My friends joined during 7th, and I joined during 8th, and we are all currently playing 8th. I played 7th twice, using 30k armies. I don't have much experience when it comes to the edition, and no experience when it comes to older ones. Why is 7th considered the worst edition for 40k?
7th started off by addressing some issues of 6th, such as toning back the effectiveness of D weapons. But it quickly got out of control with Formation rules that cranked up the power levels of armies (quite inequally) very high. A new player coming in with a casual list could be roflstomped by lists that were nigh-impossible to even begin contending with.
Then GW cranked it up even further mid edition, with absolutely wild additional abilities (for some armies) being added to the mix. It just got totally absurd. My 1850 point Marine army started the game with 2500 points or something. My Chaos army would pile Spawn and other nasties into a building, and then I'd move the building with a psychic power, then assault out of it. It was nuts.
Personally I'd rate 7th higher than 6th, because at Insectum put it it started as a patch to that edition.
The problems were already in the Core rules, though.
- Lots of USRs of which some were 2 USRs (zealot) , others hardly ever used (rampage) , or useless rolling without effect (Soulblaze)
- Random Warlord traits and psychic powers
- Hull points turned the whole vehicle rules into bloat and vehicles into paper (HH tries to mitigate that by giving Upgrades that ignore vehicle rules to everybody...)
- Psychic phase turned most psykers into batteries for a powerful one, denying was basically impossible and the phase overall tedious and highly random
- As soon as you had psykers that could reliably get invisibility the game broke down
- taking wounds from the front looked thematic, but killed CC armies (other things added to that), add also that it lead to very strange situations when blasts hit something behind cover
- Unit types were bloated, I had to reread the difference between jump and Jet every game
- Monsters had a lot of bonuses so vehicles wanted to be and actually became monsters (dreadknight, riptide) to improve sales
- Formations of formations split the game into haves and have nots, balance was very bad due to these as they just threw some special rules around like candy
- Terrible fight phase. It was so strictly coded that you had no choice at all in it. After declaring the charge, the opponent could do the rest by himself. Completely railroaded.
No FAQ/Errata Support from GW until the very end (and than GW changed rules to the opposite of what everyone whas doing)
Formations with free units starting and not seen before power creep mid-edition (by the end some armies had 4000 points worth of units in a 2000 point game)
Hull Points as mix between old vehicles rules and new ones, with high rate of fire being better at killing tanks than dedicated Anti Tank weapons
Overall there was nothing that could have been solved with a Chapter Approved, but see the first point
7th core by itself was good with minor changes (like for Invisibility) which was done by FW for Horus Heresy
TheBestBucketHead wrote: My friends joined during 7th, and I joined during 8th, and we are all currently playing 8th. I played 7th twice, using 30k armies. I don't have much experience when it comes to the edition, and no experience when it comes to older ones. Why is 7th considered the worst edition for 40k?
Because gap between the factions was huge even just by playing average collection of models, let alone for those trying to break the game.
Rules bloat was very high, pretty much no FAQ to fix issues, and the edition still suffered from old and problematic mechanics or generic OP combinations like the AV system, the "all or nothing" AP, the clunky blast/templates, 2++ saves and re-rollable 2++ (or 3++) saves, invisibility, hundred of points of free stuff, etc...
To me it was obvious that they were really doubling down on "buy all these models for a special bonus!" with all the special detachments that were also sold as boxes on the website.
I hate that style of army building where building a certain way gives you "free" models, it's crap. I left WM because of that. And the FOC was getting more and more broken down and degraded, along with a really bonkers psychic phase that quite a lot of the armies in the game had no way to participate in at all. If you're going to have a crazy psychic phase you can't have multiple factions with zero access to Psykers or Psyker defense. WFB has dwarves, but they get extra dispel and have runesmiths for even more magic def, as well as runes of spellbreaking and the like. Tau and Necrons got crap all, Orks have one mediocre psyker unit, and meanwhile Eldar had entire units of psykers. That's all fine and fluffy when psychic powers were relatively limited melee or shooting attacks or minor buffs, but when they changed them to be game changing magic like in WFB it really threw all balance out the window.
Grimtuff wrote: 40k community- "7th is the worst edition!"
9th- "Hold my beer!"
Not even close, until 9th armies start getting 25% of their army for free, units can be summoned in for free (or was that 6th? Kinda blurred into one), stacked bombs with a 2++ rerolling 1s, invisibility. That alone was worth burning it down.
The TL/DR is that GW didn't care about the game as a game.
Many of the sins of 7th could have been resolved with a simple balance pass. But they never did.
I'd argue 9ths in similar spot right now - and 8th had its moments too - but usually 3-6 months in, a CA/big FAQ would come along and serve to reset the meta (roll on January 2022?). 7th was just left as an unbalanced hellscape for years.
7th edition was, as a number of people noted, the edition when GWsimply stopped caring.
Formations were introduced with absurd bonuses: an AdMech formation existed which made all wargear free. Less egregious formations simply gave you 600 points of free Razorbacks, or obscene special rule bonuses. Honest to god Pay to Win.
In general a slew of 'random' tables, traits and powers, many of which possessed no value.
Massive number of frankly worthless USRs
Classic AP system (very clunky, many weapons were effectively worthless)
A wealth of rerollable 2++ saves
A return to Herohammer, with examples such as 'Smash-fether', a Space Marine captain with multiple re-rollable saves
Introduction of Knights and continuing a trend of normalising Superheavies and 'Apocalypse' D weapons.
Summoning; the ability to bring on huge numbers of free models. I can't recall if it was in 6th or 7th, but at one point summoned models could themselves summon more models.
Continuing the trend of 'Flying Circuses' - difficult to hit flying models (only 6s, unless you had dedicated anti-air, which was relatively limited at the time.
Incredible bloat of rules and options.
A confusing, and at times simply broken psychic powers section. I still have no idea how it worked. Incredibly random and with many bunk options.
Progression of the DLCification of the game also.
Formations f.e. came often with other sources. Supplements were normalised.
ETC.
It had its good sides, no primaris, Corsairs, R&H, elysians still existing. No lawtext unit limitations like PM, or the new commandos have.
But from a game standpoint, it was so horrifically balanced that even if you went out of your way to not break the game you HAD to deepdive into the mechanics and balance aspects to make a casual experience somewhat enjoyable, especially when certain factions were involved....
They are somewhat linked. 5th edition was OK, in no way good.
6th edition started out like 5th edition with three major changes. First everybody good psykick disipilines witch where trees you could pick from. This was cool, but some spells where mor eunbalanced in different codexes. Second you could start to ally in things, this was quite baffeling. Mayby you could in 5th as well, I do not remember, but in 6th it was all over the table. Lastly they introduced flyers. And that was a gak show. Mostly because they could only behit in 6's. Especially the imperial guard lascannon ship that was alreayd undercosted and had lascannons, and suddenly it got the flying only beeing hit on 6's for free. Forge world also had a 40 shot BS2+ S5 that could only be hit on 6's that was undercosted. As 6th edition went on you started seeing helldrakes everywhere. The ekdars got the wriaght knight that undercosted for what you did, it was pushed to sell the model and if it had to be priced propperly it would just be a 2 model army almost.
7th edtion I did not play but I saw from the sidelines. And it was a further exstension of the circus. I do believe one of the better armies from this era was the best unit the SM codex had, along with as many characters as you could take. (They would join and leave groups as will.) Now you cast invisabilaty with tigerius and your opponents abilaty to interact with that group was severly limited. 7th edtionw as full of things like that.
Niiai wrote: They are somewhat linked. 5th edition was OK, in no way good.
6th edition started out like 5th edition with three major changes. First everybody good psykick disipilines witch where trees you could pick from. This was cool, but some spells where mor eunbalanced in different codexes. Second you could start to ally in things, this was quite baffeling. Mayby you could in 5th as well, I do not remember, but in 6th it was all over the table. Lastly they introduced flyers. And that was a gak show. Mostly because they could only behit in 6's. Especially the imperial guard lascannon ship that was alreayd undercosted and had lascannons, and suddenly it got the flying only beeing hit on 6's for free. Forge world also had a 40 shot BS2+ S5 that could only be hit on 6's that was undercosted. As 6th edition went on you started seeing helldrakes everywhere. The ekdars got the wriaght knight that undercosted for what you did, it was pushed to sell the model and if it had to be priced propperly it would just be a 2 model army almost.
7th edtion I did not play but I saw from the sidelines. And it was a further exstension of the circus. I do believe one of the better armies from this era was the best unit the SM codex had, along with as many characters as you could take. (They would join and leave groups as will.) Now you cast invisabilaty with tigerius and your opponents abilaty to interact with that group was severly limited. 7th edtionw as full of things like that.
There was no allying in 5th and indeed, 4th and 5th ed codexes had basically worked to extinguish any discussion of alliances between factions (Codex Chaos Daemons has like ... maybe two mentions of Chaos Space Marines). So Allies in 6th was a massive u-turn.
I'd also like to throw Ynarri under the bus. Our entire local scene became unplayable for anyone who wasn't some form of Eldar until people got bored of fighting Eldar vs Eldar and went back to their other armies.
Formations for instance? A nice way to encourage “fluffy” armies over min-maxing. However, they were far from equal. Some were frankly ridiculous, including special rules and hundreds of points worth of free equipment.
Formations for instance? A nice way to encourage “fluffy” armies over min-maxing. However, they were far from equal. Some were frankly ridiculous, including special rules and hundreds of points worth of free equipment.
Fluffy?!? do you mean sales driven like a certain helldrake formation that didn't even function propperly?
i member far more formations falling into spam x unit and get boni, that maybee or not work at all.
Niiai wrote: They are somewhat linked. 5th edition was OK, in no way good.
6th edition started out like 5th edition with three major changes. First everybody good psykick disipilines witch where trees you could pick from. This was cool, but some spells where mor eunbalanced in different codexes. Second you could start to ally in things, this was quite baffeling. Mayby you could in 5th as well, I do not remember, but in 6th it was all over the table. Lastly they introduced flyers. And that was a gak show. Mostly because they could only behit in 6's. Especially the imperial guard lascannon ship that was alreayd undercosted and had lascannons, and suddenly it got the flying only beeing hit on 6's for free. Forge world also had a 40 shot BS2+ S5 that could only be hit on 6's that was undercosted. As 6th edition went on you started seeing helldrakes everywhere. The ekdars got the wriaght knight that undercosted for what you did, it was pushed to sell the model and if it had to be priced propperly it would just be a 2 model army almost.
