bharring wrote:
Except that CC units don't have just one chance to wipe out the unit. They have one chance before the opponent gets their next chance to maybe do something about it.

If you charge a Reaper squad with a Termie squad, and the Reapers fall back after 1 round of CC, the Termie squad is not dead. The CWE player can shoot (and/or charge) the Termie squad, yes. But the Reapers can't shoot. And anything shooting the Termies can't shoot other things. And any surviving Termies can charge the remaining Reapers next round for another round of CC - before the Reapers have had a chance to do anything.

If the CWE player devoted enough firepower to remove the Termies before their second chance at CCing the Reapers, then the Termies soaked a boatload of firepwoer that would have killed other threats - which are now one turn closer / will kill one more turn of stuff unopposed. If they haven't, the Termies eat more Reapers next turn.

What you're asking for is, if your Termies ever make it into CC with Reapers, the Reapers as a whole might as well be removed, and Termies should be allowed to charge into any other units with only overwatch in the way. Does that really make sense?

This is wholly incorrect. In my scenario, the remaining reapers fall back out of combat and light the terminators up because they can still shoot. The terminators were able to drop in and assault on turn 1 though.

All options should be equally useful... unless that option happens to be a sword, I guess.

If you just double down on every army needing shooting to be viable rather than fixing melee then the only correct way to play will be an IG-style gunline. Long range shooting needs disadvantages, which it... just doesn't have right now.

What rule do Reapers have allowing them to fallback and shoot?

I'll give you a hint. They don't. Sans stratagem, they cannot shoot if they fall back.

You could discuss (non-UM/WS) Devs vs Banshees/Spears/etc, and it's the same story.

Melee and shooting should both be viable. You're asking that the balancing point basically be "Can CC units ever get into CC" with the result being they win the entire game if they do, and they lose the entire game if they don't.

A better balance point would be to make getting into CC, durability, and deadliness all matter. To make that happen, getting into CC giving you one round of CC before the opponent gets a chance to shoot you again makes the other factors matter more.

Reapers can't fall back and shoot, except for the rule that let's them fall back and shoot.

Ok, buddy.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
All options should be equally useful... unless that option happens to be a sword, I guess.

If you just double down on every army needing shooting to be viable rather than fixing melee then the only correct way to play will be an IG-style gunline. Long range shooting needs disadvantages, which it... just doesn't have right now.

And when did I say swords should suck? I said that guns should be the first means of engagement while swords are there to disrupt enemy lines or clear entrenched positions. The sword should be effective once it gets there, but demanding that an entire army of swords be equal to an army of guns is ridiculous. Shooting is the foil to melee. (see Indiana Jones for an example)

And how exactly do you propose to fix shooting without fundamentally hamstringing it? Either you can shoot something or you can't. You'd have to make up contrivances to keep both equal all the time. The nature of melee vs ranged makes it impossible to balance in practice. There is a reason real armies don't use swords anymore. BUT they still use bayonets. Why? Because shooting is the primary form of engaging the enemy, but sometimes you need to rush a position to clear it. (such as bunkers, or machine nests)

Also, gunlines are a result of insufficient terrain. Charging across No Man's Land in WW1 was a sure way to get killed. If you can see the enemy's deployment zone from your own deployment zone... you don't have enough terrain. Force the gunline to move and all of a sudden you have a game.

Reapers *sans stratagem* can't fall back and shoot. The original discussion was *sans stratagem*. That stratagem is nice, and perhaps too nice vs CC, but not everything in the game has that stratagem. And not all units can use it. If you have two units you've assaulted, only one can use it, for instance.

Saying CC is bad because a strat exists that lets units fall back and shoot is like saying CC is OP because a strat exists that lets units pile in/fight/consoldiate twice in one round.

If it helps, just go with the other example of non-UM/WS Devs/Havocs being charged by Banshees. Same thing, different sides.

Bharring wrote:
Reapers *sans stratagem* can't fall back and shoot. The original discussion was *sans stratagem*. That stratagem is nice, and perhaps too nice vs CC, but not everything in the game has that stratagem. And not all units can use it. If you have two units you've assaulted, only one can use it, for instance.

Saying CC is bad because a strat exists that lets units fall back and shoot is like saying CC is OP because a strat exists that lets units pile in/fight/consoldiate twice in one round.

If it helps, just go with the other example of non-UM/WS Devs/Havocs being charged by Banshees. Same thing, different sides.

'Not everyone in the game has it' is a bad argument.
That ability isn't exactly rare across fly, army traits and stratagems. The fact that some units don't have it just means that those units are worse and may not be played because of it (unlikely, because who plays melee really?).
Or players acknowlegde it and build around it (screens).

In any way, the strength of melee isn't the issue. That can be adjusted by balance fixes. But the core rules totally destroy internal balance across melee units:
- The number 1 factor which makes a melee unit viable is their means of delivery. The baseline here (up to the FAQ at least) was being able to deepstrike. Walking up to the enemy, as well as transports were already out.
Units with some kind of special rule, or stratagem that increases their chances to get into CC turn 1 are prefered. Interestingly a lot of armies have one such trait or unit. But this means most CC units are just taking up space in their codizes never to see play, while a select few are very powerful.
- Then the next thing you look at is pure offensive power. You already picked the unit with the most broken delivery system, so it will most likely get into combat. But you only have one round of CC, so better make that worth it. Now all CC units are suicide glass cannons.
CC units which are more oriented to defense are not being played, as no matter the defense, it will not survive sitting right in front of the enemy army for a shooting phase. So why waste points buing say terminator armor when you can get a few more attack dice for the same cost?
There are a few exceptions to this rule, notably the Flyrant lists, but this obviously should not be the standard we are aiming for.

