I really hate the fact they made Orks into T5. They are supposed to be a horde army, not a semi-elite one.
How in the hell does Termagant cost more than Guardsman? Why is a freaking Termagant so strong?
And now I see Bloodletters with +1 to both S and T in the next Codex. What is going on here?
If the unit is weak, just decrease the point cost. Radically changing the stats of spamable Troops unit will alter the state of balance, causing some combinations/counters to be either broken or crap.
If the unit is weak, just decrease the point cost. Radically changing the stats of spamable Troops unit will alter the state of balance, causing some combinations/counters to be either broken or crap.
Well, there's kind of a lower limit on how cheap you can make a weak unit before you create new problems. A gretchin might be bad enough to warrant a really, really low cost, but if you're only charging, like, 2 points per gretchin, then the raw number of bodies you can spam might make a skew list viable where you win games by just having more wounds than your opponent has bullets. Which is an issue they could have fixed at the start of 8th when they were fiddling with points costs, but they decided gretchin, cultists, and guardsmen were all worth 5 points. So now their weakest units are basically at the lower limit they can use without creating skew issues, but they're reluctant to make guardsmen too pricey because then things get awkward with the slightly more expensive models.
But yes, the stat creep is annoying. To the point that I looked at the updated lasblaster stats in the new eldar codex and was more annoyed than excited to see that they'd become stronger. The game would probably benefit a lot from rolling back all the statline changes made since the start of 8th and then re-evaluating which (if any) ought to be kept. Just speaking for my eldar armies, you could reasonably take back...
* The extra AP on hekatarii blades and wrack tools. And glimmersteel blades. And just, any melee weapon that got an extra pip of AP, really.
* The Blade Artists rule.
* The 4+ save on kabalites. (It makes sense, but it's not necessary.)
* The extra -2 AP on shuriken weapons on to-wound rolls of 6; the flat AP-1 we have now is perfectly fine.
* Most of the buffs swooping hawk lasblasters have received in recent editions; they can just be S3 or Assault 3, and they don't need the new special rule they have.
* Probably something from howling banshees. I'm glad they're finally good again, but they have every special rule under the sun right now.
* The extra shot from dire avengers. Just make them troops again, and maybe give them an option for the old version of bladestorm where you gave up your shooting on the following turn.
* Maybe the extra Attack on most eldar units. It feels like this awkward attempt to make up for taking away initiative, and it just comes across as doubling down on needing to get the charge off.
* Bring back the negative version of spirit sight on wraith units. It was kind of cool needing our own version of "synapse" to keep our unusually chonky ghost robots in the fight. It was fluffy and made wraiths feel unique.
* The splinter cannon can stop being a transparent and unsatisfying anti-marine gun; just make it a pile of splinter shots again.
* Make windriders 1 heavy weapon per 3 bikes again. And then put bikes back in the troop slot. Lowers power creep. Makes it easier to play a distinctive style of army.
* Strands of Fate. It's a pretty good mechanic, but it doesn't add a lot of interesting decisions to the game. Get rid of it alongside most of the other doctrine-equivalents in the game.
* Death Spinners might be a bit too much right now. Although the new to-wound chart may have made Assault 2 too underwhelming for them to avoid feeling redundant.
And I'm sure there are plenty of other things I could comfortable do away with besides. So much of the power creep feels like it was either totally unasked for in the first place or else was a bandaid fix for a more complicated problem.
I would have rather seen all full-size orks get an additional wound to reflect how much punishment they can take. You can punch holes in an ork or take its arms off but it's not easy to get a fatal wound. To me that isn't stats creep, that's just how it should have always been.
But Orks and Astartes have been single wound infantry alongside Guardsmen for most of the game's history, so I suppose their superhuman vitality was reflected in their armor save.
9th edition has been all about making the game faster and more compact -- smaller boards, smaller armies, and no more 200-model horde lists. Stat creep is one of the ways they're going about achieving this.
kingpbjames wrote: I would have rather seen all full-size orks get an additional wound to reflect how much punishment they can take. You can punch holes in an ork or take its arms off but it's not easy to get a fatal wound. To me that isn't stats creep, that's just how it should have always been.
But Orks and Astartes have been single wound infantry alongside Guardsmen for most of the game's history, so I suppose their superhuman vitality was reflected in their armor save.
The thing about 2W hordes is that they can result in slow rolling. Especially if they have access to any FNP+++ rolls. You shoot a volley of overcharged plasmaguns into them, but the painboy is giving them a 6+++. So you have to slow roll each successful plasma wound to see if the boy got lucky and managed to roll a 6 and thus tank an extra shot for his squad.
Making them W1 but with a FNP works, but adds a bit of extra rolling/slowdown. Making them T4 W1 and pricing them accordingly leaves them too squishy for the current game and makes them feel a bit shrimpy. T5 is a weird solution in that it makes them tougher against bolters but not against lasguns, but maybe that's what they were going for?
I feel like the best solution is to leave them at T4 W1, but reduce the lethality of the game. Which is, unfortunately, a tougher fix to implement.
Power creep is the result of constant scale creep and of the incessant need to give new units slightly better guns than old units so you'll buy them. On top of that the 8e Indexes made some math mistakes when doing the base rules (the to-wound table makes it too easy to wound on 3+/5+ and too hard to wound on 2+/6+), which has had the effect of making Strength and Toughness much less relevant and forcing a lot of design space into Wounds, Damage, Save, and AP that it doesn't really have the range to handle.
If you wanted to reset power creep at this point I don't think there's a fast fix other than burning the whole thing down and starting over (or playing Prohammer, oldhammer, HH, something like that).
Because points are, whether you agree with it or not, balanced within a given Codex.
Termagants can benefit from Synapse, meaning you need to kill every last one of them. Guardsmen, not so much. That’s something that needs to be factored in, as they can hold/contest Objectives for longer and with much greater reliability.
T5 orks are fine for everyone but two kinds of people:
1) people with a hateboner for losing to orks
2) people who use tabletop stats to measure and compare the power of units in the lore
I do like the idea of everything being a bit better, and more expensive and lead to smaller armies overall.
Just needs to be done holistically. Stats are fine, but I do feel that ap and damage are a bit high on a lot of things. The extra wound marines got doesn't really seem all that exciting when everyone has d2 weapons.
If the unit is weak, just decrease the point cost. Radically changing the stats of spamable Troops unit will alter the state of balance, causing some combinations/counters to be either broken or crap.
Well, there's kind of a lower limit on how cheap you can make a weak unit before you create new problems. A gretchin might be bad enough to warrant a really, really low cost, but if you're only charging, like, 2 points per gretchin, then the raw number of bodies you can spam might make a skew list viable where you win games by just having more wounds than your opponent has bullets. Which is an issue they could have fixed at the start of 8th when they were fiddling with points costs, but they decided gretchin, cultists, and guardsmen were all worth 5 points. So now their weakest units are basically at the lower limit they can use without creating skew issues, but they're reluctant to make guardsmen too pricey because then things get awkward with the slightly more expensive models.
But yes, the stat creep is annoying. To the point that I looked at the updated lasblaster stats in the new eldar codex and was more annoyed than excited to see that they'd become stronger. The game would probably benefit a lot from rolling back all the statline changes made since the start of 8th and then re-evaluating which (if any) ought to be kept. Just speaking for my eldar armies, you could reasonably take back...
* The extra AP on hekatarii blades and wrack tools. And glimmersteel blades. And just, any melee weapon that got an extra pip of AP, really.
* The Blade Artists rule.
* The 4+ save on kabalites. (It makes sense, but it's not necessary.)
* The extra -2 AP on shuriken weapons on to-wound rolls of 6; the flat AP-1 we have now is perfectly fine.
* Most of the buffs swooping hawk lasblasters have received in recent editions; they can just be S3 or Assault 3, and they don't need the new special rule they have.
* Probably something from howling banshees. I'm glad they're finally good again, but they have every special rule under the sun right now.
* The extra shot from dire avengers. Just make them troops again, and maybe give them an option for the old version of bladestorm where you gave up your shooting on the following turn.
* Maybe the extra Attack on most eldar units. It feels like this awkward attempt to make up for taking away initiative, and it just comes across as doubling down on needing to get the charge off.
* Bring back the negative version of spirit sight on wraith units. It was kind of cool needing our own version of "synapse" to keep our unusually chonky ghost robots in the fight. It was fluffy and made wraiths feel unique.
* The splinter cannon can stop being a transparent and unsatisfying anti-marine gun; just make it a pile of splinter shots again.
* Make windriders 1 heavy weapon per 3 bikes again. And then put bikes back in the troop slot. Lowers power creep. Makes it easier to play a distinctive style of army.
* Strands of Fate. It's a pretty good mechanic, but it doesn't add a lot of interesting decisions to the game. Get rid of it alongside most of the other doctrine-equivalents in the game.
* Death Spinners might be a bit too much right now. Although the new to-wound chart may have made Assault 2 too underwhelming for them to avoid feeling redundant.
And I'm sure there are plenty of other things I could comfortable do away with besides. So much of the power creep feels like it was either totally unasked for in the first place or else was a bandaid fix for a more complicated problem.
To be far Shuriken always had rend as far as I remember, and Windriders always been 1 weapon per bike. But the extra attacks, re-rolls, and AP across the board is bad. Some units can get 6-7 attacks with -2ap.... Why does a single unit model outside of a character need 6 attacks, why does a 5 man unit need 30+ attacks and -2 ap? Why does CWE need multiple ways to get exploding hits and re-rolls? Why does marines need army wide re-roll hits and wounds?
Tone all this gak down and then Shuriken cannons, Plasma, and HBs will be the mid-big weapons that are scary but also not god tier or completely gak bc 1 is too strong and the other is too weak.
If the unit is weak, just decrease the point cost. Radically changing the stats of spamable Troops unit will alter the state of balance, causing some combinations/counters to be either broken or crap.
Well, there's kind of a lower limit on how cheap you can make a weak unit before you create new problems. A gretchin might be bad enough to warrant a really, really low cost, but if you're only charging, like, 2 points per gretchin, then the raw number of bodies you can spam might make a skew list viable where you win games by just having more wounds than your opponent has bullets. Which is an issue they could have fixed at the start of 8th when they were fiddling with points costs, but they decided gretchin, cultists, and guardsmen were all worth 5 points. So now their weakest units are basically at the lower limit they can use without creating skew issues, but they're reluctant to make guardsmen too pricey because then things get awkward with the slightly more expensive models.
But yes, the stat creep is annoying. To the point that I looked at the updated lasblaster stats in the new eldar codex and was more annoyed than excited to see that they'd become stronger. The game would probably benefit a lot from rolling back all the statline changes made since the start of 8th and then re-evaluating which (if any) ought to be kept. Just speaking for my eldar armies, you could reasonably take back...
* The extra AP on hekatarii blades and wrack tools. And glimmersteel blades. And just, any melee weapon that got an extra pip of AP, really.
* The Blade Artists rule.
* The 4+ save on kabalites. (It makes sense, but it's not necessary.)
* The extra -2 AP on shuriken weapons on to-wound rolls of 6; the flat AP-1 we have now is perfectly fine.
* Most of the buffs swooping hawk lasblasters have received in recent editions; they can just be S3 or Assault 3, and they don't need the new special rule they have.
* Probably something from howling banshees. I'm glad they're finally good again, but they have every special rule under the sun right now.
* The extra shot from dire avengers. Just make them troops again, and maybe give them an option for the old version of bladestorm where you gave up your shooting on the following turn.
* Maybe the extra Attack on most eldar units. It feels like this awkward attempt to make up for taking away initiative, and it just comes across as doubling down on needing to get the charge off.
* Bring back the negative version of spirit sight on wraith units. It was kind of cool needing our own version of "synapse" to keep our unusually chonky ghost robots in the fight. It was fluffy and made wraiths feel unique.
* The splinter cannon can stop being a transparent and unsatisfying anti-marine gun; just make it a pile of splinter shots again.
* Make windriders 1 heavy weapon per 3 bikes again. And then put bikes back in the troop slot. Lowers power creep. Makes it easier to play a distinctive style of army.
* Strands of Fate. It's a pretty good mechanic, but it doesn't add a lot of interesting decisions to the game. Get rid of it alongside most of the other doctrine-equivalents in the game.
* Death Spinners might be a bit too much right now. Although the new to-wound chart may have made Assault 2 too underwhelming for them to avoid feeling redundant.
And I'm sure there are plenty of other things I could comfortable do away with besides. So much of the power creep feels like it was either totally unasked for in the first place or else was a bandaid fix for a more complicated problem.
You do realise that most of these changes and improvements were made because nobody took these units?
Unless there is a DRASTIC collapse in overall stats (like we're talking Marines going to T3 with 4+ saves) all this would do is ensure all these Aspect Warrior units go back on the shelves again, like they were throughout 8th.
What's extra funny about this is most of the Aspect warrior damage is coming from the Exarch's who are now, for better or worse, the mini-characters they arguably should have been for multiple editions. Try actually charging these supposedly OP and scary Aspect units into the enemy without a properly tooled up Exarch and a full suite of Psychic power buffs up and watch how they still mostly hit like kittens.
Like, it's meant to be an elite hard-hitting army already and these are the ELITE of this elite army. That's why every Aspect Unit outside of Crimson Hunters, Reapers and Spears felt like total ass to use in 8th. These supposedly deadly elite warriors were not threatening or scary in the slightest and were not used. So they make improvements to them and now there's actual choices and variety and Aspect Warriors more properly embody the way they come off in-lore and people call it power creep and want it ALL reversed? People also forget the reason for this general trend for more damage is because end of 8th was becoming characterized by unkillable power armour armies sitting in cover with 1+ or 2+ saves and FNP's and transhuman. It was miserable to play against because it power creeped lots of units completely out of consideration and just forced people into smaller and smaller ranges of units to take.
Absolute insanity. Especially when the army itself is decidedly mid-tier currently, so it's not even on the upper end of the power scale.
If anything orks should be far stronger and tougher than humans and nobs should be larger stronger an d tougher than primaris. It's litteraly the races whole thing the more they fight the more they win the bigger and stronger they are. If anything orks need a major up sizing and massive state boost. And then they can give us the beast an ork the size of a hab block.
If the unit is weak, just decrease the point cost. Radically changing the stats of spamable Troops unit will alter the state of balance, causing some combinations/counters to be either broken or crap.
Well, there's kind of a lower limit on how cheap you can make a weak unit before you create new problems. A gretchin might be bad enough to warrant a really, really low cost, but if you're only charging, like, 2 points per gretchin, then the raw number of bodies you can spam might make a skew list viable where you win games by just having more wounds than your opponent has bullets. Which is an issue they could have fixed at the start of 8th when they were fiddling with points costs, but they decided gretchin, cultists, and guardsmen were all worth 5 points. So now their weakest units are basically at the lower limit they can use without creating skew issues, but they're reluctant to make guardsmen too pricey because then things get awkward with the slightly more expensive models.
But yes, the stat creep is annoying. To the point that I looked at the updated lasblaster stats in the new eldar codex and was more annoyed than excited to see that they'd become stronger. The game would probably benefit a lot from rolling back all the statline changes made since the start of 8th and then re-evaluating which (if any) ought to be kept. Just speaking for my eldar armies, you could reasonably take back...