7th edtion I did not play but I saw from the sidelines. And it was a further exstension of the circus. I do believe one of the better armies from this era was the best unit the SM codex had, along with as many characters as you could take. (They would join and leave groups as will.) Now you cast invisabilaty with tigerius and your opponents abilaty to interact with that group was severly limited. 7th edtionw as full of things like that.
There was no allying in 5th and indeed, 4th and 5th ed codexes had basically worked to extinguish any discussion of alliances between factions (Codex Chaos Daemons has like ... maybe two mentions of Chaos Space Marines). So Allies in 6th was a massive u-turn.
I played in 2nd edition briefly and there you could have a small % number of allies I think. I thought I might have gotten those and the last edition of WFB mixed up. But I remember having no allies in 5th, so probably it was not true. :-) Because I like a messy army.
My biggest problems with 6th and 7th (and to some extent 5th) was GW patched stuff that wasn't broken (in order to make ~changes~ so they had a reason to call it a new edition l instead of an errata) and the patching got out of hand.
5th toned down the Vehicle Damage Chart from 4th, made blasts scatter *always* instead of rolling to hit first (used to be only the purview of Barrage and Ordnance), changed wound allocation from a perfectly fine system into a horrendously broken one, turned the Fleet special rule into an action everyone could do, and made it harder to pile into an enemy after combat.
6th added Hull Points (worst singular change ever in an edition imo) to fix the fact that the 5th edition damage chart was so generous that vehicles basically never died. It also added challenges in Close Combat because nothing was more epic than a blood-thirster using EVERY SINGLE ATTACK on one guard sergeant and leaving the rest of the squad fine... it did fix wound allocation though, by going back to the 4th edition system. It also added the Psychic Phase because the old way powers worked was... bad or something???
7th patched 6th, continuing to dick around with vehicle damage, changed challenges, made a worse psychic phase (since 6th broke what didn't need touching, 7th tried something TOTALLY NEW!!
And then the codexes came out and it was a mess.
Chalenges wa sto make it 'more cinematic' as was their creed. And they did the same or where inspiered by the last edition of Fantasy.
It is worth pointing out that in 4th edition many of the codexes lacked a lot. The blood angels where thrusted towards melee. Their assualt marine unit was troop. And if you tok them without a jump pack you got a free rhino.
5th edition gave every one every role. And 6th edition gave every armour a flyer of some sort. Only GSC that came later (7th edition after beeing gone for many editions) does not have a flyer. Admech also got their flyer quite late.
I remember older psychic powers, at least in 5th, to be very boring and often incredibly uninteresting to make use of. Not necessarily bad just ... kinda uninteresting? It just felt like a ranged attack with extra steps in many cases.
Also random charges - a change brought in by 6th and kept by 7th (and 8th, and 9th). Staggeringly stupid.
Not to mention challenges - one of the dumbest concepts in the game. I hate 'cinematic' gak. Characters fighting one on one should just be something opponents agree to - not some forced mechanic which becomes a practical exploit for ensuring unit survival.
Formations for instance? A nice way to encourage “fluffy” armies over min-maxing. However, they were far from equal. Some were frankly ridiculous, including special rules and hundreds of points worth of free equipment.
Fluffy?!? do you mean sales driven like a certain helldrake formation that didn't even function propperly?
i member far more formations falling into spam x unit and get boni, that maybee or not work at all.
I honestly never remember any of the formations being fluffy. They always just felt like a way to try and sell an arbitrary x amount of stuff.
Older psychic powers weren't ALWAYS shooting, but yeah, ones that did damage typically were. Uninteresting was fine though - considerably better than jumping through hoops like 7th's whacky phases.
It's worth noting that psychic powers worked in 4th exactly the way they do now, except they don't have their own phase and Deny the Witch isn't a thing (pay protection comes in other ways)
I guess it depends on what army you had because Traitor Legions had a bunch of formations that were background accurate and pushed quite a lot of older kits like Berzerkers, Possessed and Bikes. Same with KDK.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: My friends joined during 7th, and I joined during 8th, and we are all currently playing 8th. I played 7th twice, using 30k armies. I don't have much experience when it comes to the edition, and no experience when it comes to older ones. Why is 7th considered the worst edition for 40k?
7th is a combination of incredibly complicated and bloated game design carried over from previous editions and some of the most short sighted and worst ideas on how to expand the rule set.
There were over 80 special rules you had to memorize or look up. Some of those special rules just granted other special rules. There were a dozen different unit types with different movement rates, special rules, and addendums to special rules. Some of them were so similar to each other that making them different things was meaningless. Some were so rare that I literally never once saw that type of unit on the table in years of playing. Along with the codexes, it meant that in order to really see the rules you needed like 3 books so that when one rule referenced another rule in another book which then referenced another rule in another book you could keep flipping to them.
A guy made a quick reference sheet for 7th. It was 4 pages front and back, no negative space, in like... 8 font.
Then came formations. And with formations came the Super formations with the decurion.
Formations for instance? A nice way to encourage “fluffy” armies over min-maxing. However, they were far from equal. Some were frankly ridiculous, including special rules and hundreds of points worth of free equipment.
Fluffy?!? do you mean sales driven like a certain helldrake formation that didn't even function propperly?
i member far more formations falling into spam x unit and get boni, that maybee or not work at all.
I honestly never remember any of the formations being fluffy. They always just felt like a way to try and sell an arbitrary x amount of stuff.
That's how they always felt like to me. Buy (X) models, get (X) bonus rules. And the fact that they sold bundles for them made it look even more like that.
Formations for instance? A nice way to encourage “fluffy” armies over min-maxing. However, they were far from equal. Some were frankly ridiculous, including special rules and hundreds of points worth of free equipment.
Fluffy?!? do you mean sales driven like a certain helldrake formation that didn't even function propperly?
i member far more formations falling into spam x unit and get boni, that maybee or not work at all.
I honestly never remember any of the formations being fluffy. They always just felt like a way to try and sell an arbitrary x amount of stuff.
That's how they always felt like to me. Buy (X) models, get (X) bonus rules. And the fact that they sold bundles for them made it look even more like that.
He said encourage fluffy lists. Not that they were fluffy. As with everything GW does they came up with a good idea and fethed it up with their usual incompetence.
Gert wrote: I'd also like to throw Ynarri under the bus. Our entire local scene became unplayable for anyone who wasn't some form of Eldar until people got bored of fighting Eldar vs Eldar and went back to their other armies.
troo story
The outgoing flip flop of Ynnari in 8th and 9th was just baffling mind
7th was the edition I bowed out of and came back a few years later.
It was a messy edition and I simply couldn't keep up with buying all the models for the formations to the point it just burned me out. Had some fun games early on in the edition and it looked to be going in the right direction from 6th but no FAQs and broken codices ruined the game.
30k is based off the ruleset and it is fairly balanced, but that's due to it being largely marines vs marines.
I hated forced challenges.
I hated the Ork codex. I can't express how bad it felt, the combination of that codex and 7th. This nearly drove me out of the hobby.
Orks once again being relegated into an npc role.
No, 6th was and will be the worst edition every, 7th doesn't hold a candle to 6th.
Unlimited OW's
No jink saves so transports were impossible to use
No anti-air so flyers were impossible to counter
Disembark was after movement and still could not charge (so a worst vs of what it is now)
Challenges were worst than 7th
Vehicles were worst than 7th
D-weapons were crazier than 7th
Deathstars transition from 5th books to 6th books were much worst than 7th
Basically everything was worst than 7th from a core rules section.
While people say 7th had 2++ wound allocations, so did 6th and worst at times, both had same wound allocation rules but 6th had worst shooting phase rules so it amplified the allocation crap.
7th had a great start actually, yes some book imbalances but it wasn't until formations and a certain few spells that made it bad. It was also really easy to balance 7th with minor house rules, just say no Invis spells and 1 unit with D-weapon, its hard to change 10+ core rules to balance the game like you had to in 6th.
So why do players talk about 7th more? Maybe bc 6th barely lasted for 2yrs and it was so close to 7th that players most likely forgot, and 7th being so much closer to 8th/9th easier to remember.
Vehicles used to use a different system of defenses in previous editions than everything else, where they had an armor value - say, "12" and you had to roll a D6 and add the strength of your gun to figure out if you penetrated the armor, or glanced (your roll was equal to the armor value). Vehicles in ye olden days didnt even have a fixed hit point value at all, you rolled on a table and anything between 'the vehicle only hits on 1s next turn' to 'the vehicle is instantly ker-sploded' could happen.
In 7th, they added hit points to vehicles, and in their infinite wisdom almost all vehicles in the game had 3. Just 3. And if you did a 'glancing hit' you just took away one of the hit points, nothing else happened.
So the whole system with the armor values and the penetration table and the whatever else became super super secondary, because what youd do is take a strength 6 weapon, and just fish for 6s because most vheicles had a top armor characteristic of 12. 3 6s, and any tank in the game was toasted.
In addition to that, there were a huge number of other rule systems that just..never mattered, never got used, just sat there bloating up the game:
-ramming
-tank shock (vehicles running over infantry)
-sweeping advances and morale in general (morale was really really deadly/threatening, so GW gave almost everything access to fearless)
-grenades
-precision shots/strikes
-challenges
-half the universal special rules
-most of the psychic powers
2) THE PSYCHIC SYSTEM
The way psychic powers worked in 7th, every dex had their own power list like they do now, AND everyone had access to like...7 generic disciplines in the core rulebook.
And these generic disciplines included two...interesting choices.
Interesting choice #1 was the "Malefic" discipline, which let you summon daemons. for free. As any army. Even like....eldar. Or space marines. You didnt have to pay points for the daemon models you successfully summoned.
Interesting Choice #2 was a little spell called "invisibility". What this spell did, was give you complete immunity to blast weaponry, and template weaponry, and make all other weaponry hit you on 6s. So obviously, this was by a bonkers margin the very very best defensive buff in the entire game, for the entire edition, and it was never fixed.
The way this was..."balanced" was that power selection, along with warlord trait selection too was just random. Your psykers would show up to the battlefield and go "Hmmm, what do I know how to do today?" and if you chose to roll on the table with invisiblity, you could get some useless-ass gak, or your psycher could turn your nastiest unit into a basically unkillable behemoth.
And lastly, 3) The formations, or, how I learned to stop caring and love manufactured discontent.
This is the moment that GW realized, hey, we dont actually HAVE to make it so each new codex is strong by releasing strong units.
We can just...put some kind of bs rule in the game that basically says "you win if you bought the new book!"
And theyve never questioned it since - 7E had formations, 8E had "wait til your codex to get your stratagems and faction traits", and 9E has its doctrine bs.