So internally melee is divided into a lot of useless units and a few broken ones.
I would rather see the whole melee thing scaled back in volatility, have more valid unit choices across the board and have more flexible ways to use melee than the one way of throwing in a suicide glass cannon via some special rule.

Actual data contradicts your claims, HMint.

To address your two bulleted points:
- This isn't true at all. Slaanesh has amazing means of delivery for its melee units, arguably the best out of all the Gods in the Daemons codex. But people universally revile her as the worst of the Gods, possibly only exceeded by Tzeench, which is the only shooting God.

- You have way more than one round to deliver your damage if you use even a modicum of basic tactics and surround an enemy unit so it can't fall back. There are also mechanics that exist to prevent Fall Back (for example, the wytch cult rule in the new Drukhari codex or the Slaanesh Fiend's "Soporific Musk" rule. So Shooting While Falling Back isn't available to all shooting armies; similarly, Preventing Units From Falling Back isn't available to all melee armies, but does exist.

Dandelion wrote:

Breng77 wrote:

Because if all options are equally useful for every faction then their really is no faction identity. If orks can make a shooting army that is as good as Tau the only reason to Play either becomes I like the models. Ork shooting units should not be terrible but the should be supporting pieces not the main focus of the army like people suggesting shooting be king think is a good idea.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I agree with you that all melee with no guns shouldn’t be a thing, but disagree that shooting should be primary. I think forces with 60-70% melee should be viable. In a list like that shooting is supporting a largely melee force.

All options should be equally useful. Are you suggesting that flash gitz should always be inefficient simply because they use big guns? And you're attaching too much importance to melee vs ranged as a faction identity. Orks are characterized by excessive violence, (and funny mishaps) which involves both shooting and melee. This forum is even called "dakkadakka". Even World Eaters have access to good shooting, (well, as good as marine shooting is). Tyranids also have solid shooting options. And, considering that most people pick factions they like the look of, why force them into very specific playstyles?
-"Oh, you picked Orks? Well, you're stuck doing melee all the time until you pay $1000 to play Tau."
-"But I don't like Tau"
-"How about Admech?"
-"But I like Orks..."

This isn't a MOBA where you can swap characters out on the fly.

List themes can double down on either shooting or melee, but the army as a whole needs to offer both.
If a player wants to make a 70% shooty Orks then he should not feel hamstrung for doing so. And again, the fluff 100% supports shooting focused Orks (either Bad Moonz or Freebooterz).

Though, keep in mind, I am not asking to nerf melee, just that I believe everyone should have capable shooting as a minimum.

The problem is capable shooting is defined by he shooting capabikity of other armies. Do I believe Flash Gits should be bad no, I think they should fill a role in the Ork army. Do I think they should be on a level with Tau shooting units when it comes to shooting. No I don’t, they can’t because they are paying for other abilities like not being trash in close combat. Which is the Ork problem (other than gretchin) every Ork is reasonably good in melee and the stats support that. Higher strength, more attacks etc. so if a unit pays for those things relative to another unit, and those things are counter to its primary role it won’t be ass efficient at its primary role. So unless all units are re-statted to be relatively equal to ther things that have their same role, there will be differences. I don’t see how as currrntly designed you can fairly point Ork units and have them make as efficient a gunline as Guard. As such some armies are going to lean more in one direction than another. I mean it sounds like you want one army with different skins, everyone has access to the same units but can use different models for those units. As soon as you move away from that some armies will be better at certain styles of play than others. Horde Eldar is not going to be as good as horde Orks because of how tre armies are designed. Orks should shoot, but they don’t make a top tier gunline because they pay for advantages in other areas.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
All options should be equally useful... unless that option happens to be a sword, I guess.

If you just double down on every army needing shooting to be viable rather than fixing melee then the only correct way to play will be an IG-style gunline. Long range shooting needs disadvantages, which it... just doesn't have right now.

Or IG becomes garbage as everyone else shoots as well as they do and can fight too.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
On the Reaper argument if the need to spend a stratagem the fall back is by definition no longer free as they have spent a resource on it.

I think people are missing the point, I was saying in a hypothetical rule system where there is a universal ability to fall back and still shoot, not with the rules as they currently stand.

Also, the idea that a unit is worthless because the entire army shooting at it can kill it in one round is odd, and really doesn't differ between CC and shooting. In either case, odds are the entire army shooting at one unit - outside superheavies or deathstars - should be able to kill it.

I would argue that a single (sub-500pt) unit that the opponent spends most of their firepower to remove in one round has typically done it's job. Because your other units have another turn to do whatever they want.

Even for those who do have the stratagems or fly, it's not like they ignore CC for free. They "ignore" fallback in that survivors of a round of CC could then contribute. But only the survivors - your CC unit probably killed some of them.