* The extra AP on hekatarii blades and wrack tools. And glimmersteel blades. And just, any melee weapon that got an extra pip of AP, really. * The Blade Artists rule. * The 4+ save on kabalites. (It makes sense, but it's not necessary.) * The extra -2 AP on shuriken weapons on to-wound rolls of 6; the flat AP-1 we have now is perfectly fine. * Most of the buffs swooping hawk lasblasters have received in recent editions; they can just be S3 or Assault 3, and they don't need the new special rule they have. * Probably something from howling banshees. I'm glad they're finally good again, but they have every special rule under the sun right now. * The extra shot from dire avengers. Just make them troops again, and maybe give them an option for the old version of bladestorm where you gave up your shooting on the following turn. * Maybe the extra Attack on most eldar units. It feels like this awkward attempt to make up for taking away initiative, and it just comes across as doubling down on needing to get the charge off. * Bring back the negative version of spirit sight on wraith units. It was kind of cool needing our own version of "synapse" to keep our unusually chonky ghost robots in the fight. It was fluffy and made wraiths feel unique. * The splinter cannon can stop being a transparent and unsatisfying anti-marine gun; just make it a pile of splinter shots again. * Make windriders 1 heavy weapon per 3 bikes again. And then put bikes back in the troop slot. Lowers power creep. Makes it easier to play a distinctive style of army. * Strands of Fate. It's a pretty good mechanic, but it doesn't add a lot of interesting decisions to the game. Get rid of it alongside most of the other doctrine-equivalents in the game. * Death Spinners might be a bit too much right now. Although the new to-wound chart may have made Assault 2 too underwhelming for them to avoid feeling redundant.
And I'm sure there are plenty of other things I could comfortable do away with besides. So much of the power creep feels like it was either totally unasked for in the first place or else was a bandaid fix for a more complicated problem.
You do realise that most of these changes and improvements were made because nobody took these units?
People take units more based on their looks and points cost, not their stats. Look at Ork Boyz as an example, do you see more of them with their improved stats? How about Drukhari Khymera? They weren't taken in 8th, got an AP and S, still not taken in 9th.
...Aspect warrior...
Like, it's meant to be an elite hard-hitting army already and these are the ELITE of this elite army.
This is a reason to change stats I can support, whether Dire Avengers should have been changed is debatable, but at least it is a debate worth having. Whether the unit's stats were so awful they weren't worth it is not is not because it misses out the easy solution of just lowering pts as OP pointed out, stats should come from the fluff and fluff should be inspired by the models and models should be cool.
That's why every Aspect Unit outside of Crimson Hunters, Reapers and Spears felt like total ass to use in 8th.
You would have been an oddity if you didn't say Spears felt like ass to use in 8th if they were 60 pts per model, it's all relative to the cost. Vypers would have been amazing in 8th at 20 pts per model.
AnomanderRake wrote: Power creep is the result of constant scale creep and of the incessant need to give new units slightly better guns than old units so you'll buy them. On top of that the 8e Indexes made some math mistakes when doing the base rules (the to-wound table makes it too easy to wound on 3+/5+ and too hard to wound on 2+/6+), which has had the effect of making Strength and Toughness much less relevant and forcing a lot of design space into Wounds, Damage, Save, and AP that it doesn't really have the range to handle.
If you wanted to reset power creep at this point I don't think there's a fast fix other than burning the whole thing down and starting over (or playing Prohammer, oldhammer, HH, something like that).
Don't confuse stat creep and power creep. This post is about stat creep.
Stat creep is indeed happening in 9th, and I see it more as a result of GW getting more confident with the stat system of 8th/9th. That's why we are finally seeing T9 land raiders.
Stat creep isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Power creep means having new releases be stronger than the older ones, and this is an issue which isn't really felt in this edition. 5th/6th/7th and to a lesser extent 8th were plagued by this, with 7th being the most clear example of it.
This is the first edition where I can look at one year back and confidently say that the average power level of competitive builds has gone considerably down compared to then. CK/IK/CMS and now Demons releases have nothing comparable to the power of pre nerf Admech/DE. If it wasn't for the constant update of the older rules, the new factions wouldn't be able to play in the same field.
Amishprn86 wrote:
To be far Shuriken always had rend as far as I remember, and Windriders always been 1 weapon per bike.
Then you don't remember pre-6th edition, my friend. The rending on 6s thing was added in the 6th edition codex. The jetbikes getting 1 heavy weapon per bike was also added in 7th (maybe 6th?) when they got their new kit with extra guns on the sprues. They then proceeded to be the pain in the neck known as "scatbikes" for an edition before being booted out of the troop slot to atone for their sins. So GW power crept the unit, then balanced the power creep in a way that made it harder to put a fluffy, canonical, bike-heavy playstyle on the table.
If the unit is weak, just decrease the point cost. Radically changing the stats of spamable Troops unit will alter the state of balance, causing some combinations/counters to be either broken or crap.
Well, there's kind of a lower limit on how cheap you can make a weak unit before you create new problems. A gretchin might be bad enough to warrant a really, really low cost, but if you're only charging, like, 2 points per gretchin, then the raw number of bodies you can spam might make a skew list viable where you win games by just having more wounds than your opponent has bullets. Which is an issue they could have fixed at the start of 8th when they were fiddling with points costs, but they decided gretchin, cultists, and guardsmen were all worth 5 points. So now their weakest units are basically at the lower limit they can use without creating skew issues, but they're reluctant to make guardsmen too pricey because then things get awkward with the slightly more expensive models.
But yes, the stat creep is annoying. To the point that I looked at the updated lasblaster stats in the new eldar codex and was more annoyed than excited to see that they'd become stronger. The game would probably benefit a lot from rolling back all the statline changes made since the start of 8th and then re-evaluating which (if any) ought to be kept. Just speaking for my eldar armies, you could reasonably take back...
* The extra AP on hekatarii blades and wrack tools. And glimmersteel blades. And just, any melee weapon that got an extra pip of AP, really.
* The Blade Artists rule.
* The 4+ save on kabalites. (It makes sense, but it's not necessary.)
* The extra -2 AP on shuriken weapons on to-wound rolls of 6; the flat AP-1 we have now is perfectly fine.
* Most of the buffs swooping hawk lasblasters have received in recent editions; they can just be S3 or Assault 3, and they don't need the new special rule they have.
* Probably something from howling banshees. I'm glad they're finally good again, but they have every special rule under the sun right now.
* The extra shot from dire avengers. Just make them troops again, and maybe give them an option for the old version of bladestorm where you gave up your shooting on the following turn.
* Maybe the extra Attack on most eldar units. It feels like this awkward attempt to make up for taking away initiative, and it just comes across as doubling down on needing to get the charge off.
* Bring back the negative version of spirit sight on wraith units. It was kind of cool needing our own version of "synapse" to keep our unusually chonky ghost robots in the fight. It was fluffy and made wraiths feel unique.
* The splinter cannon can stop being a transparent and unsatisfying anti-marine gun; just make it a pile of splinter shots again.
* Make windriders 1 heavy weapon per 3 bikes again. And then put bikes back in the troop slot. Lowers power creep. Makes it easier to play a distinctive style of army.
* Strands of Fate. It's a pretty good mechanic, but it doesn't add a lot of interesting decisions to the game. Get rid of it alongside most of the other doctrine-equivalents in the game.
* Death Spinners might be a bit too much right now. Although the new to-wound chart may have made Assault 2 too underwhelming for them to avoid feeling redundant.
And I'm sure there are plenty of other things I could comfortable do away with besides. So much of the power creep feels like it was either totally unasked for in the first place or else was a bandaid fix for a more complicated problem.
You do realise that most of these changes and improvements were made because nobody took these units?
...
People also forget the reason for this general trend for more damage is because end of 8th was becoming characterized by unkillable power armour armies sitting in cover with 1+ or 2+ saves and FNP's and transhuman. It was miserable to play against because it power creeped lots of units completely out of consideration and just forced people into smaller and smaller ranges of units to take.
Sounds like you're saying that the offensive power creep was a response to the defensive power creep. Which, sure. We can tone down the defense along with the offense if need be. But a Swooping Hawk probably shouldn't need two bolters' worth of shots that auto-wound on 6s to-hit to be considered useful. That feels like a bit much, right?
I think that a lot of the problem comes form GW stacking vertical buffs instead of creating horizontal options. That is, they started experimenting with things like chapter tactics, stratagems, and doctrine-equivalents. Generally, those rules are designed to make your unit straight up "better" in some way; usually by making them more killy or more durable. But this means that you end up with things like marine units that are -1 to-hit, can only be wounded on a 4+, ignore the first pip of AP, and prevent you from rerolling wounds all while rocking a 2+ save in cover. And on the flip side, my banshees are now +1 strength, +1 to-wound, +1 to their number of attacks, always strike first, run and charge, all while their exarch is doing as many as 6 mortal wounds as part of the charge (crone helm + nerve-shredding shriek) or else doing double the number of attacks that do double the damage each (whirling blades + piercing strikes). Again, just feels like too many layers of things. (Also, banshees were actually pretty decent against anything but marines (due to the extra wound) after power swords got updated to be +1 Strength. )
There's a lot I like about my space elves this edition, but it really feels like GW opted to just slap bigger numbers on a lot of things rather than finding more elegant solutions.
Absolute insanity. Especially when the army itself is decidedly mid-tier currently, so it's not even on the upper end of the power scale.
We're presumably talking about lowering the lethality game-wide. That would be a major shakeup to everyone. I'm not suggesting just nerfing aeldari in a vacuum. I was trying to point out some of the lethality buffs my armies have received just for the sake of creating/keeping up with power creep.
Jidmah wrote: T5 orks are fine for everyone but two kinds of people:
1) people with a hateboner for losing to orks
2) people who use tabletop stats to measure and compare the power of units in the lore
Neither is worth arguing with.
I don't have a problem with T5 Boys, but I wouldn't agree to the second part. Lore and stats are closely related, even if a 1:1 transition is not possible. It is a bit of a "hen or egg?" topic, but creatures in the fluff do what they do because of their stats (and the plot) and creatures on the table have the stats they have because of the fluff. T10 Gretchins for example would feel very awkward, regardless wether or not you could point them perfectly.
I think the stat creep is a legitimate complaint since, when everything is balanced up, you essentially end up back where you started - but with a load more rules to remember and/or dice to roll.
There's also a bit of false marketing. "Orks are T5 wow" ran instantly into "nearly every weapon is getting a point of strength and AP or double the shots/reroll everything, so it works out essentially the same as T4 in older editions (possibly worse)."
GW have finally got 9th into a sort of balanced state due to marrying up offence/defence/points, which was clearly out of whack throughout 2021 making for very lethal games - but this could be exploded at any time.
This is especially acute for Daemons, because it looks like GW are imagining them as a fundamentally different way. So for instance Daemonettes could have remained the same but gone down to 6 points - but instead they are getting a decent bunch of buffs, but going to 12 points. "Its like a wych for half the points" - would be quite broken. "Its a wych but paying an extra point" - "eh, might be fine?"
I actually like the stat changes. It creates a sense of diversity in the game that is much appreciated.
Like another poster I think its the extra vertical buffing that is the problem. Super doctrines, stratagems, and warlord traits and relics that are more the issue.
I would also point out that a T5 on an Ork is surprisingly lore consistent. They are thick skinned and you require a lot of bullets to take them down. This is reflected by having them slightly harder to wound which the T5 gives them, but since they don't have much in the way of armor any armor piercing round will do a proper job when it wounds.
Ultimately the problem of any lore discussion in relation to stats is that each and every viewpoint is highly interpretive and subjective. I think T5 is lore appropriate and could argue about it for days, whereas others think it is not lore appropriate and can argue for days, therefore creating an impasse that is neither useful nor productive.
I'm okay with stats changing. What I'm not okay with is that the changes are seemingly randomish and done in a vacuum, but that seems to be GWs main way of designing the game. They have so many ways to balance units but rather than using the systems they have (stats, keywords, special rules) they just add more rules or adjust points.
Sim-Life wrote: I'm okay with stats changing. What I'm not okay with is that the changes are seemingly randomish and done in a vacuum, but that seems to be GWs main way of designing the game. They have so many ways to balance units but rather than using the systems they have (stats, keywords, special rules) they just add more rules or adjust points.
I could really use an example to help understand your post.
Jidmah wrote: T5 orks are fine for everyone but two kinds of people: 1) people with a hateboner for losing to orks 2) people who use tabletop stats to measure and compare the power of units in the lore
Neither is worth arguing with.
I don't have a problem with T5 Boys, but I wouldn't agree to the second part. Lore and stats are closely related, even if a 1:1 transition is not possible. It is a bit of a "hen or egg?" topic, but creatures in the fluff do what they do because of their stats (and the plot) and creatures on the table have the stats they have because of the fluff. T10 Gretchins for example would feel very awkward, regardless wether or not you could point them perfectly.
I think everything about that is wrong, even though it's just slightly so.
Lore and stats are absolutely not closely related - first of all lore is wildly inconsistent and second the game is not granular enough to properly portrait it anyways. Third, the game stats are used to represent armies, not units or models. Any single number on a statline is roughly related to lore, if at all. T10 with six wounds might an adequate way to portrait a mob of 30 gretchin, and it absolutely doesn't matter whether that value is higher or lower than that of different unit or model, especially if it's from a different army.
There also is no hen or egg issue here at all, as that would imply a circle. An army needs to play as you would expect it to play from how their members are portrayed in the fluff. Tabletop mechanics do not influence the lore at all, which is frequently criticized by many people as immersion breaking. Orks haven't gotten more durable or less numerous in fluff because of the toughness change, death guard don't die easier because of the DR nerf, railguns still have the same flavor as they had before they got cranked to 11 and five marines are still sufficient to stop a xenos invasion force.
Last, but not least, "measure and compare" implies exactly what you said is impossible - applying stats 1:1 to the lore, which is the very thing the OP is doing.
Boosykes wrote: If anything orks should be far stronger and tougher than humans and nobs should be larger stronger an d tougher than primaris. It's litteraly the races whole thing the more they fight the more they win the bigger and stronger they are. If anything orks need a major up sizing and massive state boost. And then they can give us the beast an ork the size of a hab block.
This is fluff and model scale creep. For the first 2 or 3 editions an ork boy was no bigger or better than a guardsman in fluff or stats really. They were 1 pip tougher but had 1 pip less jnitiative...that was it. And the models were about the same size as a guardsman. They were not supposed to be even close to as elite as a marine.
Its still how i see them. The nobz are there to rep the big bad orkz.
Jidmah wrote: T5 orks are fine for everyone but two kinds of people:
1) people with a hateboner for losing to orks
2) people who use tabletop stats to measure and compare the power of units in the lore
Neither is worth arguing with.
I don't have a problem with T5 Boys, but I wouldn't agree to the second part. Lore and stats are closely related, even if a 1:1 transition is not possible. It is a bit of a "hen or egg?" topic, but creatures in the fluff do what they do because of their stats (and the plot) and creatures on the table have the stats they have because of the fluff. T10 Gretchins for example would feel very awkward, regardless wether or not you could point them perfectly.
T5 Orks make it so a Lasgun is just as equal at wounding an Ork as a Bolter, which is simply not right and bass-ackwards. That is more of a fault of the barebones wounding chart than anything, but it is still dumb as feth.
Sim-Life wrote: I'm okay with stats changing. What I'm not okay with is that the changes are seemingly randomish and done in a vacuum, but that seems to be GWs main way of designing the game. They have so many ways to balance units but rather than using the systems they have (stats, keywords, special rules) they just add more rules or adjust points.