Formations for instance? A nice way to encourage “fluffy” armies over min-maxing. However, they were far from equal. Some were frankly ridiculous, including special rules and hundreds of points worth of free equipment.
Fluffy?!? do you mean sales driven like a certain helldrake formation that didn't even function propperly?
i member far more formations falling into spam x unit and get boni, that maybee or not work at all.
I honestly never remember any of the formations being fluffy. They always just felt like a way to try and sell an arbitrary x amount of stuff.
That's how they always felt like to me. Buy (X) models, get (X) bonus rules. And the fact that they sold bundles for them made it look even more like that.
He said encourage fluffy lists. Not that they were fluffy. As with everything GW does they came up with a good idea and fethed it up with their usual incompetence.
Did they? Because if they sold lots of models for those formations, then I'd say their idea worked exactly how they wanted it to, whether they were "fluffy" or not.
I remember a friend of mine using the Raven Guard super formation, which gave them lots of cool deep striking rules, but were tied to scout squads being already set up on the table. It felt very fluffy and not oppressively powerful. Although he was also using it to run a fluffy list, not trying to break the game, so that helped.
It's the same as so many of GW rules, they can be fine if used in moderation, but GW leaves them open to abuse.
The AoD ruleset used in HH fixed a lot of the issues our group had with 7th Ed.
The Psychic trees were reworked and loads of useless USRs removed. Sure ramming and tank shock are still worthless 90% of the time but the huge lack of Fearless units in HH makes Sweeping Advances dangerous to everyone. The balance between armies and subfactions is pretty good IMO and it's only in rare cases that full subfactions (cough*Tsons*cough) are utterly broken. I think the lack of a competitive lobby helps with this. Nobody is expected to bring garbage units or bad lists but if you're rocking up to every game with Court of the Crimson King and 2 Sicaran Arcus's then you're going to run out of friends real fast.
8th fixed a lot of long running problems with the 3 to 7 ruleset like vehicles and monsters having totally different and wildly more or less powerful rules from each other, it brought back AP in a meaningful sense and did away with other silly cludges like Instant Death.
It's a shame I'm not really a fan of the strategem and CP paradigm for special abilities because when I first started looking at it I was really excited by how it solved a lot of problems. But it seems like six of one, half dozen of the other is the order of the day with GW rules sometimes. Even amazing rulesets like BFG had stinkers like the Necron fleet.
Formations were a great idea, hopelessly, comically implemented. Many of them were actually pretty fluffy. The problem is, the only ones anyone used (and therefore remembers) were broken in so many ways I'm sure I've erased a lot of the trauma from my memory. You had literally 300+ free points in some formations. Others increased the survivability of your army by 50% and others just let you ignore the FOC to take nothing but SH knights. It was dumb.
There were other problems with 7th that were mostly fixed in 8th. Sadly 8th introduced the slew of problems we currently have. Incidentally, that's one of my big problems with GW's approach to game design. We're not really on 9th edition, we're on the second iteration of the 3rd edition of the game because 1st and 2nd were all based on the same system, as were 3-7. That means a lot of the experience from previous systems is thrown out and you're starting from scratch again. For evidence of this check out all the early changes to 8th edition involving Deep Strike and Aircraft.>
Yeah it's true, in a lot of ways there've been 3 or 4 editions of 40K. Rogue Trader was a wacky weird roleplaying skirmish game. 2e was a significant departure from that into a slightly larger skirmish game with some vehicles. 3-7 were a radical departure that simplified the game radically but then gradually added cruft back in as time went on, and fiddled with small sections of the rules. But the core was essentially the same.
Now 8/9 seem to be operating on a similar paradigm. It's a bit exhausting to keep up with for me.
the_scotsman wrote: The way this was..."balanced" was that power selection, along with warlord trait selection too was just random. Your psykers would show up to the battlefield and go "Hmmm, what do I know how to do today?" and if you chose to roll on the table with invisiblity, you could get some useless-ass gak, or your psycher could turn your nastiest unit into a basically unkillable behemoth.
Pointless pedantry - it was arguably even worse than that, because Telepathy's Primaris Power (which you could always pick after rolling if you didn't like the result) was Psychic Shriek. Roll 3D6, do an unsaveable wound for every point over leadership. Basically mortals before mortals. Sure most things are LD8-10, so you do nothing a bunch of the time, but you spike that 3d6 a bit high (i.e. 15+), oh look that's a whole squad of say terminators dead (not that people ran terminators competitively, but still.) I think you had a 1 in 6 chance to scream a Wraithknight to death.
When people talk about the rules for an edition, they're really talking about a list of several different things:
1) Core rules (how models move/shoot/fight)
2 Unit rules (unit types, universal rules, etc.)
3) Missions (win conditions, deployment, length)
4) Army construction (how to build an army)
5) Army Rules (rules for each given faction)
6) Terrain rules (how models interact with scenery)
9th edition actually rates pretty well in most of these. the core rules are tight, simple, and solid. There aren't a ton of unit rules, and those that exist make sense. Oddly, unit rules in 9th are basically all keyword based, and come up in the relevant core rules. So, there is no section of the rulebook that tells you what the rules for say, infantry are. But the terrain rules mention infantry a lot, and the shooting rules note that infantry take a -1 to shoot heavy weapons after moving. 8th edition has missions that emphasis board control and are fine. Armies are built using preset detachments which give flexibility but are the same for all armies (with a handful of exceptions). Armies also cannot spam units, and troops are encouraged by the cheaper detachments and by ObSec. Army rules are bonkers, however, with so many rules for any given army that there is crazy bloat. The terrain rules are clear, technical, and while fiddly they seem pretty solid.
Okay, so what about 7th?
- Core rules were a hot mess, with complications quirks in things like the psychic phase, remvoing casualties, challenges, and of course, the last gasp of the all or nothing AP system (RIP).
- Unit rules... as noted, there were dozen and dozens of USRs, at least one of which was literally just two other USRs stapled together. Vehicles played totally differently from other models. Jump pack infantry was different from Jet Pack infantry. Fliers had their own whole section of the rules, but were also either vehicles or monsters. It was a lot.
- Missions I only played a few games, and can't comment on the missions. I forget if it still had kill points, which was another low point that stuck around way too long.
- Army construction - while not too dissimilar from today, in addition to a handful of core detachments there were dozens of army specific detachments, which often gave bonuses. Some of these nested, with a super detachment being made up of two or more smaller detachments. In theory, this could have been awesome. In practice, a few S tier formations dominated.
- Army Rules Honestly the basic army codexes were a bright spot for 7th edition. Because so many unit rules were baked into the main rulebook, the codexes could focus on fewer rules. OTOH, almost all armies had rules scattered among mulitple publications, leading to the infamous stack of hardcover books for even a single game.
-Terrain - I honestly can't remember interacting with terrain
IMO, the poster who noted that this was when GW stopped caring hit the nail on the head. Most of 7th edition was built on simply having MORE rules rather than better rules, and nothing was pruned or edited. Decent ideas were doomed by lazy execution, and bad ideas were never corrected. It was the longest stretch of time I spent not playing 40k, and I don't regret it at all.
They kind of blend together, so people remember 7e being the same kind of trainwreck as 6th but with formations on top.
Anecdotal, but I remember that in 7th edition I could field a mechanised sisters army for 1500pts, or the exact same models as marines for 1000pts - and aside from the usual S4/T4/ATSKNF/etc bonuses the marines would also have army wide obsec and game long rerolls. That marine army would be considered unoptimised and uncompetitive.
7th edition was a time when a 55pt skitarri unit could formation-up for 135pts of free gear and remove gets hot from their weapons and abilities like +3 cover saves or rerolls to hit... and still not be considered the top faction. Whatever reigning-in GW did of rules between 6th and 7th they undid twice over with subsequent releases.
To add to da Boss: 9th with the morale system from 7th would actually be pretty awesome, as for the first time GW seems to write Codizes that don't ignore morale 90% if the time, but on the other hand the morale rules themselves are also pretty worthless nowadays
Formations for instance? A nice way to encourage “fluffy” armies over min-maxing. However, they were far from equal. Some were frankly ridiculous, including special rules and hundreds of points worth of free equipment.
Fluffy?!? do you mean sales driven like a certain helldrake formation that didn't even function propperly?
i member far more formations falling into spam x unit and get boni, that maybee or not work at all.
I honestly never remember any of the formations being fluffy. They always just felt like a way to try and sell an arbitrary x amount of stuff.
That's how they always felt like to me. Buy (X) models, get (X) bonus rules. And the fact that they sold bundles for them made it look even more like that.
He said encourage fluffy lists. Not that they were fluffy. As with everything GW does they came up with a good idea and fethed it up with their usual incompetence.
Did they? Because if they sold lots of models for those formations, then I'd say their idea worked exactly how they wanted it to, whether they were "fluffy" or not.
Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.
Honestly 7th was bad but not as bad as everybody makes it out to be. A huge part of the problem was in the codex creep and poor rules interactions (e.g. rerolling 2+ invulns or whatever) and ridiculous detachment bonuses that gave you hundreds of points of free things (e.g. Gladius). Honestly I really liked formations and detachments because they often rewarded you for taking fluffy combinations and provided a sort of shopping list when you wanted to expand your force. As usual, the problem was in the balancing or lack thereof.
Horus Heresy still uses 7th and it works fairly well there where they don't have nearly as much of that crap.
Don't get me wrong it was still pretty bad but I don't think it was unsalvageable.
Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.
Gonna press X to doubt that one edition of 40k was so bad that it caused store closures, staff reductions, and the removal of the CEO.
7th was released in May 2014 and 8th in June 2017. In 3 years you're saying that 40k singlehandedly caused all of this?
Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.
Gonna press X to doubt that one edition of 40k was so bad that it caused store closures, staff reductions, and the removal of the CEO.
7th was released in May 2014 and 8th in June 2017. In 3 years you're saying that 40k singlehandedly caused all of this?
I would assume 7th was the final straw for a lot of people. As has been said 6th wasn't the best and when 7th came around and it was the same as usual you think its a coincidence that there was a mass exodus to other game systems? It just so happens that WmH/X-Wing peaked to the point of having a shot at the crown during 7th and crashed when 8th launched? As well as the aforementioned staff cuts and store closures.
Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.
Gonna press X to doubt that one edition of 40k was so bad that it caused store closures, staff reductions, and the removal of the CEO.
7th was released in May 2014 and 8th in June 2017. In 3 years you're saying that 40k singlehandedly caused all of this?