HMint wrote:

'Not everyone in the game has it' is a bad argument.
That ability isn't exactly rare across fly, army traits and stratagems. The fact that some units don't have it just means that those units are worse and may not be played because of it (unlikely, because who plays melee really?).
Or players acknowlegde it and build around it (screens).

Fly is pretty damn rare for front line units blocking melee assaults.

In any way, the strength of melee isn't the issue. That can be adjusted by balance fixes. But the core rules totally destroy internal balance across melee units:
- The number 1 factor which makes a melee unit viable is their means of delivery. The baseline here (up to the FAQ at least) was being able to deepstrike. Walking up to the enemy, as well as transports were already out. Units with some kind of special rule, or stratagem that increases their chances to get into CC turn 1 are prefered. Interestingly a lot of armies have one such trait or unit. But this means most CC units are just taking up space in their codizes never to see play, while a select few are very powerful.

Transports are not out. They really, really aren't. People didn't use them, because T1 deepstrike was readily available. That and the perception that they are hugely overcosted, which they are, but not by a margin that changes lists in any meaningful way.

- Then the next thing you look at is pure offensive power. You already picked the unit with the most broken delivery system, so it will most likely get into combat. But you only have one round of CC, so better make that worth it. Now all CC units are suicide glass cannons.
CC units which are more oriented to defense are not being played, as no matter the defense, it will not survive sitting right in front of the enemy army for a shooting phase. So why waste points buing say terminator armor when you can get a few more attack dice for the same cost?
There are a few exceptions to this rule, notably the Flyrant lists, but this obviously should not be the standard we are aiming for.

Bring cheap, durable melee that can tie up the majority of the front line. THEN when the line is broken deepstrike the glass cannon.

"Bring cheap, durable melee that can tie up the majority of the front line. THEN when the line is broken deepstrike the glass cannon. "

Almost like there's actually different roles for different CC units!

Units should be different for variety.

But there is no point having bad units - because people simply won't use them.

If all Ork shooting units are points inefficient they will just put their points into assault units. And vice versa for say Tau. There is no upside for taking inefficient units.

Its really not a problem for a Codex to have good assault and shooting units because a player can't spend the points twice. The only issue is if you have stackable synergy - and this is partly why Eldar have been good in almost every edition of the game.

Bring cheap, durable melee that can tie up the majority of the front line. THEN when the line is broken deepstrike the glass cannon.

I actually don't think there is such a thing? There are plenty of durable melee units, but they're expensive, and there are tons of cheap melee units, but they're all very flimsy. I suppose we would need to define what we mean by durable. When I think of durable I think of a unit that has two out of these three things: 2 wounds base, 3+ invulnerable save, some sort of FnP. Nothing that I can think of firts that criteria and is cheap. Again what do we mean by cheap? I would think, given the context, no more than 20 ppm?

Yeah, there shouldn't be inefficient units.

Some factions, though, simply function better. You can't really do Green Tide with Eldar. IG doesn't do Combined Arms well.

Orkz should prefer CC, like how their Shoota Boy will punch the lights out of any silly Guardians who let them get close. IG and Tau should prefer shooting, because that's their feel/fluff. IG and Tau having a couple CC units that can compete is fine, but shouldn't be able to build a pure CC list as well as Orkz. A shooty IG should outshoot a shooty Ork list, but even a shooty Ork list should outpunch a shooty IG list. Which wins should depend on how it plays out, though.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I think of IG Guardsmen and Gaunts as durable, too. Not per model, but certainly per presence.

Necron Warriors are rather durable, and only sorta-have one of those three.

Pox Walkers?

 peteralmo wrote:

Bring cheap, durable melee that can tie up the majority of the front line. THEN when the line is broken deepstrike the glass cannon.

I actually don't think there is such a thing? There are plenty of durable melee units, but they're expensive, and there are tons of cheap melee units, but they're all very flimsy. I suppose we would need to define what we mean by durable. When I think of durable I think of a unit that has two out of these three things: 2 wounds base, 3+ invulnerable save, some sort of FnP. Nothing that I can think of firts that criteria and is cheap. Again what do we mean by cheap? I would think, given the context, no more than 20 ppm?

If I were to define durable it would be lower killing power traded for greater wounds at lower points and where they are mostly self reliant on morale.

VV with TH/SS is a very different unit from VV with CS/BP. Even tac marines (AHHHHHHHH! DIRTY WORD!).

Most CC opponents have 1) no special weapons, and 2) very a low number of attacks at a low strength.

Tyel wrote:
Units should be different for variety.

But there is no point having bad units - because people simply won't use them.

If all Ork shooting units are points inefficient they will just put their points into assault units. And vice versa for say Tau. There is no upside for taking inefficient units.

Its really not a problem for a Codex to have good assault and shooting units because a player can't spend the points twice. The only issue is if you have stackable synergy - and this is partly why Eldar have been good in almost every edition of the game.

Units don’t need to be inefficient to be less efficient than choices in other armies. For instance Ork shooting units could be built to fill specific roles in the Ork army that are important but not be efficient when compared to guard shooting units. So for instance you want to bring big guns in your army to deal with vehicles behind screens, but you don’t want to build a gunline or those units, because it won’t beat a gunline of guard shooting units.