I could really use an example to help understand your post.
Lore and stats are absolutely not closely related - first of all lore is wildly inconsistent and second the game is not granular enough to properly portrait it anyways. Third, the game stats are used to represent armies, not units or models. Any single number on a statline is roughly related to lore, if at all. T10 with six wounds might an adequate way to portrait a mob of 30 gretchin, and it absolutely doesn't matter whether that value is higher or lower than that of different unit or model, especially if it's from a different army.
It would be absolutely terrible because Gretchin should be weak to lasguns and mortars, not multi-lasers and lascannons. You don't need that much granularity, is the thing a lot tougher than a human then it gets T4+, is it a lot easier to kill then it gets T2. You can represent half points of toughness through other rules, like theoretically if Gretchin belong at T2,5 then you can give them T2 and a durability buff of some kind via the Runtherd, a Stratagem or an ability that applies against certain weapons or make them T3 with certain durability drawbacks like being more easily hit by melee or Blast weapons.
Grimtuff wrote: T5 Orks make it so a Lasgun is just as equal at wounding an Ork as a Bolter, which is simply not right and bass-ackwards. That is more of a fault of the barebones wounding chart than anything, but it is still dumb as feth.
That is an arbitrary nitpick, the specific breakpoints generally don't matter and a wounding chart should be barebones, there is no reason for it not to be. The important thing is that weapons which are meant to be good against certain unit types are good against them and units that are meant to be durable against certain weapon types are durable against those weapon types.
Sim-Life wrote: I'm okay with stats changing. What I'm not okay with is that the changes are seemingly randomish and done in a vacuum, but that seems to be GWs main way of designing the game. They have so many ways to balance units but rather than using the systems they have (stats, keywords, special rules) they just add more rules or adjust points.
I could really use an example to help understand your post.
Example of what?
A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.
I think stuff like 2ed wound on marines, or even the whole primaris marines being a separate thing could be a good example of GW doing changes for reasons other then making the game play better.
But it goes in cycles. Marines are too weak to the existing weapons, so they have to be buffed, because the stat spread in w40k is small a change of "1" on many things can give huge end results. So then GW buffs other factions, not all and not all to the same degree to match the buffed marine stats. But not the one from games that community did, by the time those were done GW was finished with a lot of the non marine testing. They adjust to what ever studio and playtest games gave them as a result. The buffs can be too weak or too strong. Which ends with some books getting luke warm welcome, while others being game changers. After GW enters the 1+ of an edition, they start basing their updates and books on the current edition meta game. But of course it is a meta game 6-9 months in the past, so again changes can be too big or too small. With changes to faction GW desing team likes, they can make very powerful book. With those they don't care much about the books can be anything from bland and weak to someone puting down a rules, but not testing much and suddenly the army is wrecking stuff with some oddball build.
This seems to be an on going thing in w40k since for ever. And it won't change considering how GW writes their rules.
That is an arbitrary nitpick, the specific breakpoints generally don't matter and a wounding chart should be barebones, there is no reason for it not to be. The important thing is that weapons which are meant to be good against certain unit types are good against them and units that are meant to be durable against certain weapon types are durable against those weapon types.
There is a small problem with that, when you create a spamable and/or multi shot anti marine weapon it often ends ups good vs everything, light and medium vehicles, non marines, non marine elites etc and this is a good on top of being good vs majority of the factions being played. And with a d6 being used to decide a to wound roll, any change of 1 up or down can make a huge impact on how valid a weapon is.
There are stat lines that are good against SM but not so good against other things. Like S8 AP-4 D2 is great against SM, but it is way overkill for Guardsmen. S4 AP-3 is great against SM and fine against Guardsmen but totally fails against T8. My opinion is that Space Marines should benefit from not being the targets of any Secondary Objectives to make up for the fact that they are countered by more or less every weapon.
I think me and Jidmah can agree that weapon profiles can be abstract and Heavy 1 does not necessarily mean fewer shots fired than RF 1 every 10 seconds in the 40k universe, it might just be an abstraction and if the math checks out then it is fine. The problem with Jidmah's Gretchin example is that the math does not check out, it would create unintuitive incentives, like wasting Blasts against a unit that looks like it should be weak to them and should probably (I don't know the lore on Gretchin) be effective against in the lore.
T5 vs T6 really just says something about what the unit is weak to, a T4 monster could work, it would be super resilient to poison and relatively resilient to other things, but that might be super appropriate lore-wise.
Boosykes wrote: If anything orks should be far stronger and tougher than humans and nobs should be larger stronger an d tougher than primaris. It's litteraly the races whole thing the more they fight the more they win the bigger and stronger they are. If anything orks need a major up sizing and massive state boost. And then they can give us the beast an ork the size of a hab block.
Yep I want Boyz to be T5 and 3W but cheap enough so I can organise a Green Tide, lets say 8 points per model.
A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.
Nah. Don't have the energy for thinking up something off the top of my head you can nitpick to death.
TBF Shock Prows was an insanely random change, it went from bonus strength on the charge to hurt high Toughness units (Like you are ramming a vehicles to open it up so you can jump out of the raider attacking the hole, very pirate themed) Now it is Tokyo Drift anti-horde weapon that needs a stratagem to even work. Extremally random and pointless change.
Boosykes wrote: If anything orks should be far stronger and tougher than humans and nobs should be larger stronger an d tougher than primaris. It's litteraly the races whole thing the more they fight the more they win the bigger and stronger they are. If anything orks need a major up sizing and massive state boost. And then they can give us the beast an ork the size of a hab block.
Yep I want Boyz to be T5 and 3W but cheap enough so I can organise a Green Tide, lets say 8 points per model.
No? No one asked for that-if Orks are T5 W3, they should cost a hell of a lot more than now.
A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.
Nah. Don't have the energy for thinking up something off the top of my head you can nitpick to death.
Am I nitpicking things to death by saying Gretchin should not be 4W T10? Would the shock prow change be a good example of what you meant? How about changing tesla's exploding hits from 6+ to unmodified 6s? How about Drukhari getting an extra AP in melee on wound rolls of 6? Drukhari Kabalites getting an extra attack? Making PFP into a Combat Doctrine? It can't be that hard to give me an example if it is GW's main design paradigm.
A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.
Nah. Don't have the energy for thinking up something off the top of my head you can nitpick to death.
Am I nitpicking things to death by saying Gretchin should not be 4W T10? Would the shock prow change be a good example of what you meant? How about changing tesla's exploding hits from 6+ to unmodified 6s? How about Drukhari getting an extra AP in melee on wound rolls of 6? Drukhari Kabalites getting an extra attack? Making PFP into a Combat Doctrine? It can't be that hard to give me an example if it is GW's main design paradigm.
It probably wouldn't, but I can't be arsed having a big back and forth about it right now so I'm not going to engage with you about it.
A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.
Nah. Don't have the energy for thinking up something off the top of my head you can nitpick to death.
Am I nitpicking things to death by saying Gretchin should not be 4W T10? Would the shock prow change be a good example of what you meant? How about changing tesla's exploding hits from 6+ to unmodified 6s? How about Drukhari getting an extra AP in melee on wound rolls of 6? Drukhari Kabalites getting an extra attack? Making PFP into a Combat Doctrine? It can't be that hard to give me an example if it is GW's main design paradigm.
It probably wouldn't, but I can't be arsed having a big back and forth about it right now so I'm not going to engage with you about it.
Why do you respond with "something off the top of my head you can nitpick to death" instead of waiting to respond (maybe forever)? It seems unnecessarily rude, if you want to mutually block each other we can do that but you must be posting either to have your posts read and understood or to be challenged on your beliefs, it's fine if you don't want to be challenged but how is not being understood a good outcome for you?
Mate, stop getting so upset about someone not wanting to internet debate you. You just want me to provide examples so you can draw me into a big quote-reply discussion that I'm not in the mood for it. It's not the end of the world.
vict0988 wrote: I think me and Jidmah can agree that weapon profiles can be abstract and Heavy 1 does not necessarily mean fewer shots fired than RF 1 every 10 seconds in the 40k universe, it might just be an abstraction and if the math checks out then it is fine. The problem with Jidmah's Gretchin example is that the math does not check out, it would create unintuitive incentives, like wasting Blasts against a unit that looks like it should be weak to them and should probably (I don't know the lore on Gretchin) be effective against in the lore.
I agree, though you pretty much took the gretchin example and ran away with it It was brought up by another poster as an example of why lore is hard-wired to stats, and I was picking that example because 30 T3 wounds are actually harder to kill than 6 T10 wounds, you just need to be more lucky. Sure, the interaction with blasts and high damage weapons is weird, but you could probably find lore justifications for that as well, or add a rule that it counts as 11+ models for blast. But let's not get into details on this. As I said, the army as a whole needs to be presented properly by the tabletop rules and I doubt that T10 gretchin could actually archive that in any meaningful way.
The point is, there isn't actually any real lore on a guard battalion facing off against a horde of gretchin. Any time gretchin appear in a fight, they either just get gunned down indiscriminately alongside with whatever orks are present or they sneak up on their opponent and try to scratch their eyes out. There is absolutely nothing implying that the strength of the weapon shooting at them matters, so both T2 and T10 would be appropriate going strictly by lore.
T5 vs T6 really just says something about what the unit is weak to, a T4 monster could work, it would be super resilient to poison and relatively resilient to other things, but that might be super appropriate lore-wise.
Toughness does not say what something is weak to - the defensive profile as a whole does. 2W T5 3+ DR plague marines have to be shot by completely different weapons than 1W T5 6+ orks or 3W T5 4+ warbikers or a 3W T5 3+ transhuman gravis unit.
Looking at toughness in isolation makes zero sense, both from a game and from lore perspective. Yet, many people insist on doing so.
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Sim-Life wrote: It probably wouldn't, but I can't be arsed having a big back and forth about it right now so I'm not going to engage with you about it.
Sim-Life wrote: Mate, stop getting so upset about someone not wanting to internet debate you. You just want me to provide examples so you can draw me into a big quote-reply discussion that I'm not in the mood for it. It's not the end of the world.
Not a fan of stat creep in general but I don't think OP's chosen good examples to argue against it.
Orks have always been supposed to be tough. They can be both because having effectively no armor dramatically reduces survivability. They're still not as remotely tough as Marines, both for lack of a second wound and lack of armor, but they now take advantage of the bigger stat gulf between a Guardsman and a Marine.
Termagants have always been priced comparably to Guardsmen, or a bit more expensive. They're genetically-engineered foot soldiers the size of small horses, often used as cannon fodder but still armed with effective weapons. Having a Guardsman defensive profile but a better gun is both in line with how they used to behave (back when having AP5 vs AP- mattered, and Assault was actually beneficial over Rapid Fire) and the fluff.
Both of these are examples of armies diversifying away from how we started 8th Ed, when troops that weren't Marines were all functionally Guardsman-equivalent. It's the same deal with Eldar getting their saves bumped up to 4+, and prices adjusted to compensate. Having more armies occupy that intermediate space is a minor paradigm shift, not power creep, and it helps to diversify the factions.
A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.
Alright, I'll bite.
Now, I don't know how random the change was, or if it was a change done on purpose to achieve a greater objective, but I'd argue 2-wound marines/3-wound termies, especially Firstborn, *had* to have been done in a vacuum. The ramifications of the change have been so wide-reaching it can't have been done otherwise. In many ways the game is generally balanced around marines. There's a reason we have MEQ and TEQ as terms. They decided, in seeming isolation, to up the wound of both of those units, which made nearly every weapon meant for defeating them moot. Plasma-guns? Meant to erase marines en mass, and to crack terminators? They now risk killing themselves if they want to kill marines now, since they only do 1 wound, which used to be enough, but now only half-kill a marine per shot meaning you need approximately double the shots to kill them. This can then be repeated across all high-strength high-ap low damage weapons.
There's a reason why Melta's and melta-equivilents were one of the best things around early in the edition, as it was basically the only easily-accessible way to reliably kill marines until they got an update. Take the Eldar Starcannons, they used to be S6, ap-3, d3 wounds, but thanks to Marines (and later all other MEQ getting defensive buffs to keep up) gaining boosted wounds they were changed to S7, ap-3, 2 wound weapons, to keep reliability. This increasing lethality is why factions like Daemons, guard or pre-update tau suffer extreme existence failure whenever these new profiles glance their way, and these defensive buffs prevent them from reliable countering. "All your old codexes will be usable!" my buttocks.
and all of this absolute upheaval of the game, and it achieved.... what? Nothing, so they had to give all marines Armor of Contempt and now the cycle starts all over again.
As for a better solution, personally i'd have just left them how they were, but if they must have a defensive buff, I'd say go for Toughness. If Orks can do it, so can marines, and while small-arms will have an even harder time bringing them down, your dedicated anti-MEQ platforms would still be able to kill them, if not quite as hard as before.
I still like the move to W2 marines; I just don't love the way they power crept everything to accommodate it. Making basic marines W2 seemed like a move towards treating marines as the elite, durable fellows they're promoted as rather than making them the "baseline" "Mario" army. It always felt weird when a lucky laspistol took out a marine on its own, and the second wound is a decent way to address that. Boosting Toughness to 5 wouldn't have addressed that issue because the 'problem' with marine durability wasn't with their average performance so much as with how weird it felt for a bad Sv roll to make them feel oddly squishy.
What probably should have happened is GW should have given them a reasonable price increase that accounted for the new wound and the other buffs they got shortly after. Instead, they cancelled out the boost to marine durability (and lethality) by making everything more lethal.
IMHO the real power creep wasn't 2W Marines but the combination of doctrines, super doctrines and multi-meltas.
Multi-meltas bikes and eradicators were the first example of units that could easily get their points back in one round of shooting. Add the fact that all doctrines and super doctrines are all about increasing lethality, Space Marines were insane at the start of 9th.
Tyran wrote:IMHO the real power creep wasn't 2W Marines but the combination of doctrines, super doctrines and multi-meltas.
Multi-meltas bikes and eradicators were the first example of units that could easily get their points back in one round of shooting. Add the fact that all doctrines and super doctrines are all about increasing lethality, Space Marines were insane at the start of 9th.
VladimirHerzog wrote:Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake
Agree with all that. I'm happy to revert my splinter cannons back to their old profiles. 8th made a big deal about vehicles not dying to a single salvo barring lucky rolls, and eradicators were a notable departure from that philosophy. Being able to one-shot hardy targets is a valid design approach, but eradicators and the changes to melta weapons feel like a very transparent move away from the "things die slowly," philosophy.
artific3r wrote: 9th edition has been all about making the game faster and more compact -- smaller boards, smaller armies, and no more 200-model horde lists. Stat creep is one of the ways they're going about achieving this.
It's true, and I'm sad to see it happen. To me, a small elite army of SM holding off hordes of Orks or Tyranids is the very picture of 40k.
VladimirHerzog wrote: Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake
But upping weapons to D2 was necessary *because* Marines had been given the extra wound.
It's exactly what happens when you make sweeping changes with 0 thoughts about the impact of making the most common infantry in the game twice as durable.
It also had the effect of making basic weapons all but pointless even against infantry, which is always the hallmark of great design.
artific3r wrote: 9th edition has been all about making the game faster and more compact -- smaller boards, smaller armies, and no more 200-model horde lists. Stat creep is one of the ways they're going about achieving this.