The picture is a bit more complex. Warhammer Fantasy was just about dead as well. I recall everyone posting that marketing magazine that listed the top selling games and Fantasy never made the list for quite a few years.
But given that 40K is THE money maker any falter there when the other flagship product is doing poorly will definitely set things in motion.
Grimtuff wrote: 40k community- "7th is the worst edition!"
9th- "Hold my beer!"
Not even close, until 9th armies start getting 25% of their army for free, units can be summoned in for free (or was that 6th? Kinda blurred into one), stacked bombs with a 2++ rerolling 1s, invisibility. That alone was worth burning it down.
Well, yes. The cliche of when someone says "hold my beer", it means they are about to do something stupid. 9th is well on that way if you ask me.
Wayniac wrote: Horus Heresy still uses 7th and it works fairly well there where they don't have nearly as much of that crap.
Don't get me wrong it was still pretty bad but I don't think it was unsalvageable.
I never played 7th but I do play HH, and it stands out to me that just about all the things that people really vocally complain about with 7th outright don't exist in HH. No Fearless armies (or even ATSKNF), no Invisibility, no re-rolling 2++, and no formations.
The thing that seems to have been carried forward though, and my main gripe with the system, is that its implementation of USRs reminds me of the code obfuscation contests we'd do in college where the objective was to make your technically functional content as obtuse and unreadable as possible. Maybe I just need a cheat-sheet of all the USRs, long as that might be.
I really quite enjoyed the army-building 7th had in it's super formations made of formations, and I thought it was a neat way to allow a diversity of unit types, and have folks take less than optimal units. Loved my Slaughtercult in my Khorne Bloodbound, and the rules were very thematic.
The main issue, was not everyone had these sorts of detachments, and some were a lot better than others.
I wish they made the rules so that none of the formations could have been taken outside of the 'Decurion' style detachment. That would have limited folks just cherry-picking the best rules with no downside, but alas. Also, Admec and Space Marines getting free models/upgrades was pretty silly.
Sim-Life wrote: I would assume 7th was the final straw for a lot of people. As has been said 6th wasn't the best and when 7th came around and it was the same as usual you think its a coincidence that there was a mass exodus to other game systems? It just so happens that WmH/X-Wing peaked to the point of having a shot at the crown during 7th and crashed when 8th launched? As well as the aforementioned staff cuts and store closures.
Cool so 7th Edition didn't cause them, years of mismanaged products and poor community engagement did.
As a side note, the one-man stores I have been to have always made sense to be one-man. London had like 5 when I visited just before 7th dropped and while the Covent Garden store was a nice little Hobbit Hole, you could tell I was the first person to come in for a while. In big cities like Edinburgh, Nottingham, or Birmingham it makes sense to have more than one employee. But Stirling or store 4/5 in London? Not so much.
7th was without a doubt a final nail but not the main cause of GW's dip in 2015-17.
Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.
Gonna press X to doubt that one edition of 40k was so bad that it caused store closures, staff reductions, and the removal of the CEO.
7th was released in May 2014 and 8th in June 2017. In 3 years you're saying that 40k singlehandedly caused all of this?
Like others have said, there's more to it than JUST 40k sales on the GW side, but yeah, the edition was actually that bad. A lot of the non-GW gaming stores in my area were able to stay afloat based solely on 40k sales up to that point. Even in "down times" when the game was less popular. But sales dipped so bad in 7th that no less than 5 stores closed due to lagging 40k sales. It was also (arguably) the worst edition for needing multiple sources to play your army. White Dwarf was basically a nice looking pamphlet that came out literally weekly and often had rules. If you weren't keeping up on your weekly WD, you were missing out. It also made it really hard for tournament organizers. A lot of groups stopped doing 40k tournaments during 7th because of how much of a PITA it was. This is also why Reece and Co are such a big part of the picture now. IMO they (again, arguably) saved the competitive 40k scene in the states because it was dead at that point due to 7th.
Fantasy was also DOA, and you had, for the first time ever (I think - certainly the first time in a LONG time) 40k get passed by X-Wing as the "most popular miniatures game" in terms of sales. So the cash cow is now number 2, the backup game isn't on the radar and sales of your product have sunk so bad it's actually taking people who were on the edge and putting them out of business. Yeah, 7th was that bad.
40k was non-existent in my area for a while form the middle of 7th to a little after the launch of 8th and that's after it had been wildly easy for years to find a game. It just ... died.
Grimtuff wrote: 40k community- "7th is the worst edition!"
9th- "Hold my beer!"
Not even close, until 9th armies start getting 25% of their army for free, units can be summoned in for free (or was that 6th? Kinda blurred into one), stacked bombs with a 2++ rerolling 1s, invisibility. That alone was worth burning it down.
Well, yes. The cliche of when someone says "hold my beer", it means they are about to do something stupid. 9th is well on that way if you ask me.
Oh I know, I just was pointing out the leaps and bounds 9th will need to take to get anywhere near.
Sim-Life wrote: I would assume 7th was the final straw for a lot of people. As has been said 6th wasn't the best and when 7th came around and it was the same as usual you think its a coincidence that there was a mass exodus to other game systems? It just so happens that WmH/X-Wing peaked to the point of having a shot at the crown during 7th and crashed when 8th launched? As well as the aforementioned staff cuts and store closures.
Cool so 7th Edition didn't cause them, years of mismanaged products and poor community engagement did.
As a side note, the one-man stores I have been to have always made sense to be one-man. London had like 5 when I visited just before 7th dropped and while the Covent Garden store was a nice little Hobbit Hole, you could tell I was the first person to come in for a while. In big cities like Edinburgh, Nottingham, or Birmingham it makes sense to have more than one employee. But Stirling or store 4/5 in London? Not so much.
7th was without a doubt a final nail but not the main cause of GW's dip in 2015-17.
No, just 7th being so bad was enough to make people who had previously been able to overlook the aforementioned mismanagement to actually decide to leave. If the one product line you had keeping you afloat sinks then something has gone badly wrong. Thus, 7th was the cause.
Trying to balance out super powerful must-take models with good-to-mediocre models by making the second category free was a very peculiar design choice that soured a lot of folks on that edition.
Plus all the broken units and combinations like invisibility death stars.
I'll be honest from the start, I am incredibly biased because I play Orkz and Orkz only, and GW did orkz dirty as all hell in 7th.
7th edition launched with Orkz getting the 1st codex...which is kind of nice since we hadn't had a codex update since 4th! coming hot on the heels of the end of 6th it was kind of touted as the bellwether for 7th edition and it came in as ...well, kind of mediocre. Some things got fixed, some things got minor buffs, a lot of stuff got toned down. So 7th started with a lot of hope that the game would finally tone down the arms race and maybe make the game a bit more enjoyable. Only bad part was that the 7th edition ork codex was so bad that 5th edition and 6th edition codex's were routinely trouncing it with relative ease. But we all thought "hey it is what it is, when they get their next codex it will turn it down as well"
That level of hope lasted about 5-6 months until codex NECRONS came out and the birth of DECURION! See, ork formations were...kind of crap. Our buffs were minor in the extreme, take these 12 units and if you do, then everyone who is in base to base gets 1 free hammer of wrath attack on the charge....if you roll a 10+ yeah it was that bad.
Decurion on the other side...well its core limitations were almost as bad but significantly better in that they weren't tax units but the big upside....well, Orkz get HoW attacks on a 10+ on the charge, Necrons got +1 to reanimation rolls, which effectively gave their entire army a 4+ Reanimation protocol which was the best you could get it to.
Ok, well....umm..just a one off, it isn't that bad, GW can just nerf them in 2-4 years whenever they get around to it. And then Eldar, Space Marines and Tau all got their codexs and Ork players realized...Necrons weren't the outlier....we were. Eldar were the pinnacle of ridiculous in 7th. You had to actively try to take a bad list in 7th as Eldar. Scatbikes and Wraithknights were the flavor of the edition but D-scythe, D-cannon wraithguard were good, as were warp spiders and basically everything else. D-weapons everywhere. Marines on the other hand....they got a formation which effectively gave them 500+ points of Free razorbacks, Tau? Triptide wing. 3-9 Riptides, they all get +1BS shooting at targets already targeted they got reroll for their nova charge and the best part? They could shoot twice if they stood still...or 4 times basically if you activated ripple fire. I watched more than 1 game of Tau triptide wing vs Marine Demi-company that came down to whether or not the Tau player could table the Marine player in time to win the game. .....think about what I just said...Tau players would win by Tabling a Marine list that had 1/3rd more points than they did. Put that in 9th edition perspective, that would be a Tau list at 2000pts TABLING a Marine list at 2,700pt Marine list, optimized mind you.
I would walk into game stores for a tournament in 7th and my opponents would literally be smiling with glee that they got the "easy win" against an Ork army, I am not exaggerating here at all. I literally had players apologizing to me for how 1 sided the game was going to be. I was able to pull out a few stunners but they were few and far between, I walked into every single game in 7th knowing that my opponent was basically starting the game with 200-500pts more than me and better rules to boot.
7th was so incredibly broken that I witnessed several gaming communities basically shut down during this dark time. People just got sick and tired of seeing broken formations, or the codex imbalance being so blatantly obvious that the army they put hundreds if not thousands of dollars into was for all intents and purposes, useless.
7th edition sucked HARD. You can argue 6th was just as bad or worse, its irrelevant. 6th was bad and lasted a bit less than 2 years, 7th was terrible and lasted almost exactly 3 years. if you factor in how bad the Ork codex sucked, that meant Orkz had to go 2008 until November of 2018 before we had a codex worth playing. Most of us would have been happy to keep playing the 4th edition codex in 7th, that is how bad it was.
Wayniac wrote: Horus Heresy still uses 7th and it works fairly well there where they don't have nearly as much of that crap.
Don't get me wrong it was still pretty bad but I don't think it was unsalvageable.
I never played 7th but I do play HH, and it stands out to me that just about all the things that people really vocally complain about with 7th outright don't exist in HH. No Fearless armies (or even ATSKNF), no Invisibility, no re-rolling 2++, and no formations.
The thing that seems to have been carried forward though, and my main gripe with the system, is that its implementation of USRs reminds me of the code obfuscation contests we'd do in college where the objective was to make your technically functional content as obtuse and unreadable as possible. Maybe I just need a cheat-sheet of all the USRs, long as that might be.
I must say I always get the feeling that HH works pretty fine despite bad core rules, not because of them. Yes, unlike 40K morale is actually used. Also psykers are pretty rare so the bad psychic rules don't show as much. However, HH has a lot of superheavy tanks that only work because superheavies outright ignore most vehicle rules.