Bharring wrote:
Yeah, there shouldn't be inefficient units.

Some factions, though, simply function better. You can't really do Green Tide with Eldar. IG doesn't do Combined Arms well.

Orkz should prefer CC, like how their Shoota Boy will punch the lights out of any silly Guardians who let them get close. IG and Tau should prefer shooting, because that's their feel/fluff. IG and Tau having a couple CC units that can compete is fine, but shouldn't be able to build a pure CC list as well as Orkz. A shooty IG should outshoot a shooty Ork list, but even a shooty Ork list should outpunch a shooty IG list. Which wins should depend on how it plays out, though.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I think of IG Guardsmen and Gaunts as durable, too. Not per model, but certainly per presence.

Necron Warriors are rather durable, and only sorta-have one of those three.

Pox Walkers?

But neither warriors nor pox walkers are actually mobile. I assume mobility is assumed in the original recommendation?

I should have been clearer. I was showing that durable didn't mean 2w or a 3++ or a FNP. There are many ways to be durable.

Mobility should be yet another tradeoff.

Bharring wrote:
I should have been clearer. I was showing that durable didn't mean 2w or a 3++ or a FNP. There are many ways to be durable.

Mobility should be yet another tradeoff.

That's fine, but would you agree that melee units that aren't mobile, and also aren't swarms, aren't really seeing play right now?

This led me to answer my own question. Necron Scarabs. They are cheap, durable, and fast. There's one!

 peteralmo wrote:

Bharring wrote:
I should have been clearer. I was showing that durable didn't mean 2w or a 3++ or a FNP. There are many ways to be durable.

Mobility should be yet another tradeoff.

That's fine, but would you agree that melee units that aren't mobile, and also aren't swarms, aren't really seeing play right now?

This led me to answer my own question. Necron Scarabs. They are cheap, durable, and fast. There's one!

Which is yet another reason for transports.

Now, i'm not going to put pox walkers in a rhino, but they can still run upfield and be wave #3.

If only there was someway to make a unit mobile and durable...

... some sort of ... other unit, that could hold it, that was both faster and more durable...

... perhaps something like a tank with the weapons removed...

GAH! I feel like I'm so close to a revolutionary military concept but I just can't get it to gel...

I would agree that, currerntly, there's a problem where durability is either undercosted or underapreciated.

Again, most players will take half again the killyness over double the durability. For the same points. So it might be undercosted, but that's not the only problem.

A lot of shooting certainly feels overtuned right now, too.

I don't think the answer to overtuned shooting/undertuned durability is to make it so once you hit CC, you're basically safe from shooting for the rest of the game, either.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
If only there was someway to make a unit mobile and durable...

... some sort of ... other unit, that could hold it, that was both faster and more durable...

... perhaps something like a tank with the weapons removed...

GAH! I feel like I'm so close to a revolutionary military concept but I just can't get it to gel...

Transports would be fine if shooting wasn't as powerful. It shouldn't be as easy to 1-round a monolith as it is.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

Transports would be fine if shooting wasn't as powerful. It shouldn't be as easy to 1-round a monolith as it is.

I'm sorry, but if people are regularly 1-rounding a monolith there is no way they have enough anti-infantry for hordes or their dice are loaded.

The issue is at the cost involved it should be super rare, and it is not. Even if it only happens like 25% of games that is a non-starter for tournament play.

Breng77 wrote:
The issue is at the cost involved it should be super rare, and it is not. Even if it only happens like 25% of games that is a non-starter for tournament play.

Monolith is 381 all in. That's 2 Las Preds or 11 Dark Reapers. There is a 6% chance the Preds can ace it in one turn and just about 0% for Dark Reapers.



The most likely damage outcomes are between 6 and 12.



If they've taken 3 Las Preds then it's 27%. So, if your opponent has outspent your monolith on anti-tank by 50% and it also happens to be LC only then, yes, it could die turn 1. Magnus is 19% under the same conditions.

Okay, so we've established that I'm absurdly unlucky. I guess I'll give my monolith another try. Maybe have it transport a unit of scytheguard and a unit of tesla immortals so that moving it with the deceiver isn't a complete point sink. Leave the immortals out if the opponent brought enough anti-tank where it's a strong chance they'll get dropped and just veil them up.

Typically getting a return like that is super good though, so you kinda prove how non durable the Monolith is, unless you wanna argue for the Land Raider being durable too.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Okay, so we've established that I'm absurdly unlucky. I guess I'll give my monolith another try. Maybe have it transport a unit of scytheguard and a unit of tesla immortals so that moving it with the deceiver isn't a complete point sink. Leave the immortals out if the opponent brought enough anti-tank where it's a strong chance they'll get dropped and just veil them up.

I don't know that you're unlucky. There's plenty of ways to easily kill a monolith, but it usually takes an investment and that usually means a trade off.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Typically getting a return like that is super good though, so you kinda prove how non durable the Monolith is, unless you wanna argue for the Land Raider being durable too.

Yea, it is...unless your meta runs a bunch of LC it will do well. I don't see much in terms of LC in recent tournaments, either.