It's true, and I'm sad to see it happen. To me, a small elite army of SM holding off hordes of Orks or Tyranids is the very picture of 40k.
Smaller points games can still really have that old 40k feeling. Running 1k games can have one side flooding the board, with only a few units on the other side.
Wyldhunt wrote: I still like the move to W2 marines; I just don't love the way they power crept everything to accommodate it. Making basic marines W2 seemed like a move towards treating marines as the elite, durable fellows they're promoted as rather than making them the "baseline" "Mario" army. It always felt weird when a lucky laspistol took out a marine on its own, and the second wound is a decent way to address that. Boosting Toughness to 5 wouldn't have addressed that issue because the 'problem' with marine durability wasn't with their average performance so much as with how weird it felt for a bad Sv roll to make them feel oddly squishy.
What probably should have happened is GW should have given them a reasonable price increase that accounted for the new wound and the other buffs they got shortly after. Instead, they cancelled out the boost to marine durability (and lethality) by making everything more lethal.
VladimirHerzog wrote:Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake
Marine players were complaining that their newly W2 Marines were still too squishy long before weapons started getting updated to D2 and bonus AP. Because it's not exactly rocket science: If 60+% of the armies you're going to see on the table are W2/3+ army-wide, you don't take D1 AP0 weapons that are now mostly worthless; you find whatever D2 AP1+ weapons you have in the codex and spam the crap out of them.
So yeah, maybe the Marine players who got upset at the one-in-eighteen chance of a laspistol actually killing one of Their Dudes now don't have to worry about losing models to incidental gunfire like some sort of NPC faction, but the only time they ever feel durable as a whole is when they're brokenly OP (see: SM2.0 Iron Hands). Because otherwise whatever hard-counters them is what you take in a TAC list, and whatever sucks against them gets left at home unless it has a particularly compelling niche.
They are the de facto baseline, 'Mario' army, and they'll always be that way so long as Marines are the factions marketed to newbies, about half the factions in the game, and a majority of armies on the tabletop. They're the baseline, the norm, the yardstick against which everything else is judged. Making more weapons viable against Marines just made more units and wargear actually playable under those realities instead of left on the shelf.
Wyldhunt wrote: I still like the move to W2 marines; I just don't love the way they power crept everything to accommodate it. Making basic marines W2 seemed like a move towards treating marines as the elite, durable fellows they're promoted as rather than making them the "baseline" "Mario" army. It always felt weird when a lucky laspistol took out a marine on its own, and the second wound is a decent way to address that. Boosting Toughness to 5 wouldn't have addressed that issue because the 'problem' with marine durability wasn't with their average performance so much as with how weird it felt for a bad Sv roll to make them feel oddly squishy.
What probably should have happened is GW should have given them a reasonable price increase that accounted for the new wound and the other buffs they got shortly after. Instead, they cancelled out the boost to marine durability (and lethality) by making everything more lethal.
VladimirHerzog wrote:Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake
Marine players were complaining that their newly W2 Marines were still too squishy long before weapons started getting updated to D2 and bonus AP. Because it's not exactly rocket science: If 60+% of the armies you're going to see on the table are W2/3+ army-wide, you don't take D1 AP0 weapons that are now mostly worthless; you find whatever D2 AP1+ weapons you have in the codex and spam the crap out of them.
The issue is that 40k doesn't really have a counter system - it has an "efficiency for the points system".
Initial 8th edition Primaris were not priced that aggressively - and so were not that great. They would then become a liability when GW started throwing out lots of cheap damage 2 options backed by rerolls. Arguably the whole meta became about these 2 damage weapons - not because of Marines, but because they were too cheap and so superior to other choices.
When the meta *did* become about Marines, because they were stupidly overpowered, other factions had to go all in on their anti-Marine options to have a chance. (And Marines still stomped over this supposedly anti-Marine meta, because they were broken.)
I think this is sort of the problem with saying greater design space should make for a better game. Because it comes down to what are you trying to balance. Am I looking to see players A and B have a good game? Or am I looking to see players A and B, going to a major tournament of 5-6 games, and if one bring's all scissors, they may run into rock?
In the former you probably need restrictions on what people can bring - or you will have mismatches. In the 2nd you can hopefully rely on a more varied meta to keep people honest.
The problem with the 2nd is that usually that the meta evolves into "take the good stuff". And faction A will tend to counter faction B, and be countered by faction C, due to the interactions of said "good stuff" in each codex. You could build a very different list, which might help a bit into certain matchup - but it likely means being much less efficient against everyone else, which isn't usually desirable because no single faction is that dominant.
Problem start when your local enviroment doesn't consists of one person of the A, B, C and D kind playing games vs each other. But something like A1, A+, A2, A-, the super anti A B, and someone who plays C but never comes to the store because his army gets beaten hard by A.
I think in past edition, just from looking at the lists, balance was easier to achive, because the armies were smaller. Some 2ed armies were 20-25 man strong. Now I am not saying that GW was trying to achive balance back then, I highly doubt they changed since then, but with how stuff scales in w40k it was easier to do.
Right now the armies are more or less pre build for people, very few armies can actualy carry the "bad" units and often those that can't don't really have "bad" units, just less efficient ones.
Karol wrote: Problem start when your local enviroment doesn't consists of one person of the A, B, C and D kind playing games vs each other. But something like A1, A+, A2, A-, the super anti A B, and someone who plays C but never comes to the store because his army gets beaten hard by A.
I think in past edition, just from looking at the lists, balance was easier to achive, because the armies were smaller. Some 2ed armies were 20-25 man strong. Now I am not saying that GW was trying to achive balance back then, I highly doubt they changed since then, but with how stuff scales in w40k it was easier to do.
Right now the armies are more or less pre build for people, very few armies can actualy carry the "bad" units and often those that can't don't really have "bad" units, just less efficient ones.
That indeed is the big issue of meta balancing. That only really works on the very highest level of income where people can easily bring new armies. It doesn't work for the vast majority of players who just have an army or two and even for those armies don't have enough of all the units (and options) to bring whatever is good in a specific meta.
None of the previous editions were anywhere nearly as balanced as the current one is, with no room to argue otherwise. They might have been more fun (which is subjective), but definitely not more balanced.
VladimirHerzog wrote: Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake
But upping weapons to D2 was necessary *because* Marines had been given the extra wound.
It's exactly what happens when you make sweeping changes with 0 thoughts about the impact of making the most common infantry in the game twice as durable.
It also had the effect of making basic weapons all but pointless even against infantry, which is always the hallmark of great design.
it's not tho, if marines were too squishy before (they were), then doubling their wounds while leaving the weapons roster the same means that they wouldve been tanky enough.
Jidmah wrote: None of the previous editions were anywhere nearly as balanced as the current one is, with no room to argue otherwise. They might have been more fun (which is subjective), but definitely not more balanced.
I think 9th has been some of the worst balance over all though, no other edition has there been so much tabling T1-T2 armies, or insane stated units like 90pt Voidweavers. I'd rather go back to TauDar and HIs 8th than first version of 9ths Orks, Admech, DE, Tau, Quins, etc..., not counting how strong Custodes and Nids where too. At least in 8th you can ignore silly ITC rules and play Maelstrom where HI were bad at, and for 7th at leat every army but 2 had broken stuff (and it was really only Daemons and 1 Corsairs formation with the real broken stuff).
Ok, so when it comes to balance, should we start moving to Tournies where the Armies from each faction have 2 or 3 prebuild lists that you can choose from? I mean if the complaint is that armies are won or lost in the list building stage, then why not remove that variable? It's one of the reason i think the 8th index armies were so successful, if unflavorful. Besides, everyone LOVES a net list right? Why not embrace it?
SaganGree wrote: Ok, so when it comes to balance, should we start moving to Tournies where the Armies from each faction have 2 or 3 prebuild lists that you can choose from? I mean if the complaint is that armies are won or lost in the list building stage, then why not remove that variable? It's one of the reason i think the 8th index armies were so successful, if unflavorful. Besides, everyone LOVES a net list right? Why not embrace it?
The problem is, a lot of the power is just easy to see and players gravitate to power anyways. Look at DT Liquifiers for example, within 10min of the leaks most the DE community saw how strong it was without seeing any lists as well as Comp Edge Razorflails. "Oh supercharge flamers with no draw back? lol ok thanks" DE community asked "Why did GW change DT for the better?" If it would have stayed like 8th no one would have done Wrack LG spam. GW changed it on purpose and I am 100% sure they knew it would sell Wracks. Wracks is one of the best money makers for GWDE units, highest cost unit per point that can be spam, its why they are still 8pts, its why AoR was wrack spam. GW is making things unbalanced on purpose from my PoV.
SaganGree wrote: Ok, so when it comes to balance, should we start moving to Tournies where the Armies from each faction have 2 or 3 prebuild lists that you can choose from? I mean if the complaint is that armies are won or lost in the list building stage, then why not remove that variable? It's one of the reason i think the 8th index armies were so successful, if unflavorful. Besides, everyone LOVES a net list right? Why not embrace it?
The problem is, a lot of the power is just easy to see and players gravitate to power anyways. Look at DT Liquifiers for example, within 10min of the leaks most the DE community saw how strong it was without seeing any lists as well as Comp Edge Razorflails. "Oh supercharge flamers with no draw back? lol ok thanks" DE community asked "Why did GW change DT for the better?" If it would have stayed like 8th no one would have done Wrack LG spam. GW changed it on purpose and I am 100% sure they knew it would sell Wracks. Wracks is one of the best money makers for GWDE units, highest cost unit per point that can be spam, its why they are still 8pts, its why AoR was wrack spam. GW is making things unbalanced on purpose from my PoV.
Of that I have no doubt... the last year of Codex releases can support that theory...
Hence the prebuild idea.
If you have a "Council" making the lists for a tournament season, updating as Codexes release and are FAQd, then you should be able to mitigate a lot of that power Skew. Will the problems still persist? Oh yeah, and GW will have to address them but at least we, as a community, can mitigate the stupid, and make the games more fun for 90% of tournament goers.
Wyldhunt wrote: I still like the move to W2 marines; I just don't love the way they power crept everything to accommodate it. Making basic marines W2 seemed like a move towards treating marines as the elite, durable fellows they're promoted as rather than making them the "baseline" "Mario" army. It always felt weird when a lucky laspistol took out a marine on its own, and the second wound is a decent way to address that. Boosting Toughness to 5 wouldn't have addressed that issue because the 'problem' with marine durability wasn't with their average performance so much as with how weird it felt for a bad Sv roll to make them feel oddly squishy.
What probably should have happened is GW should have given them a reasonable price increase that accounted for the new wound and the other buffs they got shortly after. Instead, they cancelled out the boost to marine durability (and lethality) by making everything more lethal.
VladimirHerzog wrote:Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake
Marine players were complaining that their newly W2 Marines were still too squishy long before weapons started getting updated to D2 and bonus AP. Because it's not exactly rocket science: If 60+% of the armies you're going to see on the table are W2/3+ army-wide, you don't take D1 AP0 weapons that are now mostly worthless; you find whatever D2 AP1+ weapons you have in the codex and spam the crap out of them.
Revisionism as its finest.
Really? If you've forgotten threads with titles like 'The Power Armor Problem', let me refresh your memory. Here are some random quotes I have pulled from pre-SM2.0 on this very forum- I've tried to pick ones specifically about access to weapons or about Primaris, not single-wound Marines:
I think the MAIN issue with most MEQ units is the cheap cost for many high-AP multiple-shot devastating weapons that are available to most armies (including other MEQ armies). If access to such weapons was more expensive, or if they were simply less shots, then MEQ might be seen more.
Multi-wound infantry and bikes seem generally overcosted to me this edition. Their prices seem to assume that you're only ever shooting them with single-damage weapons. They're sort of perversely designed because usually they have good armor as well -- you already want to use a high-powered weapon to deny them their save, and lots of those don't care that they have multiple wounds. I'm not sure that such models are generally worth taking unless they come with a significant invulnerable save, at least 4++ for 2 wounds and 3++ for 3.
I have an entire shelf of freshly painted hellblasters, inceptors (plasma and bolter), intercessors (these actually get some run as deathwatch since I can only deepstrike in 3 vet squads and with the new bolter rule they are not terrible for backfield objective holders), aggressors, repulsor and redemptor. All of them are trash when played against any half decent army (eldar soups, imperial soups, tau, orcs, nids and now GSC).
2 wounds 3+ armor save isn't enough to protect units that cost as much as they do.
What is wrong with Space Marines is that 40K has turned into Epic, where you have a proliferation of tanks, vehicles and knights that make common infantry redundant, and the heavy armor of marines worthless.
In general, the issue is armor save modifiers returning. The last time there was armor save mods, it was 2nd edition. The game was very, very different back then. The Marine statline, while virtually identical (your heroes had S5/T5 though IIRC) meant a lot more back then.
Part of it is that they die easily, but are priced as though they are resilient. Before when you had the old AP system, it was all or nothing so most non-special/heavy weapons didn't affect your save. When most weapons now do affect your save, your survivability takes a hit but they haven't gotten anything to really compensate for the game-changing around them. They are priced/positioned the same way as they were in 3rd through 7th edition, but without the survivability since their armor is more easily reduced.
I still find it hillarious that 3+ is *obviously* the problem, especially at such a high PPM, after a year of people complaining about *Dark Reapers* and *Shining Spears*.
The problem isn't the Power Armor. It's that everyone and their dog has AP modifiers. If Ap-1/AP-2 were much rarer, Marines would do a lot better.
The problem with space marines has always been that they are over costed. Previously the problem was that MEQ's paid for a 3+ armour save that they rarely got because everyone took weapons that were AP3 or better - and GW needed to realize that lower their points. Sadly they didn't. Under 8th it isn't as easy as that anymore because most weapons modify armour saves now but marines remain expensive points wise.
IMHO there is nothing competitive about a primaris army. Gunlines with Gulliman are about as good as that's going to get, and some people have had some success with them, but for the most part, too expensive, too fragile, and not fast enough.
For what it's worth, Intercessors are one of the few units that can win a standoff with Guardsmen. However, they will drop pretty quickly to fire from big guns, like Battle Cannons, or special weapons, like Plasmaguns. This is something you can work with, though. It's definitely part of why I wouldn't go all-primaris, though.
The perception that W2 Marines are fragile absolutely did not start in 9th Ed when GW started buffing non-Marine weapons, it's been there since the start of 8th. There are tons and tons and tons and tons of posts like these.
Jidmah wrote: None of the previous editions were anywhere nearly as balanced as the current one is, with no room to argue otherwise. They might have been more fun (which is subjective), but definitely not more balanced.
I think 9th has been some of the worst balance over all though, no other edition has there been so much tabling T1-T2 armies, or insane stated units like 90pt Voidweavers. I'd rather go back to TauDar and HIs 8th than first version of 9ths Orks, Admech, DE, Tau, Quins, etc..., not counting how strong Custodes and Nids where too.
Do I really need to explain to a native speaker what "current" means?
At least in 8th you can ignore silly ITC rules and play Maelstrom where HI were bad at,
9th has two massively popular game modes which do not have ITC rules, including the successor of maelstrom.
and for 7th at leat every army but 2 had broken stuff (and it was really only Daemons and 1 Corsairs formation with the real broken stuff).
Do you really believe that? I mean, if you do, would you mind buying some crystals I charged with comic engery that make your dice roll better? For just $300 per crystal (which totally isn't a piece of a beer bottle that I picked up near a river), it's yours!