Then you get dozer blades for everyone to ignore terrain. You get Upgrades to ignore the Melter rule and to ignore Lascannons iirc. So in short the game had to give every vehicle Upgrades to ignore vehicle rules which makes it quite obvious that their rules are rubbish. The faction whose roster is made up of walkers hardly features any actual walkers (Mechanicum) because the walker rules are terrible, they're all monsters instead.
Any CC unit needs a list of at least 5 USRs to be playable because CC is extremely punished in 6th/7th rules system.
Any weapon that's not Ap3 or better is practically useless because most armies have a 3+ so Ap 4 to 6 doesn't matter with the old AP system.
And quad-mortars aren't just bad because how badly pointed they are(were?) but also because the blast system breaks down with these kinds of units and turns the game into a slog.
Yes, FW shows what could have been possible even with 7th base rules, but HH still suffers from its terrible basic rules and would deserve a proper foundation.
I don't understand all the hate for 9th. Its like you guys all forgot the problems we had in 8th. Did you guys forget about the unkillable Iron Hands list? about the Eldar flying shenanigans? 8th wasn't bad, neither is 9th, 7th was just a fethstorm of bad.
Sure we have some broken lists/armies right now, but nowhere near the peak levels of stupid we were seeing.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: My friends joined during 7th, and I joined during 8th, and we are all currently playing 8th. I played 7th twice, using 30k armies. I don't have much experience when it comes to the edition, and no experience when it comes to older ones. Why is 7th considered the worst edition for 40k?
In 9th, a good 2000pt list vs a bad 2000pt list results in a fairly onesided tabling around turn two or three with only a handful of models on the good list dead.
In 7th, a good list 1850pt list vs a bad 5000pt list could easily result in a completely onesided tabling top of turn two with ZERO models dead on the 1850 side.
Usually one problem at a time in 8th and IH for example was swiftly nerfed as soon as a new problem showed up and all marines got the doctrine nerf.
So far in 9th we had a few ok and so releases until Drukhari came and played 9,5 and after that the new books continue with 9,5 while the rest play 8th to 9th. Drukhari and And mech got a slap on the wrist and nothing really changed for most armies the last 6 months. Besides getting crushed by Drukhari and AM now you also get crushed by Dreadknights and buggies/planes. Instead of dropping FAQs or erratas or balance patches GW continue with physical books and stupid day 0 dlc supplements. Those supplements is probably a big reason for why they don't do quick pdf fixes. They don't want to fix the new menace before they release the book that uses it.
SemperMortis wrote: I don't understand all the hate for 9th. Its like you guys all forgot the problems we had in 8th. Did you guys forget about the unkillable Iron Hands list? about the Eldar flying shenanigans? 8th wasn't bad, neither is 9th, 7th was just a fethstorm of bad.
Sure we have some broken lists/armies right now, but nowhere near the peak levels of stupid we were seeing.
Previous editions being bad doesn't excuse 9th from also being bad.
Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.
Gonna press X to doubt that one edition of 40k was so bad that it caused store closures, staff reductions, and the removal of the CEO.
7th was released in May 2014 and 8th in June 2017. In 3 years you're saying that 40k singlehandedly caused all of this?
LunarSol wrote: 8th was a great example of what happens when GW keeps their hand on the wheel.
9th is showing us what happens when they let go.
Man how easily people forget how screwy 8th was.
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Klickor wrote: Usually one problem at a time in 8th and IH for example was swiftly nerfed as soon as a new problem showed up and all marines got the doctrine nerf.
So far in 9th we had a few ok and so releases until Drukhari came and played 9,5 and after that the new books continue with 9,5 while the rest play 8th to 9th. Drukhari and And mech got a slap on the wrist and nothing really changed for most armies the last 6 months. Besides getting crushed by Drukhari and AM now you also get crushed by Dreadknights and buggies/planes. Instead of dropping FAQs or erratas or balance patches GW continue with physical books and stupid day 0 dlc supplements. Those supplements is probably a big reason for why they don't do quick pdf fixes. They don't want to fix the new menace before they release the book that uses it.
IH were such a tiny part of 8th being at the ass end of it.
DE is totally beatable with a current book ( and some old ones ) even if they're too strong. Admech is busted for a portion of their book and has too many tools alongside planes and artillery. Orks are busted with a sub-faction using planes and artillery.
People pretend that the current admech and ork were the ones that were being used since the books came out - those lists are like a month or two old...
LunarSol wrote: 8th was a great example of what happens when GW keeps their hand on the wheel.
9th is showing us what happens when they let go.
Man how easily people forget how screwy 8th was.
That's why I say hand on the wheel. The car was drifting all over the place, but at the very least it felt like someone was trying to correct back to center.
Perhaps the better analogy for 9th is that the hand is on the wheel but wildly swerving toward every exit ramp it sees?
LunarSol wrote: 8th was a great example of what happens when GW keeps their hand on the wheel.
9th is showing us what happens when they let go.
Man how easily people forget how screwy 8th was.
That's why I say hand on the wheel. The car was drifting all over the place, but at the very least it felt like someone was trying to correct back to center.
Perhaps the better analogy for 9th is that the hand is on the wheel but wildly swerving toward every exit ramp it sees?
You have that impression, because there was a schedule for FAQs with more to fix that hit regularly ( except when they missed it one time and people freaked the f out ). They've been doing the same thing except also taking the extra step of semi-nerfing DE and Admech on a much faster schedule. We got a Chapter Approved five months ago.
The Ork books has been out officially for two months and Freebootas with buggies and jets is like a month old.
We're certainly due some sort of action from GW before too long.
LunarSol wrote: 8th was a great example of what happens when GW keeps their hand on the wheel.
9th is showing us what happens when they let go.
Man how easily people forget how screwy 8th was.
That's why I say hand on the wheel. The car was drifting all over the place, but at the very least it felt like someone was trying to correct back to center.
Perhaps the better analogy for 9th is that the hand is on the wheel but wildly swerving toward every exit ramp it sees?
You have that impression, because there was a schedule for FAQs with more to fix that hit regularly ( except when they missed it one time and people freaked the f out ). They've been doing the same thing except also taking the extra step of semi-nerfing DE and Admech on a much faster schedule. We got a Chapter Approved five months ago.
The Ork books has been out officially for two months and Freebootas with buggies and jets is like a month old.
We're certainly due some sort of action from GW before too long.
Its not just that tho, new GK's are also surprisingly very strong (for sure S tier, but not Ork level of S tier, DE level). But we also have some armies that are borderline not playable, GSC, Tau, heck even new BA's are pretty bad (WS and EP's just does what they do but better), and a few more that are on extreme hard mode (CWE without allies for example, Ynnari players, IG, Knights/Chaos Knights with no ally, IF) in t8h IDK any army that was so unplayable compare to 9th.
NOTE: in 8th there were 2 groups of Players ITC and non ITC, each had different armies that were good and bad, IH playing in Maelstrom was actually a middle tier army. And No not everyone played ITC, but numbers and tier lists for armies were based off of ITC, it was a daily controversy.
Yea, 8th was very fragmented. It made reconciling experiences even harder.
GKs have a great secondary and some overly efficient dreadknights. I'd dare say the rest is mostly fine.
T'au and GSC are the ones to watch with their books due soon. Tyranids took a 5-0 in a tournament that allowed the book this past weekend, but otherwise not much data to look into there yet.
At some point you have to factor in that the weaker armies aren't going to be played by the more competitive types ( like Siegler not championing T'au like he used to ) and those armies just don't get used to their full potential. There's a single guy who does great with GSC ( dodging bad matchups occasionally, I'm sure ), but other players can't replicate, because it requires specific units they may not have on hand. Same thing with FW heavy lists like with the Magaera.
8th had more broken lists trought is duration, they just changed.
We started with conscript spam and ended up with inmortal iron hand leviathans.
But we wen't trought guilliman flyer spam, azrael 4++ parking lot, turn-1 bloodletter bombs and double shooting obliterators, shadowswords making all vehicles useless and then imperial knights making shadowswords useless, infinite manticore barrages, loyal 32, smash captains, inmortal castellans, custodes bikers, inmortal celestine, etc, etc...
But being fair, the community was very much active and GW was very much active with nerfs and balance changes.
And 8th was probably the edition I have played most and I enjoyed it.
The truth is, if I haven't been able to enjoy 9th as much as 8th is because the pandemic.
I did go from playing 1-2 tournaments a month in my store with my friends trought all of 8th to 1 tournament each 5-6 months in 9th and my store being closed because they didn't survived the pandemic.
It sucks, and sucked the enjoyement of the game from me.
1: The initial release and indexes felt like a new and refreshing shakeup of the game, and while it had some imbalances, in general the game felt like a much welcome reprieve from 7th and it had a lot of potential.
2. Just before the release of the SM codex 2.0, the game had been adjusted and readjusted into a pretty good state, balance wise.
Unfortunately in both instances GW didn't let the game "breathe" for hardly any amount of time before blasting it apart with relentless releases.
The thing is during 8th I still held some hope. 9th, despite having some strong points, has been really dissapointing in comparisson. GW has effectively eroded my faith in their handling of things.
7th was objectively worse than 9th, no doubt. But I agree with the people who say that the way 9th has shook out since the DE codex is actually more disappointing than 7th was. I feel like 9th shows that GW didn't actually learn any lessons at all from what went wrong last time.
Galas wrote: I would say 8th post SM codex 2.0 but before all supplements was the most balanced state 40k has been in decades.
No - it was definitely Mar 2020 to Dec 2020.
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yukishiro1 wrote: 7th was objectively worse than 9th, no doubt. But I agree with the people who say that the way 9th has shook out since the DE codex is actually more disappointing than 7th was. I feel like 9th shows that GW didn't actually learn any lessons at all from what went wrong last time.
So, Sisters, GK, TS, and BT are as bad as Admech and a subset of Orks? Maybe some might be tempted to put Dreadknights on the same short list as Ork buggies and flyers, but I find that to be a far cry from 7th.
I think people are more disappointed, because they can sense that GW finally knows a bit better and it still keeps slipping away rather than them having not learned anything at all.
A side note, not about others but for me 7th was and will be the greatest bc I played Corsairs (No formations actually) and GW will never have had another more fun (actually very balanced IF no formations) army rules list every again, I will never have games more fun than I had in 7th.
yukishiro1 wrote: 7th was objectively worse than 9th, no doubt. But I agree with the people who say that the way 9th has shook out since the DE codex is actually more disappointing than 7th was. I feel like 9th shows that GW didn't actually learn any lessons at all from what went wrong last time.