Okay, so it is easy enough to kill a monolith. Now my lychguard are stuck on my side of the table (I have to use Dimensional Corridor to move them because neither the Eternity Gate nor Emergency Invasion Beam works on turn one) and are going to have to weather 2-3 turns of incoming fire without doing anything at all to affect the board during that time because they're slow without some way to teleport around. If we include the Deceiver that I included in the list to make the Monolith usable in the first place then that's 906 points that have been effectively taken out of the game by cracking that one brick. That's a "lost on turn one" situation, Daedalus.

It'd be the same deal with rhinos or any other transport: if you go second, you're going to have to walk, and that means you lost the game.

You are using glass cannons for that analysis though, and glasscannons do not have a 4 turn life expectancy. If you repeat the same math with a more balanced unit, like a standard leman russ, you would see that on a monolith it has a return of 33%, which is indeed a bit high, but not to the levels of making it unusable. The real problem with the monolith is that when playing with big models, one would like to put some buff on those, but necrons don't have anything like that.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I remember back in 5th edition when you couldn't break contact for free where I had a bunch of Leman Russ Tanks vs like 40 genestealers.

In 5th edition guard could blob, so I did just that, and had 50 guardsmen in a blob in front of my tanks.

The genestealers charged the guardsman blob, and wiped them all out except for 1 one-wound heavy weapons team (dice, I guess?). I was like "no problem, that heavy weapons team will fail leadership and run away, letting my tanks pound on the genestealers." after the genestealers all piled in and locked themselves up with the heavy weapons team.

Morale check? Snakeyes. Insane Heroism universal rule kicked in, Heavy Weapons Team didn't run.

So because of a single desperate man with a shovel hiding under the slain corpses of his foes, three squadrons of Leman Russ tanks just sat there sucking their thumbs eight feet in front of a gigantic mob of genestealers.

It was the least intuitive, least realistic, least sensible, and least fun I think I've ever had playing a gunline. Watching my tanks just sit there awaiting their inevitable death told me all I needed to know about how stupid the ability to lock things in combat was.

It’s worth pointing out that you’re talking about a minute chance (1/36) of that happening, and an even smaller chance that it’s going to happen at a critical junction like that. It’s sad to to say it but sometimes your dice just hate you and it can spoil a game for you. That doesn’t mean a mechanic is bad because one time you got royally and unfairly screwed by it.

You know what’s massively more common? Failing an easy charge and losing the game because of it. I lost count of how many times that happened to me in 7th, and I have to say that the ability to reroll one of the dice for a CP is the only thing that saves the swingyness of a 2D6” charge length from being a travesty in my eyes. And yes, sometimes you will roll snake eyes, reroll one of the dice and come up with another 1, at which point you just have to accept that the dice gods are just deliberately dicking around with you.

Having to take a 2D6 ‘can your unit actually do some damage this turn or is it just going to get shot off the board’ test is one of the myriad hurdles assault units face. Being able to charge off a Turn 1 Deep Strike removed enough of these hurdles that assault armies became competitive with gunlines where they hadn’t been for, what, 4 editions? They weren’t dominant but they were at least viable. Now I’ll agree that massed Turn 1 charging was obnoxious to play against, which is why I’m coming around to being in favour of the beta rule despite it kicking my beloved Terminators when they’re already down and bleeding. It does, however, drag us back to the previous decade’s worth of the game where assault armies were at a massive disadvantage to shooting ones (barring those with some kind of gimmick that bends the game to make them viable).

I think we could definitely redress the balance post-beta ruling by mitigating some of the hurdles assault armies face. The most obvious is unlimited Overwatch - you hit on 6s in Overwatch because it’s meant to represent a last minute desperate barely-aimed snap shot in the nick of time. A model that can shoot once in its own shooting phase suddenly gets a high enough rate of fire to shoot five times in the split second before it’s charged? Cap units to shooting once in the Charge Phase and you help assault armies a little bit (and, incidentally, fix the Y’vahra).

Another hurdle is that, thanks to the Fall Back mechanic, assault units typically get to make their attacks once in the game. This means that units that can’t frontload apocalyptic amounts of damage the turn they charge become useless, and prevents cinematic, desperate drawn-out hand-to-hand struggles over a vital objective. Further, it’s incredibly immersion-breaking to have the enemy just stroll away mid-brawl. If you turn your back on, say, Khârn the Betrayer mid-fight, you’re going to cop an axe where the sun don’t shine. I agree with another poster - if a unit Falls Back, a unit in combat with it should be able to attack that unit as if it’s the Fight Phase, but not Pile In or Consolidate. Obviously if you limit Overwatch to once per phase you’d limit this to once per phase too.

Little changes to help redress the balance without completely altering the game. If it proves not to be enough you go a step further - say, if a unit shoots in the Charge Phase, it can’t shoot in its own following Shooting Phase. It gives you a tactical choice of whether to make a weaker out-of-sequence attack or take the chance that your opponent will fail the charge and get your full strength attack the next turn.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Fly is pretty damn rare for front line units blocking melee assaults.

Fly is pretty rare, except for Tau, Eldar and Dark Eldar. But lets also not forget the point here is we are talking about units/armies that ignore or minimize the downside to falling back from CC. Ultramarines ignore it and that 1 unit loses 1BS for 1 turn...that is it. Eldar also have a strat that allows them to retreat a unit from CC without consequence, A number of armies have abilities which allow you to teleport out of CC like Greyknights. And then to make the point even more obvious, the only major offending gun line army that CAN NOT do this is IG, but they don't need to. They can just screen there good stuff with cheap, throwaway infantry units. Ohhh no! you had to lose 1 round of shooting from your 10 man Guardsman unit? The horror. I guess the other 5 will just have to blast the offending CC unit off the table while your long ranged guns keep pounding away.