I'd like to chime in on the topic why I think Space Marines don't feel durable enough, even though I'm not playing 9th currently.
Everything is too cheap. A lascannon upgrade on a Tactical Marine costs less than either a Tactical or an Intercessor at 15p, while the weapon itself can reliably take out Gravis or Outrider models worth three times the price. At the same time there is no real need to bring dedicated anti-infantry weaponry, as you have so much lower tier weapons in everything, that you can take on the usual trash units from your opponent just fine.
Just for comparison's and argument's sake some unit costs from my Homebew:
- Marine with boltgun 45p
- Marine with a lascannon 100p
- Redemptor Dread with all the upgrades 530p
- Guardsman with a lasrifle 10p
You can't spam high tier weapons, as the cost is too prohibitive. You absolutely need them though, or else the Redemptor (and other combat vehicles) will tear you a new one (thanks to AV making it immune to most damage). But at the same time alot of armies have access to very cheap units that can easily overwhelm your damage output, if you dont account for it and bring at least some weapons with a higher rate of fire. Which in turn are useless against most vehicles.
This is missing from 9th edition. The difference between a heavy bolter and a lascannon are 5p. Who would ever bring the bolter, unless they just happen to have some points over and/or cant buy a better upgrade?
Jidmah wrote: None of the previous editions were anywhere nearly as balanced as the current one is, with no room to argue otherwise. They might have been more fun (which is subjective), but definitely not more balanced.
I think 9th has been some of the worst balance over all though, no other edition has there been so much tabling T1-T2 armies, or insane stated units like 90pt Voidweavers. I'd rather go back to TauDar and HIs 8th than first version of 9ths Orks, Admech, DE, Tau, Quins, etc..., not counting how strong Custodes and Nids where too.
Do I really need to explain to a native speaker what "current" means?
At least in 8th you can ignore silly ITC rules and play Maelstrom where HI were bad at,
9th has two massively popular game modes which do not have ITC rules, including the successor of maelstrom.
and for 7th at leat every army but 2 had broken stuff (and it was really only Daemons and 1 Corsairs formation with the real broken stuff).
Do you really believe that?
I mean, if you do, would you mind buying some crystals I charged with comic engery that make your dice roll better? For just $300 per crystal (which totally isn't a piece of a beer bottle that I picked up near a river), it's yours!
I hate current GT right now and feel its still not all that balanced, Nids and Quins are still destroying people, many armies below 40% win rates, lots of options are literally unplayable now, not weak but I mean actually unplayable, a couple armies were just given VP handicaps instead of being balanced. So I dont agree with "current" either.
Currently only a few Space Marine subfactions have a win rate under 40%.
As in, even Astra Militarum has a win rate of 41%.
At the other side of the spectrum, Tyranids have a 58% win rate as the strongest faction, which is bad but far from the days of the same faction winning first, second and third place of every tournament.
People take units more based on their looks and points cost, not their stats. Look at Ork Boyz as an example, do you see more of them with their improved stats? How about Drukhari Khymera? They weren't taken in 8th, got an AP and S, still not taken in 9th.
Ork boyz aesthetically haven't changed in some time, very few people have the "new" ork boyz models in any kind of number. The reason they fell off a cliff in 9th compared to 8th is because the rules dramatically changed which made them go from B tier units to F Tier units. For most of this edition they were 50% more expensive then they were in 7th (now only 33%) and yeah they gained T5 and Base S4 they also lost morale and a host of other buffs while point for point becoming less durable then they were in 7th.
I don't have a problem with T5 Boys, but I wouldn't agree to the second part. Lore and stats are closely related, even if a 1:1 transition is not possible. It is a bit of a "hen or egg?" topic, but creatures in the fluff do what they do because of their stats (and the plot) and creatures on the table have the stats they have because of the fluff. T10 Gretchins for example would feel very awkward, regardless wether or not you could point them perfectly.
As pointed out already...the Lore is meaningless because it doesn't follow any kind of logic trail, nor is it consistent. In one story you have a single space wolf blood claw slaughtering orkz in their hundreds, in another story you have a single mob of Kommandos gutting the majority of a Space Wolf Company. Basing the game off bolter porn is a stupid premise to be blunt.
There's also a bit of false marketing. "Orks are T5 wow" ran instantly into "nearly every weapon is getting a point of strength and AP or double the shots/reroll everything, so it works out essentially the same as T4 in older editions (possibly worse)."
It isn't "a bit" of false marketing, its a blatant avalanche of bullcrap. Orkz got T5, Mozrog Skragbad got some cool rules. You had the 40k outrage mob out in force. If Jidmah can find the clip I want him to share it, there is a reviewer having a literal melt down over Mozrog saying he would break the game and destroy any semblance of balance. You had SM players, some who are posting on this very thread, screaming the sky was falling because Orkz were T5, they were literally saying Ork boyz needed to be 10-15ppm think i'm lying? 41% of Dakka thought 10-15 was a good points cost of Ork boyz going into the Ork codex https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/798896.page and here we sit a month or more into the "buff" to ork boyz going down to 8ppm and still not seeing any real play....almost like they weren't worth 8pts, let alone the 15 some muppets were calling for.
As for a better solution, personally i'd have just left them how they were, but if they must have a defensive buff, I'd say go for Toughness. If Orks can do it, so can marines, and while small-arms will have an even harder time bringing them down, your dedicated anti-MEQ platforms would still be able to kill them, if not quite as hard as before.
Love the Marine mindset, still not auto-winning your bolter porn fantasies? Better buff Marines even further. Since 7th edition Marines have doubled their ranged firepower, doubled their wounds, doubled their CC attacks turn 1, gained doctrines and super doctrines, lets not forget AoC so functionally 2+ armor (1+ in cover). still not enough though.
VladimirHerzog wrote: Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake
You mean like Heavy Bolters? or do you mean like Melta going to D6+ or D6+4? Marines going to 2 wounds never made sense and it still doesn't because here is the news flash we have been trying to tell Marine players FOREVER! YOU ARE THE BASE LINE!!!!! I can't emphasize that point enough. Marines are by far the most common faction to play against, Power Armor is literally everywhere. When I build my competitive Grand tournament lists I base my stats off how they will size up against Marines because they will most likely be at least 1 of my 5 opponents that day. Hell, during the Custodes/Nidz/Harlequin hay day when they were running away with every event I still ran into a BA player on my 2nd or 3rd game.
Long story short, buffing Marines has no impact on the game because every other faction will adapt to face the new Marine profiles. Or do you think its just a coincidence that Marines got AoC and most factions are now dropping AP-1 weapons unless they can be buffed to AP-2?
I think 9th has been some of the worst balance over all though, no other edition has there been so much tabling T1-T2 armies, or insane stated units like 90pt Voidweavers. I'd rather go back to TauDar and HIs 8th than first version of 9ths Orks, Admech, DE, Tau, Quins, etc..., not counting how strong Custodes and Nids where too.
Orkz had 1 tabling at a top table and the community screamed so much hate and vitriol that GW pushed through a first of its kind, an emergency "FETH ORKZ" patch. Keep in mind that at the time of the nerf to orkz, they were still a lower win/loss rate then Ad mech and DE and were not placing nearly as highly. Its almost like competitive players got butt hurt and screamed at mommy to nerf the big bad orkz who aren't supposed to ever win. As far as going back to 8th....that just shows how little you remember 8th. IH were running away with top placings at events at the end of 8th. I'll happily admit that 9th has its moments, but nowhere near how bad 7th and 8th were.
Amishprn86 wrote: and for 7th at leat every army but 2 had broken stuff (and it was really only Daemons and 1 Corsairs formation with the real broken stuff).
Yeah...that isn't remotely correct. Tau had Triptide wing, Marines had 600pts of free vehicles, Necrons had Decurion, Eldar had...well basically their entire fething codex. Then you had the "have nots" like IG, DE and Orkz. The Ork super formation was 90% of your list in mostly useless units and it gave you....Impact hits on the charge...but only if you rolled a 10+ to charge. So no, 7th was the worst edition i've ever played...literally.
Amishprn86 wrote: I hate current GT right now and feel its still not all that balanced, Nids and Quins are still destroying people, many armies below 40% win rates, lots of options are literally unplayable now, not weak but I mean actually unplayable, a couple armies were just given VP handicaps instead of being balanced. So I dont agree with "current" either.
Last 5 GTs: Alberta Classic: Eldar, Quins, Quins, Quins. Hometown 40k: Sisters, Orkz Custards, nidz Power 9: Quins, Knights, Blood Angels, Custards Trashtics: Nidz, 1k sons, Necrons, Chaos. Rise of Kings: Death Guard, Orkz, Necrons Chaos.
So yeah no, Quins had 1 event where they placed well, other than that they have been about average. And nidz? 2 top 4 finishes in 5 GTs is not "Destroying people".
The perception that W2 Marines are fragile absolutely did not start in 9th Ed when GW started buffing non-Marine weapons, it's been there since the start of 8th. There are tons and tons and tons and tons of posts like these.
In concurrence I'd like to point out that I could build a Marine army in 8th that could spit something like 90+ AP-3 D2/D-D3 shots in a turn. There was already a tremendous amount of weapons that one could spam for anti-MEQ profiles. The 2w thing hit basic weapons and many, many other infantry really hard though, and it's only proper that there be corrections, because certain other units (Banshees, Genestealers, Dire Avengers, Necron Warriors) should absolutely be able to compete with Marines in their respective ways.
a_typical_hero wrote: I'd like to chime in on the topic why I think Space Marines don't feel durable enough, even though I'm not playing 9th currently.
Everything is too cheap. A lascannon upgrade on a Tactical Marine costs less than either a Tactical or an Intercessor at 15p, while the weapon itself can reliably take out Gravis or Outrider models worth three times the price. At the same time there is no real need to bring dedicated anti-infantry weaponry, as you have so much lower tier weapons in everything, that you can take on the usual trash units from your opponent just fine.
Just for comparison's and argument's sake some unit costs from my Homebew:
- Marine with boltgun 45p
- Marine with a lascannon 100p
- Redemptor Dread with all the upgrades 530p
- Guardsman with a lasrifle 10p
You can't spam high tier weapons, as the cost is too prohibitive. You absolutely need them though, or else the Redemptor (and other combat vehicles) will tear you a new one (thanks to AV making it immune to most damage). But at the same time alot of armies have access to very cheap units that can easily overwhelm your damage output, if you dont account for it and bring at least some weapons with a higher rate of fire. Which in turn are useless against most vehicles.
This is missing from 9th edition. The difference between a heavy bolter and a lascannon are 5p. Who would ever bring the bolter, unless they just happen to have some points over and/or cant buy a better upgrade?
^I think this is a really good observation. If the fancier equipment was more expensive, you'd see less of it. If there was less of the fancy stuff around, lethality would go down and basic units/infantry vs. infantry would be more of the game. Some tuning for that meta would be required of course, but the broad strokes argument here is really solid imo.
Lore and stats are absolutely not closely related - first of all lore is wildly inconsistent and second the game is not granular enough to properly portrait it anyways.
The best versions of the rules (scattered throughout the editions) are the ones where the "outlandish" narratives told in books still remain plausible within the framework of the game. And there's a lot of wiggle room in there, specifically because the game involves dice. Because of the fact that the storyteller is often telling an "extraordinary" story, the average dice results aren't the odds being portrayed in a novel.
The problem arises when readers of the books think that these extraordinary narrative circumstances should be the norm. Looking at Marine players, specifically . . .
There's also a dissonance between the story narratives and the scenario that constitutes a typical 2K PUG.
Like "Marines should be able to take on 100,000 Guardsmen!" but then on the tabletop Marines get blown away by a small Guard army. Why is that? It's not because the Marines are statted poorly, it's because 50 Marines decided to start an engagement in front of half a company of battle tanks with gobs of anti-MEQ firepower with clean LOS lines. (That's more of an 8th ed thing but it illustrates the dissociation)
Amishprn86 wrote: and for 7th at leat every army but 2 had broken stuff (and it was really only Daemons and 1 Corsairs formation with the real broken stuff).
Yeah...that isn't remotely correct. Tau had Triptide wing, Marines had 600pts of free vehicles, Necrons had Decurion, Eldar had...well basically their entire fething codex. Then you had the "have nots" like IG, DE and Orkz. The Ork super formation was 90% of your list in mostly useless units and it gave you....Impact hits on the charge...but only if you rolled a 10+ to charge. So no, 7th was the worst edition i've ever played...literally.
Amishprn86 wrote: I hate current GT right now and feel its still not all that balanced, Nids and Quins are still destroying people, many armies below 40% win rates, lots of options are literally unplayable now, not weak but I mean actually unplayable, a couple armies were just given VP handicaps instead of being balanced. So I dont agree with "current" either.
Last 5 GTs: Alberta Classic: Eldar, Quins, Quins, Quins. Hometown 40k: Sisters, Orkz Custards, nidz Power 9: Quins, Knights, Blood Angels, Custards Trashtics: Nidz, 1k sons, Necrons, Chaos. Rise of Kings: Death Guard, Orkz, Necrons Chaos.
So yeah no, Quins had 1 event where they placed well, other than that they have been about average. And nidz? 2 top 4 finishes in 5 GTs is not "Destroying people".
Quins and Nids are dominating, they have a 58-60% win rate and basically auto win vs 1/2 the armies in the game (literally), just bc they dont hit top 1st place doesn't mean they are not wrecking people (Edit, you seem to think you have to win every event to destroy a large group of players on the tables, no you dont need to win every event to do this. There are times you have a 56-60% win rate and not finish as the top player but still make it impossible for the majority of armies to beat you, it just means the other 2-3 top armies can beat you, but good luck if you are not one of them). Maybe look at the whole picture Here are more games from the last weekend with Nids doing extremely well. https://www.reddit.com/r/WarhammerCompetitive/comments/x0n74n/meta_monday_82911_the_age_of_man_is_over/ Here are more detailed stats too https://www.stat-check.com/the-meta . 13 armies are below 45% that is something like 40% of armies are below what is consider acceptable low.
Also about 7th, I say broken, Daemons screamer star was broken, TauDar compare to that was nothing, heck my DE could handle Trip Riptides, if DE can handle that then it wasn't that bad (they were awful in 7th), the other formation was a Corsairs 3 Warp Hunter Apoc Blast D-weapon formation, yeah have fu with a 10" pie plate D weapon shooting you while Insiv and all the Corsair trickery, but I am guessing you have not idea that was even a thing.
As for a better solution, personally i'd have just left them how they were, but if they must have a defensive buff, I'd say go for Toughness. If Orks can do it, so can marines, and while small-arms will have an even harder time bringing them down, your dedicated anti-MEQ platforms would still be able to kill them, if not quite as hard as before.
Love the Marine mindset, still not auto-winning your bolter porn fantasies? Better buff Marines even further. Since 7th edition Marines have doubled their ranged firepower, doubled their wounds, doubled their CC attacks turn 1, gained doctrines and super doctrines, lets not forget AoC so functionally 2+ armor (1+ in cover). still not enough though.
You completely misunderstand the point of that statement. I am Against 2w marines, or buffing them at all. What my statement says (especially if you include the context) is that if we are to take the 8th statline and buff them, don't give them two wounds, give them a toughness point.
Amishprn86 wrote: 13 armies are below 45% that is something like 40% of armies are below what is consider acceptable low.
I need to note that of those 13 "armies", 1 is Imperial soup and 8 are Space Marine subfactions (not counting Grey Knights who actually are their own army).