So, Sisters, GK, TS, and BT are as bad as Admech and a subset of Orks? Maybe some might be tempted to put Dreadknights on the same short list as Ork buggies and flyers, but I find that to be a far cry from 7th.
I think people are more disappointed, because they can sense that GW finally knows a bit better and it still keeps slipping away rather than them having not learned anything at all.
That's just a balance thing, and GW has always been terrible at balance and always will be terrible at balance; before the last six months I would have said they are getting better at balance, now I think you can't even say that. But that isn't actually what I was getting at.
I realize maybe it sounded like I was talking only about balance because I mentioned the DE Codex as being the turning point, but my "they haven't learned anything" was less about narrow balance in the sense of creating unbalanced monsters and more about bloat and the general structure of the way editions progress.
Fundamentally 7th wasn't bad just because the balance was terrible, 7th was bad because the system got so corpulent and bloated that it started collapsing in on itself. The bad balance was more of a symptom than a root cause. And I think from the way 9th has gone we have seen that same thing happen - 9th isn't failing just because Ad Mech+, it's failing because it's becoming the same sort of bloated mess that 7th was. It just fundamentally isn't fun to play any more, especially if you have an old book trying to compete with the new bloat.
The lesson GW ought to have learned from 8th was that the best thing they ever did was resetting things with the indexes. In 9th they took precisely the opposite approach, and aggressively didn't reset anything, to the point where you have truly absurd things like 1W CSM a year and a half after loyalists went to 2W. And yet at the very same time, they aggressively bloated out everything with more and more rules interactions, which creates monsters like ad mech because that's what happens when you do that.
I think that we can use the recent GK as a meter to show how balance has changed.
We all can agree that GK are extremely good, probably top tier, due to the dreadknight datasheet being criminally undercosted. If it wasn't for that, it would be a decent dex but nothing special.
Let's assume that we ultra nerf the Dreadknights, by increasing the cost by 40 points (!). This puts the cost of the typical DK setup at over 200 points. Still usable probably, but definitely no longer OP.
If we operate under this assumption, it means that the current difference between an average dex and one perceived as top tier, is around 160-200 points (current GK lists play 4 or 5 DK).
In other terms, the difference between average tier and top tier is around 8-10% efficiency in points.
In 7th, against top tier lists you could very well take 4k point lists and still lose if you didn't have one of the top dexes.
We use the same terms "OP" "Unbalanced" "Crap dex" that we used in 7th, but the meaning of those terms has changed quite a lot in these years.
Amishprn86 wrote: A side note, not about others but for me 7th was and will be the greatest bc I played Corsairs (No formations actually) and GW will never have had another more fun (actually very balanced IF no formations) army rules list every again, I will never have games more fun than I had in 7th.
The warp maze psychic power (put target unit into Ongoing Reserves) was simultaneously the funniest and most wildly unbalanced thing that has ever existed.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: My friends joined during 7th, and I joined during 8th, and we are all currently playing 8th. I played 7th twice, using 30k armies. I don't have much experience when it comes to the edition, and no experience when it comes to older ones. Why is 7th considered the worst edition for 40k?
Actually 6th edition is the worst edition, it was just not around long enough for people to remember. it lasted all of 14 months before GW killed it(even they realized how bad it was). 7th stuck around for 3 years and started out with improvements to 6th, then about half way through the formation spam started.
Our group rates 9th just behind 6th in terms of worst edition. they replaced the problems with 7th edition formation spam with stratagem spam, codex bloat, and stupid levels of lethality among many of it's other problems.
That's just a balance thing, and GW has always been terrible at balance and always will be terrible at balance; before the last six months I would have said they are getting better at balance, now I think you can't even say that. But that isn't actually what I was getting at.
That is mostly because the game was never intended to be balanced in the way that they are trying to make it in 9th ed. it was designed for hanging out with friends rolling dice and having a good time playing in the lore of the 40K universe. i dare say it was intended to be un-balanced because it was not meant for tournament play at it's core. The draw was playing the game, not pure competition. remember the game started out as space crusade the scifi version of hero quest.
Every army had built in handicaps and strengths that you could exploit but they were not otherwise "equal" like something akin to chess.
yukishiro1 wrote: 7th was objectively worse than 9th, no doubt. But I agree with the people who say that the way 9th has shook out since the DE codex is actually more disappointing than 7th was. I feel like 9th shows that GW didn't actually learn any lessons at all from what went wrong last time.
So, Sisters, GK, TS, and BT are as bad as Admech and a subset of Orks? Maybe some might be tempted to put Dreadknights on the same short list as Ork buggies and flyers, but I find that to be a far cry from 7th.
I think people are more disappointed, because they can sense that GW finally knows a bit better and it still keeps slipping away rather than them having not learned anything at all.
I can definitely agree on your second point. Gw were quick to nerf the most egregious stuff in the DE and Admech codexes, but they still have a ways to go, and they've been dragging their feet on a lot of other things. Hell, it took them almost a year to fix the basic rules for Dreadclaws. And they're still in the wrong FOC slot.
That is mostly because the game was never intended to be balanced in the way that they are trying to make it in 9th ed. it was designed for hanging out with friends rolling dice and having a good time playing in the lore of the 40K universe. i dare say it was intended to be un-balanced because it was not meant for tournament play at it's core. The draw was playing the game, not pure competition. remember the game started out as space crusade the scifi version of hero quest
"This" game started from a WW2 ruleset, the game that started from Space Crusade was stopped with 2nd Edi
and 7th was meant as a tournament game, as no casual/narritive player was chasing the meta and bought the latest gak that changed every 2 months to compete at events
those people played their Orcs, just bought 1 Wraithknight instead of 3 and did not cared that playing the same army list twice within a month was not an option if you wanted to be top 3
and don't follow the GW advertising/narrative that balance is for events
tournaments don't care about Errata/FAQ/Balance, because of those are needed they are done by the TO anyway. 7th had no rules support from GW, but every tournament had a FAQ/Errata to solve rules problems in advance for the event
Tournaments don't care if there are just 3 Factions viable to win the event, those that want to be top will play one of those 3 factions and don't care about the rest
Balance is important for casual and narrative play, if you make a pure casual game that is there to play Crusade like campaigns, balance between units within a Codex and between factions is much more important so that everyone can buy/play what they like and have fun (same as all starter boxes must have equal points and be the same strength for such a system)
for a tournament, no problem if there is no balance, the worst that happens is that everyone plays the same faction with the same army list and no one cares (except the casual player who wants to bring his army to an event and have fun but than again, if the balance is needed for the casual player and not the tournament)
Balance is important for casual and narrative play, if you make a pure casual game that is there to play Crusade like campaigns, balance between units within a Codex and between factions is much more important so that everyone can buy/play what they like and have fun (same as all starter boxes must have equal points and be the same strength for such a system)
Except the fact that there was a point in time that GW pointedly said that codex points costs were based on the value of a unit not based on how it compared to another faction, but how important it was within it's own faction.
Lore is the most important basis for casual or narrative play, not how one factions balances against another faction in points etc... the reason why the old hammer players always look back to the 3rd/4th edition army lists/faction special rules/codexes (not the core game rules) as one of the high points of the game because the factions behaved as they would within the 40K universe. the 3.5 chaos codex is still so loved because of this very reason.
Amishprn86 wrote: A side note, not about others but for me 7th was and will be the greatest bc I played Corsairs (No formations actually) and GW will never have had another more fun (actually very balanced IF no formations) army rules list every again, I will never have games more fun than I had in 7th.
Aye , i agree with that , for r&h or corsairs there never was a better time.
Balance is important for casual and narrative play, if you make a pure casual game that is there to play Crusade like campaigns, balance between units within a Codex and between factions is much more important so that everyone can buy/play what they like and have fun (same as all starter boxes must have equal points and be the same strength for such a system)
Except the fact that there was a point in time that GW pointedly said that codex points costs were based on the value of a unit not based on how it compared to another faction, but how important it was within it's own faction.
Lore is the most important basis for casual or narrative play, not how one factions balances against another faction in points etc... the reason why the old hammer players always look back to the 3rd/4th edition army lists/faction special rules/codexes (not the core game rules) as one of the high points of the game because the factions behaved as they would within the 40K universe. the 3.5 chaos codex is still so loved because of this very reason.
And still one of the easiest dexes to play "Find that fething guy".
However most retro Hammer Communities know how to tame it Like everything else.
LunarSol wrote: 8th was a great example of what happens when GW keeps their hand on the wheel.
9th is showing us what happens when they let go.
7th was when they put their hands on their foot to keep the gas pedal pinned to the floor.
8th was a complete train wreck compared to 9th, it had all the problems that 9th have but amplified by a huge margin plus a whole set of problems (mostly tied to CPs availability mechanics and unbalance between codex vs index) that 9th doesn't have anymore.
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Galas wrote: I would say 8th post SM codex 2.0 but before all supplements was the most balanced state 40k has been in decades.
Maybe pre SM codex 2.0.
It's much more balanced now though, both in competitive and casual metas.
The game has only ever had brief periods of being well balanced, same is true of WFB. There's always some underpowered or overpowered book or some weird rule that breaks things, ever since I started playing.
I think the reason for it is a mix of genuine incompetence in the rules writers (there are certain writers who reliably produce drek in either direction) and GW having a culture in the design studio of kind of feeling that looking for balance being something a bit perverse, like a gentleman shouldn't need balance because they would just inherently understand that the aim is to have a good game.
I have to say the older I get, the more I sort of see where they are coming from and acknowledge that to have a good time I've got to take ownership myself, but the flipside of that is I'm not interested in paying GW money for badly written rules I'll have to balance myself by being careful in unit selection and negotiating with opponents beforehand. Charging for expensive hardback books with a useful shelf life of ~2 years with mostly recycled background where you know the rules are not going to be particularly well thought out...well, I dunno. It rubs me the wrong way and makes me raise my eyebrow at them, because the product doesn't match the attitude with which it was created.
Not at the very start. with the indexes, everybody had a codex at the same time and there were only 3 stratagems that everybody had access to.
It was a good idea, and then GW fethed it up as they always do.
The only real problem it had was being a bit to simple for 28mm play, however using the rules with halved ranges works fantastic for playing epic scale.
Not at the very start. with the indexes, everybody had a codex at the same time and there were only 3 stratagems that everybody had access to.
It was a good idea, and then GW fethed it up as they always do.
The only real problem it had was being a bit to simple for 28mm play, however using the rules with halved ranges works fantastic for playing epic scale.
Index 40kIMHO was the worst experience of 40k ever .