CC was already hard enough to get into with GOOD units and keep them tied up without this nerf, saying otherwise is a lie.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Transports are not out. They really, really aren't. People didn't use them, because T1 deepstrike was readily available. That and the perception that they are hugely overcosted, which they are, but not by a margin that changes lists in any meaningful way.

My army had the ability to turn 1 deepstrike Kommandos, which are 50% overpriced boyz....that is about it. So why didn't I bring transports for my army? Ohh that is right, because they are AWFUL and a complete waste of my points. 82pts for a Trukk with T6 4+ save and the ability to transport 12 models. Or I could double down and get a Battlewagon which will run 160+ and can transport 20 models. So the trukk literally costs MORE then the boys its transporting and the Battlewagon is SIGNIFICANTLY more then the 20 boys its transporting. neither can shoot worth a damn, but the battlewagon can at least take a deffrolla which makes it not useless after delivering its payload, of course now its even more expensive. In other words, Yes they are "overcosted" and by a very "Meaningful Way". So.....Yeah, Transports right now are UTTERLY useless.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Bring cheap, durable melee that can tie up the majority of the front line. THEN when the line is broken deepstrike the glass cannon.

No such CC unit exists. And lets break down your suggestion here. Bring up cheap durable melee (which doesn't exist) and tie up the majority of the frontline, this takes 2 turns to do , Turn 1 you move and advance and then turn 2 you move, advance and attempt to charge, so Really you are saying, spend 2 turns getting shot off the table and then deepstrike my other CC units.....basically to where my "Cheap durable" melee unit is because Screens are a thing and I have yet to run across an opponent who doesn't factor in a 9' deepstrike .

None of your suggestions are feasible, realistic or work. you invent units that don't exist to prove a point that you then forget takes several turns to accomplish where as before we were doing the exact same thing with turn 1 deepstrike AND STILL weren't winning tournaments.



So this brings me to another point, why did GW Nerf turn 1 deepstrike. The answer is simple, not because of Turn 1 deepstriking MELEE armies, nope, the offending units that needed a nerf were Turn 1 Deep striking Shooting units like Tau Commanders and the plethora of other units that were showing up and shooting OVER a screening unit instead of having to mulch through it in CC.

A full additional fight phase worth of punches could be too punishing, but if it was hitting on 6's then it could be a reasonable suggestion.

Spoletta wrote:
A full additional fight phase worth of punches could be too punishing, but if it was hitting on 6's then it could be a reasonable suggestion.

and leaving your CC unit exposed to the entire armies shooting phase is not punishing? Did you forget that said CC unit just walked itself up the board for a minimum of 2 full shooting phases to even get into assault? the fact that you even get the chance to walk out of CC is ridiculous.

Most transports are a 9" movement buff over 2 turns and you get some wounds which efficient against low strength 1 damage weapons but are inefficient vs high strength multiple damage weapons.

When you are paying a fortune (Orks are especially bad, but its common enough) this isn't worthwhile. Please take transports - I will pop them, potentially scattering mortal wounds about and killing 1/6th of the squad inside. My infantry can then shoot whatever has been revealed (unless there is fortunate terrain).

As an aside Plaguebearers are probably the closest to a cheap and durable melee unit.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Breng77 wrote:
The issue is at the cost involved it should be super rare, and it is not. Even if it only happens like 25% of games that is a non-starter for tournament play.

Monolith is 381 all in. That's 2 Las Preds or 11 Dark Reapers. There is a 6% chance the Preds can ace it in one turn and just about 0% for Dark Reapers.



The most likely damage outcomes are between 6 and 12.



If they've taken 3 Las Preds then it's 27%. So, if your opponent has outspent your monolith on anti-tank by 50% and it also happens to be LC only then, yes, it could die turn 1. Magnus is 19% under the same conditions.

Or you could take a naked shadow sword for 404 points and kill the monolith 50% of the time for 23 points more.

It’s worth pointing out that you’re talking about a minute chance (1/36) of that happening, and an even smaller chance that it’s going to happen at a critical junction like that. It’s sad to to say it but sometimes your dice just hate you and it can spoil a game for you. That doesn’t mean a mechanic is bad because one time you got royally and unfairly screwed by it.

You know what’s massively more common? Failing an easy charge and losing the game because of it. I lost count of how many times that happened to me in 7th, and I have to say that the ability to reroll one of the dice for a CP is the only thing that saves the swingyness of a 2D6” charge length from being a travesty in my eyes. And yes, sometimes you will roll snake eyes, reroll one of the dice and come up with another 1, at which point you just have to accept that the dice gods are just deliberately dicking around with you.