So it is actually 5 armies below what is considered acceptable (IG, Admech, Daemons, Space Marines and Grey Knighs), with Space Marines being debatable because Blood Angels, Iron Hands and Dark Angels are above 45%.
Jidmah wrote: None of the previous editions were anywhere nearly as balanced as the current one is, with no room to argue otherwise. They might have been more fun (which is subjective), but definitely not more balanced.
This is a very bold statement, have you been active in 40k since Rogue Trader days in a continious manner?
Without that historical perspective your claim has very little weight.
Also balance is a polysemic word and can be understand in different ways... Without further explanation your claim is senseless.
SemperMortis wrote: Marines going to 2 wounds never made sense and it still doesn't because here is the news flash we have been trying to tell Marine players FOREVER! YOU ARE THE BASE LINE!!!!!
But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
Marines can be the baseline due to the high amount of people playing them and still feel special compared to more hord-y armies. It's just a matter of stats, points and a special rule here and there.
SemperMortis wrote: Marines going to 2 wounds never made sense and it still doesn't because here is the news flash we have been trying to tell Marine players FOREVER! YOU ARE THE BASE LINE!!!!!
But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
Sure, but every faction also wants their cool elite troops to feel cool and elite too. I mean, no Guardsman player expects miracles from Guardsmen, but those who play Genestealers, Aspect Warriors or Necrons want those things to also be elite and cool in their own ways. And there's enough units like that out there that the Marine profile shouldn't really be all that outlandish in comparison.
SemperMortis wrote: It isn't "a bit" of false marketing, its a blatant avalanche of bullcrap. Orkz got T5, Mozrog Skragbad got some cool rules. You had the 40k outrage mob out in force. If Jidmah can find the clip I want him to share it, there is a reviewer having a literal melt down over Mozrog saying he would break the game and destroy any semblance of balance. You had SM players, some who are posting on this very thread, screaming the sky was falling because Orkz were T5, they were literally saying Ork boyz needed to be 10-15ppm think i'm lying? 41% of Dakka thought 10-15 was a good points cost of Ork boyz going into the Ork codex https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/798896.page and here we sit a month or more into the "buff" to ork boyz going down to 8ppm and still not seeing any real play....almost like they weren't worth 8pts, let alone the 15 some muppets were calling for.
I definitely remember the internet meltdown on Mozrog that... didn't seem to translate to the table at all. Its kind of the reverse, but there was that weird claim Marines were getting S5 Heavy Intercessors to counter T5 Orks... which clearly didn't happen (they sucked at 28 points per model - and still do).
I'm not sure it actually goes anywhere good - but I think there's clear evidence that the "Professional scene" having clear factional biases and blind spots. And GW seem to listen since they are online making content every week. I think it has made the game more balanced - but also makes the "???" decisions more obvious.
Jidmah wrote: T5 orks are fine for everyone but two kinds of people:
1) people with a hateboner for losing to orks
2) people who use tabletop stats to measure and compare the power of units in the lore
Neither is worth arguing with.
Or Ork players who realize that it made Boyz worse.
SemperMortis wrote: Marines going to 2 wounds never made sense and it still doesn't because here is the news flash we have been trying to tell Marine players FOREVER! YOU ARE THE BASE LINE!!!!!
But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline.
Then about 80-90% of them need to play different armies until Eldar or Tau or Orks or whatever displace Marines as the de facto baseline.
SemperMortis wrote: Marines going to 2 wounds never made sense and it still doesn't because here is the news flash we have been trying to tell Marine players FOREVER! YOU ARE THE BASE LINE!!!!!
But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
Sure, but every faction also wants their cool elite troops to feel cool and elite too. I mean, no Guardsman player expects miracles from Guardsmen, but those who play Genestealers, Aspect Warriors or Necrons want those things to also be elite and cool in their own ways. And there's enough units like that out there that the Marine profile shouldn't really be all that outlandish in comparison.
And bolter porn is brain rot.
You'd have a point if "Bolter porn" wasn't the baseline for the last two decades. That's the standard and y'all need to get over it.
SemperMortis wrote: Marines going to 2 wounds never made sense and it still doesn't because here is the news flash we have been trying to tell Marine players FOREVER! YOU ARE THE BASE LINE!!!!!
But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
Sure, but every faction also wants their cool elite troops to feel cool and elite too. I mean, no Guardsman player expects miracles from Guardsmen, but those who play Genestealers, Aspect Warriors or Necrons want those things to also be elite and cool in their own ways. And there's enough units like that out there that the Marine profile shouldn't really be all that outlandish in comparison.
And bolter porn is brain rot.
You'd have a point if "Bolter porn" wasn't the baseline for the last two decades. That's the standard and y'all need to get over it.
I'll still mercilessly mock anyone who takes it unironically. Not using Armor of Contempt for our narrative league was a great decision; most of the Astartes players left.
SemperMortis wrote: Marines going to 2 wounds never made sense and it still doesn't because here is the news flash we have been trying to tell Marine players FOREVER! YOU ARE THE BASE LINE!!!!!
But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
Sure, but every faction also wants their cool elite troops to feel cool and elite too. I mean, no Guardsman player expects miracles from Guardsmen, but those who play Genestealers, Aspect Warriors or Necrons want those things to also be elite and cool in their own ways. And there's enough units like that out there that the Marine profile shouldn't really be all that outlandish in comparison.
And bolter porn is brain rot.
You'd have a point if "Bolter porn" wasn't the baseline for the last two decades. That's the standard and y'all need to get over it.
I'll still mercilessly mock anyone who takes it unironically. Not using Armor of Contempt for our narrative league was a great decision; most of the Astartes players left.
Thats the fluff for the last two decades. You having a hissyfit and deciding to not include a rule that became necessary due to AP creep is all on you.
EviscerationPlague wrote: You'd have a point if "Bolter porn" wasn't the baseline for the last two decades. That's the standard and y'all need to get over it.
Oh I'm over the fact that BL novels kinda suck.
And up until Primaris the Marine statline was a nice T4W1. That was like just 5 years ago?
Two decades is 2002. That's Necron Warriors at 18 ppm to Marine 15, and Bloodletters at 26ppm iirc.
Wyldhunt wrote:But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
If Marines were T7 and had 4 wounds apiece and 2+ saves, they still wouldn't be elite. You'd just be setting a new baseline, and Marines would still feel mundane and average at that new point. Custodes, assuming they also got buffed to keep up, would still be the army that feels like 'elites' in comparison. And all the non-Marine, non-Custodes factions would just feel horde-ier than ever.
You literally cannot stat your way out of this. The average is 'whatever Marines are'. If you want that to change, they need to stop being, well, the norm.
Karol wrote: Define nice. Because 1W marines of any kind were so bad, that any marine army that could do it would play a few of those nice 1W marines as possible.
Blame the context, not the staline.
If Marines dont hold up against a leafblower guard list, or a 7th ed Eldar Warp Spider Scatbike list, it's not the Marines that needed to be addressed.
SemperMortis wrote: Marines going to 2 wounds never made sense and it still doesn't because here is the news flash we have been trying to tell Marine players FOREVER! YOU ARE THE BASE LINE!!!!!
But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
Sure, but every faction also wants their cool elite troops to feel cool and elite too. I mean, no Guardsman player expects miracles from Guardsmen, but those who play Genestealers, Aspect Warriors or Necrons want those things to also be elite and cool in their own ways. And there's enough units like that out there that the Marine profile shouldn't really be all that outlandish in comparison.
And bolter porn is brain rot.
You'd have a point if "Bolter porn" wasn't the baseline for the last two decades. That's the standard and y'all need to get over it.
A useless/unhealthy standard should never be accepted.
Bolter porn (IE the flanderisation of marines and 40K as a whole) shouldnt be endorsed, even if GW is fully onboard.
If GW publicly and explicitly promoted antisemitism (or any other variety of hate speech) it dosent matter if it did it during many years, its shouldnt be "accepted".
Thats the fluff for the last two decades. You having a hissyfit and deciding to not include a rule that became necessary due to AP creep is all on you.
It's been the fluff that the Imperium is a bunch of ignorant degenerates for longer than that.
Also, whether or not that rule is a good idea is subjective. There's also no secondaries in narrative play, so that changes the dynamic a lot...
EviscerationPlague wrote: You'd have a point if "Bolter porn" wasn't the baseline for the last two decades. That's the standard and y'all need to get over it.
Oh I'm over the fact that BL novels kinda suck.
And up until Primaris the Marine statline was a nice T4W1. That was like just 5 years ago?
Two decades is 2002. That's Necron Warriors at 18 ppm to Marine 15, and Bloodletters at 26ppm iirc.
I don't know what you're on about.
Well the novels clearly aren't too bad if people keep buying them and they, for the most part, get praise. You're referring to rules, and one might say that, if the rules don't reflect the fluff, that needs to be fixed.
Also Necron Warriors sucked back in the day too so that's not really a benchmark or anything.
Source: I played Necrons in 3rd and know how absolutely hyped the Glance ability was vs the math on it. They could've absolutely been buffed too, but the new dynamic of Immortals being the baseline "elite" Necron troop is a lot more awesome.
Wyldhunt wrote:But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
If Marines were T7 and had 4 wounds apiece and 2+ saves, they still wouldn't be elite. You'd just be setting a new baseline, and Marines would still feel mundane and average at that new point. Custodes, assuming they also got buffed to keep up, would still be the army that feels like 'elites' in comparison. And all the non-Marine, non-Custodes factions would just feel horde-ier than ever.
You literally cannot stat your way out of this. The average is 'whatever Marines are'. If you want that to change, they need to stop being, well, the norm.
Highlighted the red text to indicate that I'm aware that the existence of custodes makes it difficult for marines to feel "elite."
I think it's worth pointing out that there's a difference between marines feeling "elite" and marines armies being rare. Yes, marines being a common army irl means that people will always build to try and deal with them. But if you're killing my marines because you loaded up on D2, that still feels better than if you're killing them with bolters and shootas. You took out my marine with a might plasma gun shot? Very good. May the brother die knowing that he could only be felled by such a rare and powerful weapon. You killed a W1 marine with a lucky lasgun shot from 24" away? Oof. It's going to be awkward reporting that one to the chapter. Why are we even bothering with all these extra organs and expensive armor?
For me, W2 does a lot to tell the story that marines are extra-hard-to-kill types with a bit of plot armor slapped on for good measure. If my faction's win rate has to go down as you price them fairly for that extra wound, so be it. But alas, GW made the cost too low (especially when combined with the other buffs around the same time), and then decided to up the killing power of everyone to keep pace with the new wound instead of just setting a reasonable points cost.
I don't have a problem with T5 Boys, but I wouldn't agree to the second part. Lore and stats are closely related, even if a 1:1 transition is not possible. It is a bit of a "hen or egg?" topic, but creatures in the fluff do what they do because of their stats (and the plot) and creatures on the table have the stats they have because of the fluff. T10 Gretchins for example would feel very awkward, regardless wether or not you could point them perfectly.
As pointed out already...the Lore is meaningless because it doesn't follow any kind of logic trail, nor is it consistent. In one story you have a single space wolf blood claw slaughtering orkz in their hundreds, in another story you have a single mob of Kommandos gutting the majority of a Space Wolf Company. Basing the game off bolter porn is a stupid premise to be blunt.
Don't make it out to be like it is impossible from reading some fluff to determine the general capabilities of a given unit. Who said I am basing it on bolter porn? Did I mention any specific stories? Putting words into other people's mouth is a stupid thing to do in a discussion, to be blunt.
Are you telling me that you are not able to even get a rough feeling for what the general power level of a Space Wolves Bloodclaw should be and instead go "could be anything between a Grot (1) and an Emperor titan (10), I don't know everything in my bolter porn is so inconsistent"? Please, give me break.
Wyldhunt wrote:But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
If Marines were T7 and had 4 wounds apiece and 2+ saves, they still wouldn't be elite. You'd just be setting a new baseline, and Marines would still feel mundane and average at that new point. Custodes, assuming they also got buffed to keep up, would still be the army that feels like 'elites' in comparison. And all the non-Marine, non-Custodes factions would just feel horde-ier than ever.
You literally cannot stat your way out of this. The average is 'whatever Marines are'. If you want that to change, they need to stop being, well, the norm.
Highlighted the red text to indicate that I'm aware that the existence of custodes makes it difficult for marines to feel "elite."
I think it's worth pointing out that there's a difference between marines feeling "elite" and marines armies being rare. Yes, marines being a common army irl means that people will always build to try and deal with them. But if you're killing my marines because you loaded up on D2, that still feels better than if you're killing them with bolters and shootas. You took out my marine with a might plasma gun shot? Very good. May the brother die knowing that he could only be felled by such a rare and powerful weapon. You killed a W1 marine with a lucky lasgun shot from 24" away? Oof. It's going to be awkward reporting that one to the chapter. Why are we even bothering with all these extra organs and expensive armor?
For me, W2 does a lot to tell the story that marines are extra-hard-to-kill types with a bit of plot armor slapped on for good measure. If my faction's win rate has to go down as you price them fairly for that extra wound, so be it. But alas, GW made the cost too low (especially when combined with the other buffs around the same time), and then decided to up the killing power of everyone to keep pace with the new wound instead of just setting a reasonable points cost.
The problem is that you don't want to reduce whole armies to just being NPCs with the majority of their troops basically being useless. Lasguns have to be able to trade fire with Space Marines because they will crush my poor little guardsmen in melee. And it also feels pretty bad to just have the lasguns, which is to say, the vast majority of the army, just standing around being cheerleaders and ablative wounds for the guy with the plasma gun. Time and effort goes into painting them as well after all. I personally really dislike facing for instance Custodes where an individual basic model brings more to the table than a whole squad of my guardsmen. Sure, it's a nice power fantasy for the players of these elite armies, but it would be nice for the rest to also have fun and not just be punching bags.
And with Marines being by far the most-played category of armies, that only gets worse because it's not just one game out of so many, it's almost every game where you face marines. I don't like the second wound because it basically halved the value of my guys in most situations and made the rolling of buckets of dice even more useless. To kill a single marine (on average, I know, bad stats), I have to fire 24 lasgun shots. That's more than a full squad's worth at close range (which means that the squad is dead next turn because even a few marines will beat them to a pulp). Against even more elite elites, it becomes far worse with needing huge piles of dice rolling just to have a minor effect.
Are Bolter Porn addicts that believe that every astartes can defeat single handed a whole ork Waagh or IG regiment crying about the tabletop stats of their plastic avatars??
I have lost the sense of this thread long ago, can someone give me a briefing, please?
I think it's worth pointing out that there's a difference between marines feeling "elite" and marines armies being rare.
For practical reasons, there really isn't.
You've also got an additional problem in terms of both how wide 40k's scale is (because some genius thought including Imperial Knights and Baneblades in standard games would be a great idea), and in the sheer number of just Marine units. Even if you put Custodes to one side, you've got to find a niche for Scouts (Marines), Tactical Marines (Elite Marines), Sternguard (Elite Elite Mrines), Primaris Marines (Newer, Eliter Marines), Terminators (Elite Elite Elite Marines), Centurions (Elite Elite Elite Elite Marines), plus the 400 or so sergeants, captains and commanders, and their terminator and primaris versions. Then, on top of that, you have all the variations with their myriad of elites and specialists - like Grey Knights, who are Marines and Terminators but even more elite.