The idea was good but points costs were so insane that it was the only moment from 3rd edition in which I was tempted to abandon playing. I even missed 7th in that period, a lot. It didn't help that I saw the first 8th codex after an year and a half of the edition's release. Some factions had balanced indexes, but orks for example had super cheap troops and characters while anything else was extremely expensive. When a boy is 6ppm and a deffkopta is 83ppm (now 9 and 50) the only option was to bring the cheapest 6 characters and 180 boyz. Which, other than making 95% of the codex completely useless, lead to a style of playing that I utterly despised .
But I had the same problems with SW and drukhari, their indexes were very poorly balanced around points costs. Middle-end of the edition when everyone had a codex was a much better experience, although I never accepted that some armies had 2x or 3x the amount of CPs and that functiong armies had to bring 4-6 characters and 6-9 troops.
Balance is important for casual and narrative play, if you make a pure casual game that is there to play Crusade like campaigns, balance between units within a Codex and between factions is much more important so that everyone can buy/play what they like and have fun (same as all starter boxes must have equal points and be the same strength for such a system)
Except the fact that there was a point in time that GW pointedly said that codex points costs were based on the value of a unit not based on how it compared to another faction, but how important it was within it's own faction.
Whatever GW's excuse of the season is for "were are not able to write good rules and we don't care to improve them as we are already working on the next Edition that will be totally different anyway"
it does not matter if GW say what the reason is, point is that tournaments don't care how bad the originals rules are because a TO can easily force an Errata/FAQ/Update for his event on players who want to participate
a casual/narrative player needs a fixed group to do so and even there can only add minor changes (as otherwise they would not need to buy the rules from GW or would see it as wasted money) the one who can only play pick up games must rely on the default balance of the rules from GW
of course GW tries to tell you that their way of writing rules is the only possible way and that they do it that way for a specific reason that the players demanded
blame the customer for the mistakes of the company so that those that are upset are angry about other customers and not about the company
Galas wrote: I would say 8th post SM codex 2.0 but before all supplements was the most balanced state 40k has been in decades.
Post 2.0 but pre supplements? So like...a week?
Well...its even worse than that. This is an example of rose tinted glasses. Everyone sitting here bashing 9th was horrible and imbalanced while holding 8th up as some kind of glory days of balance and fairness.
They've already been listed but there was basically no moment in the game where it was realistically balanced. The game went from 1 broken meta list to the next. Girlyman flying gunline, to girlyman gun line, to Eldar Flying shenanigans into The loyal 32 with Knights and Smashcaptains to spare and right into Space Marine 2 Electric boogaloo and the Iron Hands unkillable lists. . Don't get me wrong, it was incredibly good compared to 7th, but 9th isn't worse than 8th in my opinion.
Since August:
SoB have 17 top 4 placings. Custards have 5 top 4 placings.
IG have 1 top 4 placings.
Eldar have 1 top 4 placings.
Black Templars have 2 top 4 placings.
Blood Angels have 2 top 4 placings.
Chaos Daemons have 8 top 4 placings. (ironic )
Chaos Marines have 4 top 4 placings.
Ad Mech have 30 top 4 placings. Dark Angels have 8 top 4 placings.
Death Guard have 8 top 4 placings.
Deathwatch have 3 top 4 placings.
Dark Eldar have 46 top 4 placings. GSC have 0 top 4 placings.
Grey Knights have 8 top 4 placings.
Harlequins have 7 top 4 placings.
Imperial Fists have 0 top 4 placings.
Imperial Knights have 6 top 4 placings.
Iron Hands have 10 top 4 placings.
Necrons have 4 top 4 placings.
Orkz have 19 top 4 placings. Raven Guard have 1 top 4 placings.
Renegade Knights have 0 top 4 placings.
Salamanders have 1 top 4 placings.
Space Wolves have 5 top 4 placings.
Tau Have 0 top 4 placings.
Thousand Sons have 7 top 4 placings. (Also Ironic)
Tyranids have 2 top 4 placings.
Ultramarines have 3 top 4 placings.
White Scars have 3 top 4 placings.
You have a fairly balanced tournament results list here with 4 outliers, 2 of them being somewhat extreme and 2 being above average but likely results from having the largest release the factions have ever seen. You also have a couple armies that aren't doing well, IG, Eldar, GSC, Imperial Fists, Renegade Knights, Tau. unsurprising, none of these factions have received their new codex yet, I didn't include nids because they just got their codex and I expect them to start pulling in some big wins.
regardless, that is light years better than 8th. LVO was ready for this? 8 Space Marine lists in the top 13, 2 Eldar, an Ork, a Chaos and an "imperium" army. almost 2/3rds of the top 13 were ALL Marines, with Marines taking 1st, 2nd 4th and 5th.
What about 2019's LVO? Was it any better....Nope. The loyal 32 with Knights took 1st, 3rd, 4th while the Eldar shenanigans took 2nd, 5th and 8th. That was a fairly accurate reflection of the top 20-30 honestly.
Now the only difference is that instead of 1 or 2 factions dominating you have 4 which are doing well and a host of others doing midling to good with just a few in need of some love.
The 7th BRB was mostly an improved version of the 6th edition BRB with some of the supplement rule sets rolled into it. The problem with 7th is the runaway power creep that was the codex releases. Rules writers where completely out of touch with the game they influenced while somebody must of been pushing for more power creep to boost sales with zero regard for how it impacted things like balance.
Thing about 7th was that if two people came together to play the game and fielded armies of similar relative power then games could be extremely fun and engaging. It's just that it took a lot of effort to ensure a relatively fair fight. Just throwing two lists on the table to battle each other could very easily result in one sided stomps because of how much of a power difference certain codexes had with others.
For me, 7th was fun despite GW's best efforts to keep breaking the game. 8th and 9th on the other hand is an unfun slog despite my best efforts to find anything enjoyable about it.
6th fixed some stuff from 5th, broke others. Like every edition of 40k had (and continues to do so) I don’t have many bad memories of it, compared to other editions, but that might just be the amount of time playing. It might be if 6th lasted longer it would have gotten worse. One big problem was the rollout of new things like flyers, which made for a very have/have not split.
A lot of the problems with 7th were codex based. Overall the rules were OK, but the power creep was crazy. It’s hard to look back objectively without seeing the flaws from things like decurions and other formations. As a whole, those made the game basically unplayable without a fine eye on balancing your list with your opponent. Not that we’ve ever had a time where this wasn’t the case, but the range between broken-good and crap lists was the worst in 7th then in any other time IMHO.
So like, this is full rose-tinted glasses, waiting for my morning coffee to kick in rambling, and I won't make any apologies for it, but here's some word salad.
There's no maths here. No tourney rankings. No crunched numbers or memories of 3rd, or anecdotes about how 9th totally wasn't a bloated corpse at birth, priming us all with a crappy, unpopular edition for 40k The Times of Ending, and then 10th ed. and Age of Emperor.
No.
Just rambling. Disregard because I'm stupid if ya like.
7th had it's problems. Power creep was a very real thing, and I remember waiting with baited breath for rules releases, to see if they could save my precious Black Templars from the shame of d-tier space marines. Formations made the game really spicy, and there was a clear division between haves - tau, certain marines, necrons, eldar - and the have nots, who at a competitive level, could really take pasting after pasting with no hope in sight. Certain rules interactions meant that you could find yourself hopelessly unable to counter your opponent - things like anti-tank and anti-air, and their absence in your list were the difference between having a fun game, or spending like 3 hours (games were slower back then, no?) just taking an utter pasting. I kinda agree with the poster who said that this was the edition where GW just stopped caring. Looking at the whole thing where the Wraithknight was deliberately undercosted to sell units, and the amount of anguish is caused fans, for so long, is really pretty dirty looking back on it. Likewise, there seemed to be a lot of rules interactions that GW never really anticipated, and having an invisible deathstar just rock up to you was always... less terrifying, but this kind of sad moment where you realized "I'm gonna lose every model in that unit over the next two turns, and there's almost nothing I can do about it".
But 7th was also the edition I started playing. And I remember it fondly. Remember chapter tactics back then? It was like maybe 2 special rules, tops. Iron hands were considered a reliable powerhouse with their FNP saves. Sure, there were relics, too, but that was about it. To the very lucky subfactions that got rules, it felt like they were an edge, but one that was knowable, compared to the absolute carnage of bookkeeping and supplements and all the other insanity that I really cba to keep abreast of with 9th. For me, that brevity was really great. It meant that even the filthiest of filthy casuals like me could at least sort of have a working knowledge of the meta, and be able to glance over unit entries, oogle special rules, and get a faint notion of how an army was likely to play. It felt easier to get excited for new rules releases, because they were rarer, and usually less reliably broken. Sometimes you'd get thrown a bone, sometimes you'd have to wait, but even then, you'd maybe only get one or two new additions. Relics were few and far between, but they were also one of those things that you could use to really push your points economy. Stuff like wondering if Teeth of Terra was worth the points, or whether you should just suck it up, drop a special weapon here or there and go for the Burning Blade instead. Considering about trying to convert options because you took them so often, or just so you could have a cool captain or whatever equipped with one, just in case you wanted to take it in a battle. Stuff like armor facings and templates made movement feel more strategic. In 7th I was always under-gunned when it came to taking out armored targets, and trying to sneak your boys round to get that rear shot really was tricky. Likewise, the struggle of placing a template weapon well, and then the satisfaction when you could park it on a unit, bunched up, say, in cover? One of the peakest *chef's kiss* moments. They were rare, and usually with flamers (for me), and so... never really delivered, because it was 7th, and plasma was just a better take, but still, it was a fun moment, where it felt like squad maneuvering really mattered. Deepstriking, too, was horribly risky, and could mean the difference between a squad being delivered down the throat of your enemy, or else losing 2/5ths of it's strength before arrival, ON TOP of just landing out in the open, in full view of that Battle Cannon. But that risk, that danger of total failure made the decision carry real weight, made it feel risky, made the choice of putting your unit in a tank and rumbling up the board, taking fire, or trying something risky and cheap, but possibly extremely dangerous, was a real decision to chew over, and really changed how your playstyle would have to work. These days (forgive me, I haven't played any 9th) it sounds a lot more like you try to make the cover rules work to max out lethality to your foe, minimize it to yourself, and just pop cardgame strategies to delete units. Armor almost isn't worth it, unless your dudes are very squishy, and even then everything is just maximizing how many dice can be thrown in response to a situation. Despite all the inbalance that 7th got weighed down with, at the filthy casual level that I used to play, it always seemed like, even with the most hopeless battles, you had a chance. Something insane like 90% casualties in your enemy's first round of shooting - even in my worst games, and I had some very bad worst games never happened. There often was a point where you knew the game was unwinnable, but even then you would have enough backbone for a turn or two to do some damage, maybe try and get some revenge, or deny something to your foe that would make the game harder for them. Early 8th was a much easier game to pick up and learn, but it stripped away some of the things that I think actually made 7th (and, probably more accurately, the pre-7th ruleset paradigm) a really solid system. Because for all the things that suggested that GW didn't care any more, for all the balance issues that could've been quickly ammended, beneath the bloat and USR hell, there was actually a pretty good game, buried away, that was fun, strategic, and tactically engaging. I'm not sure if 7th ever could have wholly been that game, but I don't think it was all that bad, either. Early 8th showed us that GW can actually achieve, if not balance, then semi-decent parity with faction rules. It also showed us that they are more than capable of fat-trimming, and stripping bloat. However, they haven't showed that since, and they have yet to return to the level of movement-based strategy that preceding rules systems enjoyed either. But I can also see how, for tired veterans, 7th could have seemed like a real nail in the unfun coffin, especially if you already had a decent-sized miniatures collection, and were able to play those higher-point-level games, where the real wombo combo bs could pop off.
tldr: 7th was kinda fun for me, but I get how it could be a silly unfun mess, too.