Having to take a 2D6 ‘can your unit actually do some damage this turn or is it just going to get shot off the board’ test is one of the myriad hurdles assault units face. Being able to charge off a Turn 1 Deep Strike removed enough of these hurdles that assault armies became competitive with gunlines where they hadn’t been for, what, 4 editions? They weren’t dominant but they were at least viable. Now I’ll agree that massed Turn 1 charging was obnoxious to play against, which is why I’m coming around to being in favour of the beta rule despite it kicking my beloved Terminators when they’re already down and bleeding. It does, however, drag us back to the previous decade’s worth of the game where assault armies were at a massive disadvantage to shooting ones (barring those with some kind of gimmick that bends the game to make them viable).

I think we could definitely redress the balance post-beta ruling by mitigating some of the hurdles assault armies face. The most obvious is unlimited Overwatch - you hit on 6s in Overwatch because it’s meant to represent a last minute desperate barely-aimed snap shot in the nick of time. A model that can shoot once in its own shooting phase suddenly gets a high enough rate of fire to shoot five times in the split second before it’s charged? Cap units to shooting once in the Charge Phase and you help assault armies a little bit (and, incidentally, fix the Y’vahra).

Another hurdle is that, thanks to the Fall Back mechanic, assault units typically get to make their attacks once in the game. This means that units that can’t frontload apocalyptic amounts of damage the turn they charge become useless, and prevents cinematic, desperate drawn-out hand-to-hand struggles over a vital objective. Further, it’s incredibly immersion-breaking to have the enemy just stroll away mid-brawl. If you turn your back on, say, Khârn the Betrayer mid-fight, you’re going to cop an axe where the sun don’t shine. I agree with another poster - if a unit Falls Back, a unit in combat with it should be able to attack that unit as if it’s the Fight Phase, but not Pile In or Consolidate. Obviously if you limit Overwatch to once per phase you’d limit this to once per phase too.

Little changes to help redress the balance without completely altering the game. If it proves not to be enough you go a step further - say, if a unit shoots in the Charge Phase, it can’t shoot in its own following Shooting Phase. It gives you a tactical choice of whether to make a weaker out-of-sequence attack or take the chance that your opponent will fail the charge and get your full strength attack the next turn.

Some excellent points here.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

SemperMortis wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Fly is pretty damn rare for front line units blocking melee assaults.

Fly is pretty rare, except for Tau, Eldar and Dark Eldar. But lets also not forget the point here is we are talking about units/armies that ignore or minimize the downside to falling back from CC. Ultramarines ignore it and that 1 unit loses 1BS for 1 turn...that is it. Eldar also have a strat that allows them to retreat a unit from CC without consequence, A number of armies have abilities which allow you to teleport out of CC like Greyknights. And then to make the point even more obvious, the only major offending gun line army that CAN NOT do this is IG, but they don't need to. They can just screen there good stuff with cheap, throwaway infantry units. Ohhh no! you had to lose 1 round of shooting from your 10 man Guardsman unit? The horror. I guess the other 5 will just have to blast the offending CC unit off the table while your long ranged guns keep pounding away.

CC was already hard enough to get into with GOOD units and keep them tied up without this nerf, saying otherwise is a lie.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Transports are not out. They really, really aren't. People didn't use them, because T1 deepstrike was readily available. That and the perception that they are hugely overcosted, which they are, but not by a margin that changes lists in any meaningful way.

My army had the ability to turn 1 deepstrike Kommandos, which are 50% overpriced boyz....that is about it. So why didn't I bring transports for my army? Ohh that is right, because they are AWFUL and a complete waste of my points. 82pts for a Trukk with T6 4+ save and the ability to transport 12 models. Or I could double down and get a Battlewagon which will run 160+ and can transport 20 models. So the trukk literally costs MORE then the boys its transporting and the Battlewagon is SIGNIFICANTLY more then the 20 boys its transporting. neither can shoot worth a damn, but the battlewagon can at least take a deffrolla which makes it not useless after delivering its payload, of course now its even more expensive. In other words, Yes they are "overcosted" and by a very "Meaningful Way". So.....Yeah, Transports right now are UTTERLY useless.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Bring cheap, durable melee that can tie up the majority of the front line. THEN when the line is broken deepstrike the glass cannon.

No such CC unit exists. And lets break down your suggestion here. Bring up cheap durable melee (which doesn't exist) and tie up the majority of the frontline, this takes 2 turns to do , Turn 1 you move and advance and then turn 2 you move, advance and attempt to charge, so Really you are saying, spend 2 turns getting shot off the table and then deepstrike my other CC units.....basically to where my "Cheap durable" melee unit is because Screens are a thing and I have yet to run across an opponent who doesn't factor in a 9' deepstrike .

None of your suggestions are feasible, realistic or work. you invent units that don't exist to prove a point that you then forget takes several turns to accomplish where as before we were doing the exact same thing with turn 1 deepstrike AND STILL weren't winning tournaments.



So this brings me to another point, why did GW Nerf turn 1 deepstrike. The answer is simple, not because of Turn 1 deepstriking MELEE armies, nope, the offending units that needed a nerf were Turn 1 Deep striking Shooting units like Tau Commanders and the plethora of other units that were showing up and shooting OVER a screening unit instead of having to mulch through it in CC.