My point is, it's really hard to stat the standard Marines as elites without running out of design space for the dozens and dozens of other Marines units that need to be far more elite.
I think it's worth pointing out that there's a difference between marines feeling "elite" and marines armies being rare. Yes, marines being a common army irl means that people will always build to try and deal with them. But if you're killing my marines because you loaded up on D2, that still feels better than if you're killing them with bolters and shootas. You took out my marine with a might plasma gun shot? Very good. May the brother die knowing that he could only be felled by such a rare and powerful weapon. You killed a W1 marine with a lucky lasgun shot from 24" away? Oof. It's going to be awkward reporting that one to the chapter. Why are we even bothering with all these extra organs and expensive armor?
The problem is, while that might feel better for the Marine player, it's a tiresome experience for the player whose standard weapons might as well be water pistols.
Again, this is the problem with Marines being by far the most played faction (with the runners up being evil Marines). If you have a lot of bolters or splinter weapons or lasguns, then you can probably accept the risk that you might occasionally face Custodes or Knights and end up fishing for a lot of 6s to achieve anything. However, when your standard anti-infantry weapons are grossly inefficient even against the most common infantry in the game, there's no point even bothering.
Hence, an awful lot of units either have to get super-buffed to keep up or else just don't see play and instead people take more tanks or elite units or whatever else has sufficient firepower to actually be worth a damn in that role.
Wyldhunt wrote: But alas, GW made the cost too low (especially when combined with the other buffs around the same time), and then decided to up the killing power of everyone to keep pace with the new wound instead of just setting a reasonable points cost.
This I do agree with. GW seems to want to have its cake and eat it in terms of making Marines elite but also counterintuitively making them relatively cheap. I don't know if this goes back to the above point of there being so many Marine units that the lower ones need to be cheap, but it certainly creates a lot of difficulties.
Wyldhunt wrote: Highlighted the red text to indicate that I'm aware that the existence of custodes makes it difficult for marines to feel "elite."
Just to be clear, I was responding to that. If I gave the impression that I was ignoring your point, I apologize.
What I was getting at is that it's not the existence or lack thereof of Custodes that's the issue, it's the ubiquity of Marines. Even in my Heresy group where there are no Custodes players, Marines never feel 'elite', because... why would they? They're the basic troops of the basic faction. The lore can tell you they're extraordinarily rare supermen but on the tabletop they are the baseline, vanilla, default. Why wouldn't you describe their durability as 'average' when they are the average?
Wyldhunt wrote: I think it's worth pointing out that there's a difference between marines feeling "elite" and marines armies being rare. Yes, marines being a common army irl means that people will always build to try and deal with them. But if you're killing my marines because you loaded up on D2, that still feels better than if you're killing them with bolters and shootas. You took out my marine with a might plasma gun shot? Very good. May the brother die knowing that he could only be felled by such a rare and powerful weapon. You killed a W1 marine with a lucky lasgun shot from 24" away? Oof. It's going to be awkward reporting that one to the chapter. Why are we even bothering with all these extra organs and expensive armor?
In practice, that 'tough against lasguns, weak against plasma' paradigm is not ideal for a couple of reasons:
1. Non-Marine players whose basic weapons are essentially worthless, or require tidal waves of dice to do anything, get frustrated that they have to buy, build, and paint models that might as well just be board-occupying tokens against 80% of armies.
2. Marine players staring down two dozen plasma guns watch their models get blown off the board, and because they're more expensive on account of the second wound, they're points pinatas for those specialized weapons. You might be okay with your Marines getting shot by plasma guns, but over the past couple of years I've read a lot of complaints from Marine players watching their army evaporate to massed plasma, autocannons, disintegrators, heavy bolters, and so on.
The combination of Marines making up a majority of armies and simultaneously having a specialized defensive profile that is very strong against certain weapons but very weak against others creates an obvious incentive to gravitate towards the hard-counter weapons. For Marines to not feel like glass by virtue of being hard-countered by any TAC list, they need to either be a minority on the tabletop (so that loading up on anti-MEQ is a bad idea to begin with), or they need to have a defensive profile so middle-of-the-road that there are no ideal anti-MEQ counters to spam.
GW giving more weapons anti-MEQ capability was throwing a bone to armies that historically have had limited anti-MEQ choices in a MEQ-dominated game; more AP and more D2 was an inevitability, and the alternative is going back to large swathes of each codex staying on the shelf because they don't have a place in Marinehammer 40K.
Vatsetis wrote: Are Bolter Porn addicts that believe that every astartes can defeat single handed a whole ork Waagh or IG regiment crying about the tabletop stats of their plastic avatars??
I have lost the sense of this thread long ago, can someone give me a briefing, please?
SemperMortis wrote: Marines going to 2 wounds never made sense and it still doesn't because here is the news flash we have been trying to tell Marine players FOREVER! YOU ARE THE BASE LINE!!!!!
But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
It is irrelevant what Marine players "Want". The fact remains they are the baseline. And it isn't because GW just randomly chose them to be the baseline to judge stats off of, it is because they are without question the MOST POPULAR army in the game. So if you increase their durability or dmg output then the rest of the game adjusts to meet this new trend. There is literally no baseline stat or rule you can give to Marines to make them feel elite, ever. Let me say that again to be clear, Marines WILL NEVER FEEL ELITE. You could literally give every Marine the Statline of a Dreadnought with 2+ armor and -1dmg and they would still feel flimsy because the entire game would adjust to bring buttloads of Anti-Tank weapons with 3+dmg.
The reason Custodes kind of got away (for a bit) with being "elite" was because they were such a small fraction of the game, but even then look what happened at the tournament level. Custodes became so popular that everyone adjusted fire to target their statline...which also overlapped pretty nicely with most Marine statlines. I mean christ, I went to a GT and 2 of my 5 games were against Custodes players. Out of 40 something odd people, 9-10 were playing custodes.
You'd have a point if "Bolter porn" wasn't the baseline for the last two decades. That's the standard and y'all need to get over it.
It really depends on how you want your bolter porn fantasy to play out. Do you want to auto-win because you are the bestest of best boys with your super special shiny armor Marines? If that is the case...grow up or quit playing because this is a competitive game even when played in a friendly environment and nobody wants to be the NPC army you get to beat up on with ease. Or, do you want as Wyld wants to have your Marines feel special/elite? Do you really want a single Marine to beat 20-30 Ork boyz with ease? If that is the case then as I mentioned, you will have to pay the points cost for it, every Marine should have a dreadnoughts statline and be priced as such. Your army is now 10-20 Models total...Also, i'm no longer bringing 60-120 Ork boyz to fight you, i'm bringing Mek Gunz and Tankbustas to kill you with impunity from cover because i'm not into playing an NPC race for you to have your power trip on.
Don't make it out to be like it is impossible from reading some fluff to determine the general capabilities of a given unit. Who said I am basing it on bolter porn? Did I mention any specific stories? Putting words into other people's mouth is a stupid thing to do in a discussion, to be blunt.
Are you telling me that you are not able to even get a rough feeling for what the general power level of a Space Wolves Bloodclaw should be and instead go "could be anything between a Grot (1) and an Emperor titan (10), I don't know everything in my bolter porn is so inconsistent"? Please, give me break.
First off, that wasn't a hit specifically against you, but rather the concept of basing the game off fluff...its impossible.
As to your first point, yes its impossible to determine a units general capabilities from fluff because you have dozens if not hundreds of authors who have written fluff for GW for decades. Look at Brothers of the Snake, by Dan Abnett (One of the best 40k writers ever). He has a SINGLE Space Marine defeating an entire Dark Eldar raiding party of hundreds. Ragnar Blackmane series has Ragnar as a bloodclaw soloing hundreds of orkz with impunity. Now go read Star of Damocles or any other faction book that doesn't play into the bolter porn mindset, A single Tau battlesuit defeats a squad of Marines with relative ease. I can site example after example, there is literally no way to judge anything's power level by the fluff, hell the writers can't even get numbers right let alone stats The 3rd War of Armageddon was supposed to have been the biggest battle/deployment of Marines and guardsmen since the Horus Heresy....had fewer troops than the allies deployed during WW1 on the Western Front. Also, i'm glad you brought up Emperor Titans, and Titans in general. How many points is the smallest Titans? (Warhound titans) I think they are like 2k, I don't play them ever so i'm guessing at this point but I remember someone saying they were basically a single model army. Now, how many points is Girlyman...or Primarchs in general? 500-700 roughly? good. OK, now how many points is a Warlord Titan supposed to be? Ridiculously expensive like 5,500 right? Ok. Now...in the fluff, Sanguinius, a 400-700pt model Solo'd a Warlord Titan. So are we then supposed to price Sangy at 5,600pts? I mean, he killed a Warlord Titan by himself so therefore his power level is higher right?
All of that is to just really emphasize the point that you can't base the game on fluff because none of it is written with any kind of continuity in mind.
GW giving more weapons anti-MEQ capability was throwing a bone to armies that historically have had limited anti-MEQ choices in a MEQ-dominated game; more AP and more D2 was an inevitability, and the alternative is going back to large swathes of each codex staying on the shelf because they don't have a place in Marinehammer 40K.
Oh look, more Revisionism. Anti-MEQ was never a problem ever since 5th edition LOL
GW giving more weapons anti-MEQ capability was throwing a bone to armies that historically have had limited anti-MEQ choices in a MEQ-dominated game; more AP and more D2 was an inevitability, and the alternative is going back to large swathes of each codex staying on the shelf because they don't have a place in Marinehammer 40K.
Oh look, more Revisionism. Anti-MEQ was never a problem ever since 5th edition LOL
Also not true.
Orks relied upon Power Klaws hidden in blobs of 30 boyz to kill MEQ, they also spammed Rokkits wherever possible. SO yes, up until 8th, for Orkz Anti-Meq was a problem.
For those wondering how bad Ork boyz used to be against MEQs. Ork boyz got 2 attacks base, and a 3rd for having 2 CC weapons. 30 Boyz was 180pts, PK was 25pts (I think) and the BP which was required basically, was 5pts, so a normal mob of boyz was 210pts. 10 MEQs without upgrades was 150pts. Marines swing first, 12 attacks, 6 hits, 3 wounds and basically 3 dead Ork boyz. 26 Boyz swing back with 78 attacks, 39 hits, 13 wounds and 4.3 dead Boyz. The Nob then got to swing last with his PK with 3 attacks, 1.5 hits and 1.25 dead Marines. So 210pts of Orkz in CC killed.... 83pts of Marines.
GW giving more weapons anti-MEQ capability was throwing a bone to armies that historically have had limited anti-MEQ choices in a MEQ-dominated game; more AP and more D2 was an inevitability, and the alternative is going back to large swathes of each codex staying on the shelf because they don't have a place in Marinehammer 40K.
Oh look, more Revisionism. Anti-MEQ was never a problem ever since 5th edition LOL
Also not true.
Orks relied upon Power Klaws hidden in blobs of 30 boyz to kill MEQ, they also spammed Rokkits wherever possible. SO yes, up until 8th, for Orkz Anti-Meq was a problem.
For those wondering how bad Ork boyz used to be against MEQs. Ork boyz got 2 attacks base, and a 3rd for having 2 CC weapons. 30 Boyz was 180pts, PK was 25pts (I think) and the BP which was required basically, was 5pts, so a normal mob of boyz was 210pts. 10 MEQs without upgrades was 150pts. Marines swing first, 12 attacks, 6 hits, 3 wounds and basically 3 dead Ork boyz. 26 Boyz swing back with 78 attacks, 39 hits, 13 wounds and 4.3 dead Boyz. The Nob then got to swing last with his PK with 3 attacks, 1.5 hits and 1.25 dead Marines. So 210pts of Orkz in CC killed.... 83pts of Marines.
That's not too bad a trade.
Orks lost 1/10th of their unit and killed 1/2 a marine unit.
What's the comparison like now?
GW giving more weapons anti-MEQ capability was throwing a bone to armies that historically have had limited anti-MEQ choices in a MEQ-dominated game; more AP and more D2 was an inevitability, and the alternative is going back to large swathes of each codex staying on the shelf because they don't have a place in Marinehammer 40K.
Oh look, more Revisionism. Anti-MEQ was never a problem ever since 5th edition LOL
Also not true.
Orks relied upon Power Klaws hidden in blobs of 30 boyz to kill MEQ, they also spammed Rokkits wherever possible. SO yes, up until 8th, for Orkz Anti-Meq was a problem.
For those wondering how bad Ork boyz used to be against MEQs. Ork boyz got 2 attacks base, and a 3rd for having 2 CC weapons. 30 Boyz was 180pts, PK was 25pts (I think) and the BP which was required basically, was 5pts, so a normal mob of boyz was 210pts. 10 MEQs without upgrades was 150pts. Marines swing first, 12 attacks, 6 hits, 3 wounds and basically 3 dead Ork boyz. 26 Boyz swing back with 78 attacks, 39 hits, 13 wounds and 4.3 dead Boyz. The Nob then got to swing last with his PK with 3 attacks, 1.5 hits and 1.25 dead Marines. So 210pts of Orkz in CC killed.... 83pts of Marines.
That's not too bad a trade.
Orks lost 1/10th of their unit and killed 1/2 a marine unit.
What's the comparison like now?
Note that that assumes you just... Appear in Close Combat.
Realistically, the Marines are gonna be shooting you well before you make it there.
GW giving more weapons anti-MEQ capability was throwing a bone to armies that historically have had limited anti-MEQ choices in a MEQ-dominated game; more AP and more D2 was an inevitability, and the alternative is going back to large swathes of each codex staying on the shelf because they don't have a place in Marinehammer 40K.
Oh look, more Revisionism. Anti-MEQ was never a problem ever since 5th edition LOL
Also not true.
Orks relied upon Power Klaws hidden in blobs of 30 boyz to kill MEQ, they also spammed Rokkits wherever possible. SO yes, up until 8th, for Orkz Anti-Meq was a problem.
For those wondering how bad Ork boyz used to be against MEQs. Ork boyz got 2 attacks base, and a 3rd for having 2 CC weapons. 30 Boyz was 180pts, PK was 25pts (I think) and the BP which was required basically, was 5pts, so a normal mob of boyz was 210pts. 10 MEQs without upgrades was 150pts. Marines swing first, 12 attacks, 6 hits, 3 wounds and basically 3 dead Ork boyz. 26 Boyz swing back with 78 attacks, 39 hits, 13 wounds and 4.3 dead Boyz. The Nob then got to swing last with his PK with 3 attacks, 1.5 hits and 1.25 dead Marines. So 210pts of Orkz in CC killed.... 83pts of Marines.
That's not too bad a trade.
Orks lost 1/10th of their unit and killed 1/2 a marine unit.
What's the comparison like now?
Note that that assumes you just... Appear in Close Combat.
Realistically, the Marines are gonna be shooting you well before you make it there.
The Orks will also be shooting the SMs....
And in those days each unsaved wounds on the SMs end equaled a dead Marine.
GW giving more weapons anti-MEQ capability was throwing a bone to armies that historically have had limited anti-MEQ choices in a MEQ-dominated game; more AP and more D2 was an inevitability, and the alternative is going back to large swathes of each codex staying on the shelf because they don't have a place in Marinehammer 40K.
Oh look, more Revisionism. Anti-MEQ was never a problem ever since 5th edition LOL
Also not true.