Nevelon wrote: A lot of the problems with 7th were codex based. Overall the rules were OK, but the power creep was crazy. It’s hard to look back objectively without seeing the flaws from things like decurions and other formations. As a whole, those made the game basically unplayable without a fine eye on balancing your list with your opponent. Not that we’ve ever had a time where this wasn’t the case, but the range between broken-good and crap lists was the worst in 7th then in any other time IMHO.
Agree with the Codex issues.
Downstream of that: 7th edition was a turn off, some players perceived it as a money grab. Asking people to buy a new set of books for a ruleset that was mostly 6th with some tweaks was not enjoyable.
It came out about 2 years after 6th was released. It was too soon.
Nevelon wrote: A lot of the problems with 7th were codex based. Overall the rules were OK, but the power creep was crazy. It’s hard to look back objectively without seeing the flaws from things like decurions and other formations. As a whole, those made the game basically unplayable without a fine eye on balancing your list with your opponent. Not that we’ve ever had a time where this wasn’t the case, but the range between broken-good and crap lists was the worst in 7th then in any other time IMHO.
Agree with the Codex issues.
Downstream of that: 7th edition was a turn off, some players perceived it as a money grab. Asking people to buy a new set of books for a ruleset that was mostly 6th with some tweaks was not enjoyable.
It came out about 2 years after 6th was released. It was too soon.
It burned a lot of my goodwill. While I don’t mind spending money on minis, I am less fond of spending it on rules. Prior to 6th, you at least knew your investment was going to last 4-5+ years. The life cycle of 6th killed that hard. And 7th felt like a major pay-to-win system. Like the sales team was not only firmly in control, but was doing unseemly things behind the scenes to the rules guys. The story about the wraithknight being a big one, but also formations where you only got the super special datasheet from buying direct from GW. And not just "captain with a different pistol" level PTW stuff. But skyhammer formations where you got to ignore all the bad rules, and have layer after layer after layer of broken crap on top.
A lot of the ideas in 6-7th were sound in concept, but flawed in execution. Allies. Back for the first time since 2nd. Thematically appropriate to have the guard holding the line while a spearhead of marines drops from orbit into the enemies’ heart. Less so to use them to layer Eldar buffs on Tau. Or formations that reward you for taking sub-par units in fluffy ways with a small bonus. Not give hundreds of points of free wargear or army wide stat buffs. They also killed the ballanced TAC nature of the FOC.
Nevelon wrote: A lot of the problems with 7th were codex based. Overall the rules were OK, but the power creep was crazy. It’s hard to look back objectively without seeing the flaws from things like decurions and other formations. As a whole, those made the game basically unplayable without a fine eye on balancing your list with your opponent. Not that we’ve ever had a time where this wasn’t the case, but the range between broken-good and crap lists was the worst in 7th then in any other time IMHO.
Agree with the Codex issues.
Downstream of that: 7th edition was a turn off, some players perceived it as a money grab. Asking people to buy a new set of books for a ruleset that was mostly 6th with some tweaks was not enjoyable.
It came out about 2 years after 6th was released. It was too soon.
It came out bc 6th was that bad. The game was literally unplayable for some armies and many "normal" lists. Marines vs most "better" lists could be tabled by turn 2, some armies relied on super combos, or a single DS of 4 characters and a unit to even be playable. While other armies like Chaos and necrons just needed a couple flyers and the rest could be anything you wanted. When a single flyer can shoot a flamer at 12" with pivot points hitting multiple units at str 7, hitting dudes inside transports, terrain, and ignore cover that auto killed anything single wound basically all while you can only hit it back on 6's. yeah its stupid. Then HP's were terrible, way to easy to kill anything while jink was almost not even a save (5+, but when any 3 hits kills you a 5+ save is not very good). I had games with DE where 1 Ork truck with Burna Boys literally killed 30 bodies and 3 vehicles, yes, 1 unit with did that, my models worth triple of his. Then you old D-weapon and new Knights... lol that was bad really fast. There were many little rules too that was just bad, worded poorly, or just way too much, too weak, too annoying, etc.... (lie units in transports counted on the table for rules but not for models, but bc they wanted units to be able to be hit by some weapons like grenades and flamers if there were Fire points or Open top, but then guns that had Nova was in the grey, but you also had beams, etc... just way too many little stupid rules interactions).
Players couldn't wait for 7th within just a year of playing 6th.
Yep it was 14 months (not 18) of hell. It got me to start playing games other than just 40K and classic battletech.
In a way 6th edition being so terrible was a good thing since it got me into playing infinity, warmachine and DUST.
7th was an improvement but wasn't truly fixed until Alan Bligh got ahold of it for horus heresy.
At the end of the day GW can do whatever they like with the game, they cannot however force me to play it in it's current edition or chase the meta. i have all my old minis, all the rulebooks and codexes and i enjoy the heck out of playing it the way it was originally meant to be, that means my group uses core 5th ed rules and much like mezmorki's pro-hammer project we use whichever codex best fits the feel of the faction. 9th does not give me that, but in my book it is only slightly less bad than 6th. who knows when 10th comes out GW may surprise(or not) us by doing an even worse job.
Vankraken wrote: The 7th BRB was mostly an improved version of the 6th edition BRB with some of the supplement rule sets rolled into it. The problem with 7th is the runaway power creep that was the codex releases. Rules writers where completely out of touch with the game they influenced while somebody must of been pushing for more power creep to boost sales with zero regard for how it impacted things like balance.
Thing about 7th was that if two people came together to play the game and fielded armies of similar relative power then games could be extremely fun and engaging. It's just that it took a lot of effort to ensure a relatively fair fight. Just throwing two lists on the table to battle each other could very easily result in one sided stomps because of how much of a power difference certain codexes had with others.
For me, 7th was fun despite GW's best efforts to keep breaking the game. 8th and 9th on the other hand is an unfun slog despite my best efforts to find anything enjoyable about it.
I agree abuout 7th, with pre-game arrangements it was fun. I certainly had fun in that edition but I mostly stayed away from random pick up games.
In 9th I find that much less pre-game arrangements are needed on average to get a fun game, random pick up games work better, and I prefer several core mechanics of 9th edition. That's why I love the current edition.
Pre-Formation 7th was the best they've ever put out. The formations weren't necessarily a bad idea as the idea stuck and we are getting them in 9th with the Charadon/Octarius books. It was also the last time we had a competitive mission set for tournament play, which was sadly ignored by tournaments. A side effect of what made 7th appear bad was everything that Ward did with Ultras/GK's seemed to mutate into a monster during 7th. As bad as it was, it's nothing in comparison to the guy doing the damage in 9th.
8th was simply 40k being locked in the Cage in the Temple of Doom while Mola Ram ripped the beating heart out of it before dropping it into the fire.
9th is the worst rule set to date. The 'Matched Play' mission is borderline unplayable after learning how to play. Yet it keeps getting crammed down our throats with every CA. They're trying to make it succeed, but each update just cuts players out. Crusade format is the only gem right now, and it's just a diamond in the rough. Something that we might see a bit more polished if it survives to the next edition.
Like others have said, there's more to it than JUST 40k sales on the GW side, but yeah, the edition was actually that bad. A lot of the non-GW gaming stores in my area were able to stay afloat based solely on 40k sales up to that point. Even in "down times" when the game was less popular. But sales dipped so bad in 7th that no less than 5 stores closed due to lagging 40k sales. It was also (arguably) the worst edition for needing multiple sources to play your army. White Dwarf was basically a nice looking pamphlet that came out literally weekly and often had rules.
40k was non-existent in my area for a while form the middle of 7th to a little after the launch of 8th and that's after it had been wildly easy for years to find a game. It just ... died.
Same experience here. We had a group of about 20 guys that would regularly play at either the GW store or the FLGS right down the street. All of us would get a game in at least weekly, sometimes 2-3 days a week. 7th killed it. Most people stopped coming in, several sold off their armies. I sold all my models and built a gaming PC/mining rig with the money. My friend sold most of his stuff and got heavy into high end RC cars. I'm just now coming back to 40k after only playing Titanicus for the last 3 years. 40k and WHFB were #1 and #2 selling game systems for years. It's pretty bad when 40k loses the top spot and Fantasy drops completely off the list. That shows you how badly they missed the mark on both systems during the end of the Kirby era.
I'd actually lump 6th in with 7th as effectively the same edition, and both had significant issues.
As other have mentioned, Formations were a big part of it, particularly being directly tied to web sales bundles. In general, they tried to do too many things in too many directions, and made really poor design decisions. Trying to make Challenges between individual infantry soldiers on the table a thing, on tables that may otherwise be battles between tank companies or involve superheavy tanks, was just inappropriate to the scale of the game. The entire concept of the HP mechanic for vehicles effectively turned them all into Toughness/Wound models...without saves, while still having the overlapping damage table kill mechanic. As a result, tanks and walkers became absolute garbage, unless they had the Jink skill like Skimmers and Flyers. Faction balance was particularly atrocious and lethality got turned up to 11. The entire 6-7E time period was a giant mess and probably the steepest drop-off in play and interest I'd seen that wasn't a result of game stores being physically closed.
I don't think the rules themselves were any better or worse than any other edition its just GW seemed not to care at all for any type of unit or force balance. Whatever they were trying to sell at the moment was made OP until next month when the next thing came out that was more powerful than that.
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