And here as well.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Okay, so it is easy enough to kill a monolith. Now my lychguard are stuck on my side of the table (I have to use Dimensional Corridor to move them because neither the Eternity Gate nor Emergency Invasion Beam works on turn one) and are going to have to weather 2-3 turns of incoming fire without doing anything at all to affect the board during that time because they're slow without some way to teleport around. If we include the Deceiver that I included in the list to make the Monolith usable in the first place then that's 906 points that have been effectively taken out of the game by cracking that one brick. That's a "lost on turn one" situation, Daedalus.

It'd be the same deal with rhinos or any other transport: if you go second, you're going to have to walk, and that means you lost the game.

Rhinos, Predators, Land Raider, etc. You're not killing everything. Something will walk, yes.

Honestly if I was using a monolith to transport i'd bring the Deceiver, too. Otherwise there would be Night Scythes in addition to it. I also wouldn't be using Lychguard for front line assaults.

The point is there should be other things to shoot and redundancy. Of this list below those 12 lascannons can't shoot all of them. Do they risk a 27% chance to plink against the Monolith, shoot the things that will blow them up, or the flyer that will get units in their face faster?

Monolith - 381
Night Scythes - 160
Doomsday Ark - 193
3 Heavy Destoryers - 171


Automatically Appended Next Post:

SemperMortis wrote:

Fly is pretty rare, except for Tau, Eldar and Dark Eldar. But lets also not forget the point here is we are talking about units/armies that ignore or minimize the downside to falling back from CC. Ultramarines ignore it and that 1 unit loses 1BS for 1 turn...that is it. Eldar also have a strat that allows them to retreat a unit from CC without consequence, A number of armies have abilities which allow you to teleport out of CC like Greyknights. And then to make the point even more obvious, the only major offending gun line army that CAN NOT do this is IG, but they don't need to. They can just screen there good stuff with cheap, throwaway infantry units. Ohhh no! you had to lose 1 round of shooting from your 10 man Guardsman unit? The horror. I guess the other 5 will just have to blast the offending CC unit off the table while your long ranged guns keep pounding away.

CC was already hard enough to get into with GOOD units and keep them tied up without this nerf, saying otherwise is a lie.

Yes, armies have ways to fall back. That is why you tie up multiple units. IG do not retreat without consequence. They need to change their orders and there are a limited number of orders. Tie up multiple units.

FYI did you know a rhino can multi-charge? Why you can even charge it sideways and get 2 to 3 units. *MAGIC*

My army had the ability to turn 1 deepstrike Kommandos, which are 50% overpriced boyz....that is about it. So why didn't I bring transports for my army? Ohh that is right, because they are AWFUL and a complete waste of my points. 82pts for a Trukk with T6 4+ save and the ability to transport 12 models. Or I could double down and get a Battlewagon which will run 160+ and can transport 20 models. So the trukk literally costs MORE then the boys its transporting and the Battlewagon is SIGNIFICANTLY more then the 20 boys its transporting. neither can shoot worth a damn, but the battlewagon can at least take a deffrolla which makes it not useless after delivering its payload, of course now its even more expensive. In other words, Yes they are "overcosted" and by a very "Meaningful Way". So.....Yeah, Transports right now are UTTERLY useless.

I cry no tears for Orks. I play against them all the time. You have all manner of outflankers and Da Jump. Trukks are NOT useless. Overcosted, yes. Useless, no. Have you ever swung wrecking balls that hit on 4s? Used mob up on Boyz jumping out?

And there's this crazy thing they can get. The KFF, I think?

EIGHT Lascannons:
8 * .666 * .666 * .666 * 3.5 = NOT a dead trukk

All this and you still have 634 to spare. All the trukks can easily start in KFF range.

No such CC unit exists. And lets break down your suggestion here. Bring up cheap durable melee (which doesn't exist) and tie up the majority of the frontline, this takes 2 turns to do , Turn 1 you move and advance and then turn 2 you move, advance and attempt to charge, so Really you are saying, spend 2 turns getting shot off the table and then deepstrike my other CC units.....basically to where my "Cheap durable" melee unit is because Screens are a thing and I have yet to run across an opponent who doesn't factor in a 9' deepstrike .

None of your suggestions are feasible, realistic or work. you invent units that don't exist to prove a point that you then forget takes several turns to accomplish where as before we were doing the exact same thing with turn 1 deepstrike AND STILL weren't winning tournaments.

Yes, they are, and Boyz are the perfect example of that. You don't need a 3+ save to have staying power in melee ON TOP of having 3 or 4 Trukks crashing in with you. In ADDITION TO Da Jump.

The problem with Trukks is people saw that they were lower toughness than Rhino, but more points and wrote them off and never gave them a second glance. Just go TRY it.

SemperMortis wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
A full additional fight phase worth of punches could be too punishing, but if it was hitting on 6's then it could be a reasonable suggestion.

and leaving your CC unit exposed to the entire armies shooting phase is not punishing? Did you forget that said CC unit just walked itself up the board for a minimum of 2 full shooting phases to even get into assault? the fact that you even get the chance to walk out of CC is ridiculous.

God forbid we utilize the revolutionary tactic of falling back from a fight we can't win. No, falling back and being exposed to attacks of opportunity seems fair. If the risk/reward of melee is skewed right now, perhaps the focus should be on decreasing the risk rather than bumping up the reward so melee units just become immune to shooting once they come into contact with another unit. That's just as awful a balance outcome as what we have now.