Orks relied upon Power Klaws hidden in blobs of 30 boyz to kill MEQ, they also spammed Rokkits wherever possible. SO yes, up until 8th, for Orkz Anti-Meq was a problem.
For those wondering how bad Ork boyz used to be against MEQs. Ork boyz got 2 attacks base, and a 3rd for having 2 CC weapons. 30 Boyz was 180pts, PK was 25pts (I think) and the BP which was required basically, was 5pts, so a normal mob of boyz was 210pts. 10 MEQs without upgrades was 150pts. Marines swing first, 12 attacks, 6 hits, 3 wounds and basically 3 dead Ork boyz. 26 Boyz swing back with 78 attacks, 39 hits, 13 wounds and 4.3 dead Boyz. The Nob then got to swing last with his PK with 3 attacks, 1.5 hits and 1.25 dead Marines. So 210pts of Orkz in CC killed.... 83pts of Marines.
That's not too bad a trade.
Orks lost 1/10th of their unit and killed 1/2 a marine unit.
What's the comparison like now?
Note that that assumes you just... Appear in Close Combat.
Realistically, the Marines are gonna be shooting you well before you make it there.
The Orks will also be shooting the SMs....
And in those days each unsaved wounds on the SMs end equaled a dead Marine.
12" Pistol with S4 AP6 or AP- (I forget which, but it's irrelevant) and BS2.
If all 30 are in range, that's 10 hits, 5 wounds, and 1-2 dead Marines.
Whereas the Marines shoot from 24" away with Rapid Fire S4 AP5 and BS4.
That's 10 shots, 20/3 hits, 10/3 wounds, and 3-4 dead Boys at max range. Double that to 6-7 in half range.
EviscerationPlague wrote: You'd have a point if "Bolter porn" wasn't the baseline for the last two decades. That's the standard and y'all need to get over it.
Oh I'm over the fact that BL novels kinda suck.
And up until Primaris the Marine statline was a nice T4W1. That was like just 5 years ago?
Two decades is 2002. That's Necron Warriors at 18 ppm to Marine 15, and Bloodletters at 26ppm iirc.
I don't know what you're on about.
Well the novels clearly aren't too bad if people keep buying them and they, for the most part, get praise.
Riiiiight. . . . Well let's just say they won't be winning any Nebulas anytime soon. People can be entertained and find value even though the writing is not great, and the storytelling is tropey and full of holes.
EviscerationPlague wrote: Also Necron Warriors sucked back in the day too so that's not really a benchmark or anything.
Source: I played Necrons in 3rd and know how absolutely hyped the Glance ability was vs the math on it. They could've absolutely been buffed too, but the new dynamic of Immortals being the baseline "elite" Necron troop is a lot more awesome.
Necron Warriors didn't suck. More importantly, they didn't suck compared to Marines. Source: I played both Necrons and Marines in 3rd/4th.
Orks relied upon Power Klaws hidden in blobs of 30 boyz to kill MEQ, they also spammed Rokkits wherever possible. SO yes, up until 8th, for Orkz Anti-Meq was a problem.
EviscerationPlague either has poor memory or seems to think that a codex having maybe 2-3 decent ways to kill MEQs is fine and dandy, but either way I already showed that his last claim of 'revisionism' was bs and I can't be bothered to do it again when he never addressed it.
What I will say is good riddance to the days of every Tyranid list starting with a unit of Hive Guard, basic troops like Guardians being little more than cannon fodder, and ostensibly anti-Marine specialists like Howling Banshees and Incubi getting yeeted by Intercessors. Fact is the game is often a Marine-fest and units/weapons that are awful against Marines don't see nearly as much play as units/weapons that counter them.
Wyldhunt wrote:But to be fair, I don't think most marine players want marines to be the baseline. Or at least, they don't want them to be statted like they're "average." They want marines to feel special, powerful, and few in number because that's the marine power fantasy/sales pitch. They (we) want marines to feel tough; we don't want to describe their durability as "average." Basically, we want marines to feel a lot like custodes. Which makes the existence of custodes as a faction kind of frustrating.
If Marines were T7 and had 4 wounds apiece and 2+ saves, they still wouldn't be elite. You'd just be setting a new baseline, and Marines would still feel mundane and average at that new point. Custodes, assuming they also got buffed to keep up, would still be the army that feels like 'elites' in comparison. And all the non-Marine, non-Custodes factions would just feel horde-ier than ever.
You literally cannot stat your way out of this. The average is 'whatever Marines are'. If you want that to change, they need to stop being, well, the norm.
Highlighted the red text to indicate that I'm aware that the existence of custodes makes it difficult for marines to feel "elite."
I think it's worth pointing out that there's a difference between marines feeling "elite" and marines armies being rare. Yes, marines being a common army irl means that people will always build to try and deal with them. But if you're killing my marines because you loaded up on D2, that still feels better than if you're killing them with bolters and shootas. You took out my marine with a might plasma gun shot? Very good. May the brother die knowing that he could only be felled by such a rare and powerful weapon. You killed a W1 marine with a lucky lasgun shot from 24" away? Oof. It's going to be awkward reporting that one to the chapter. Why are we even bothering with all these extra organs and expensive armor?
For me, W2 does a lot to tell the story that marines are extra-hard-to-kill types with a bit of plot armor slapped on for good measure. If my faction's win rate has to go down as you price them fairly for that extra wound, so be it. But alas, GW made the cost too low (especially when combined with the other buffs around the same time), and then decided to up the killing power of everyone to keep pace with the new wound instead of just setting a reasonable points cost.
Here's a better way to look at it, imo. HOW are the Marines supposed to be getting their elite value? By just being able to stand in the open and tank incoming AT fire? The Astartes animation is widely praised for making the Marines feel nice and elite, but even those guys take cover from heavy firepower.
Here's a good question. How many Marines should it take to kill a Marine? Like, just a squad of Marines firing bolters at another squad of Marines? Right now it takes 10 Marines, Rapid Firing, to kill a single Marine in the open. Does that feel appropriate? If Marines were 3W each and a 2+ save, that goes to 50 Marines without changing the Bolter. Does that feel right?
Now, you could change the Bolter to compensate. . . but then naturally you have to change the Heavy Bolter. So what does the new Heavy Bolter look like? But then realize that the Heavy Bolter is ubiquitous among the Imperial Armies. If every Guard squad is getting a Heavy Bolter, and a Heavy Bolter is better than your standard Bolter, what does that really mean for the survivability for Marines in a world where dozens of Heavy Bolters (and much stronger weapons) can be fielded?
GW giving more weapons anti-MEQ capability was throwing a bone to armies that historically have had limited anti-MEQ choices in a MEQ-dominated game; more AP and more D2 was an inevitability, and the alternative is going back to large swathes of each codex staying on the shelf because they don't have a place in Marinehammer 40K.
Oh look, more Revisionism. Anti-MEQ was never a problem ever since 5th edition LOL
Also not true.
Orks relied upon Power Klaws hidden in blobs of 30 boyz to kill MEQ, they also spammed Rokkits wherever possible. SO yes, up until 8th, for Orkz Anti-Meq was a problem.
That "after 5th" thing seems weird to me since Orks had Choppas which reduced Marines saves to 4+ in 3rd and most of 4th, and they were pretty capable of laying the hurt on. Plus they were piloting looted Leman Russes with AP3 Battle Cannons (or Basilisks).
One has to realize that basic loyalist Marines in the context of 40K just aren't that special. They're on par with Aspect Warriors, Necron immortals, Ork nobz, Incubi, maybe Genestealers.
They're inferior to Crisis Suits, Custodes, Cult Marines and Tyranid Warriors.
What can give them the edge is their armor combined with strong leadership and training and a solid yet not extremely deadly weaponry.
The start of 9th saw actual Elite Marines, but what happened was that things that were supposed to be just as awesome became cannon fodder.
We still have that problem with Gravis armor. Marines shouldn't be the faction that can go full on T5 and 3 wounds everywhere when Necrons, Death Guard and Custodes exist with partly worse stats. (note, this is not really a question of gaming strength in my view but more about immersion).
How to make marines feel elite: all models must be fully painted to a battle-ready standard and 100% WYSIWYG, and you may not play the game if marine models make up more than 10% of your fully painted and WYSIWYG collection by point cost. If you have not played at least ten games since the last game in which you used marines you may not include marines in your army.
GW giving more weapons anti-MEQ capability was throwing a bone to armies that historically have had limited anti-MEQ choices in a MEQ-dominated game; more AP and more D2 was an inevitability, and the alternative is going back to large swathes of each codex staying on the shelf because they don't have a place in Marinehammer 40K.
Oh look, more Revisionism. Anti-MEQ was never a problem ever since 5th edition LOL
Also not true.
Orks relied upon Power Klaws hidden in blobs of 30 boyz to kill MEQ, they also spammed Rokkits wherever possible. SO yes, up until 8th, for Orkz Anti-Meq was a problem.
For those wondering how bad Ork boyz used to be against MEQs. Ork boyz got 2 attacks base, and a 3rd for having 2 CC weapons. 30 Boyz was 180pts, PK was 25pts (I think) and the BP which was required basically, was 5pts, so a normal mob of boyz was 210pts. 10 MEQs without upgrades was 150pts. Marines swing first, 12 attacks, 6 hits, 3 wounds and basically 3 dead Ork boyz. 26 Boyz swing back with 78 attacks, 39 hits, 13 wounds and 4.3 dead Boyz. The Nob then got to swing last with his PK with 3 attacks, 1.5 hits and 1.25 dead Marines. So 210pts of Orkz in CC killed.... 83pts of Marines.
That's not too bad a trade.
Orks lost 1/10th of their unit and killed 1/2 a marine unit.
What's the comparison like now?
Note that that assumes you just... Appear in Close Combat.
Realistically, the Marines are gonna be shooting you well before you make it there.
The Orks will also be shooting the SMs....
And in those days each unsaved wounds on the SMs end equaled a dead Marine.
12" Pistol with S4 AP6 or AP- (I forget which, but it's irrelevant) and BS2.
If all 30 are in range, that's 10 hits, 5 wounds, and 1-2 dead Marines.
Whereas the Marines shoot from 24" away with Rapid Fire S4 AP5 and BS4.
That's 10 shots, 20/3 hits, 10/3 wounds, and 3-4 dead Boys at max range. Double that to 6-7 in half range.
1-2 dead marines is not irrelevant. That's 1-2 marines who don't get to swing back 1st.
You've also apparently never seen anyone supporting their would-be chargers with fire from other units to soften up a target.
Oh wow. Lots of responses to my posts over the last day or so. I'll try to hit as many points as I can without making this response too long. (I will fail, but I'll try all the same.)
Dolnikan wrote:
The problem is that you don't want to reduce whole armies to just being NPCs with the majority of their troops basically being useless. Lasguns have to be able to trade fire with Space Marines because they will crush my poor little guardsmen in melee. And it also feels pretty bad to just have the lasguns, which is to say, the vast majority of the army, just standing around being cheerleaders and ablative wounds for the guy with the plasma gun. Time and effort goes into painting them as well after all. I personally really dislike facing for instance Custodes where an individual basic model brings more to the table than a whole squad of my guardsmen. Sure, it's a nice power fantasy for the players of these elite armies, but it would be nice for the rest to also have fun and not just be punching bags...
I don't like the second wound because it basically halved the value of my guys in most situations and made the rolling of buckets of dice even more useless. To kill a single marine (on average, I know, bad stats), I have to fire 24 lasgun shots.
So a couple of things here:
A.) The extra wound on marines costs points. It didn't cost enough points when it came out (I won't hazard to speak to whether it costs enough now), but it's not free. So while your lasguns are indeed less efficient as a result of the second wound, each marine they do kill represents a bigger percentage of your opponent's army than before. I think we'd have been better off tweaking the cost of W2 marines rather than making everyone more lethal to compensate. That way, marines can enjoy tanking lots of shots, but they're also fielding fewer bodies and feeling the shots that do get through.
B.) I understand not wanting the lasgun guys to feel like cheerleaders, but I also kind of feel like that's how IG are intentionally designed at the moment? Needing lots of guardsmen to kill marines and being pretty bad at it except with special weapons seems (broadly) consistent with the lore. And I know, lore shouldn't dictate rules, but I don't think GW is crazy for landing on cheerleader guardsmen. I'm sure you could make a very solid case for shrinking the gap between guardsmen and marines, but I also think the current interpretation is a reasonable one. tldr; cheerleader lasguns are kind of working as intended I guess?
vipoid wrote:
You've also got an additional problem in terms of both how wide 40k's scale is (because some genius thought including Imperial Knights and Baneblades in standard games would be a great idea), and in the sheer number of just Marine units. Even if you put Custodes to one side, you've got to find a niche for Scouts (Marines), Tactical Marines (Elite Marines), Sternguard (Elite Elite Mrines), Primaris Marines (Newer, Eliter Marines), Terminators (Elite Elite Elite Marines), Centurions (Elite Elite Elite Elite Marines), plus the 400 or so sergeants, captains and commanders, and their terminator and primaris versions. Then, on top of that, you have all the variations with their myriad of elites and specialists - like Grey Knights, who are Marines and Terminators but even more elite.
Good points. My selfish and unreasonable preference would probably be for superheavies to not be in 40k at all and for the super-duper-elite factions (custodes, GK, DW) to get the imperial agents treatment. A lot of my stance is based on the idea that part of the marine identity is being the "main character" plot-armored faction who perform a bit above and beyond what they reasonably should because protagonist powers. And to clarify, I don't mean that marines should be OP or anything. I just mean that the aforementioned traits are part of what i perceive their "gimmick" to be. And if the game is going to include even more super special variations on the same basic concept, then it kind of leaves marines without a narrative or playstyle niche.
Basically, I feel like W2 tacticals/intercessors are in roughly the right place for the faction. I'm okay with termies/gravis units being even tougher because they're rare and more expensive. The faction as a whole could absolutely stand to merge a few datasheets. Tacticals and Intercessors can just be one datasheet, for instance.
Again, this is the problem with Marines being by far the most played faction (with the runners up being evil Marines). If you have a lot of bolters or splinter weapons or lasguns, then you can probably accept the risk that you might occasionally face Custodes or Knights and end up fishing for a lot of 6s to achieve anything. However, when your standard anti-infantry weapons are grossly inefficient even against the most common infantry in the game, there's no point even bothering.
I hear you. I feel like this falls into my point above about finding the right price for the improved marine statline. I believe there's a balanced marine statline to be had somewhere between the old W1 firstborn stats and the current custodes stats. A statline with enough durability and offense to be relevant but expensive enough to be balanced. That's where I'd like marines to be. Not sure if the current statline is that or not.
catbarf wrote:
Wyldhunt wrote: Highlighted the red text to indicate that I'm aware that the existence of custodes makes it difficult for marines to feel "elite."
Just to be clear, I was responding to that. If I gave the impression that I was ignoring your point, I apologize.
Fair. The internet, and all that.
What I was getting at is that it's not the existence or lack thereof of Custodes that's the issue, it's the ubiquity of Marines. Even in my Heresy group where there are no Custodes players, Marines never feel 'elite', because... why would they? They're the basic troops of the basic faction. The lore can tell you they're extraordinarily rare supermen but on the tabletop they are the baseline, vanilla, default. Why wouldn't you describe their durability as 'average' when they are the average?
...
In practice, that 'tough against lasguns, weak against plasma' paradigm is not ideal for a couple of reasons:
1. Non-Marine players whose basic weapons are essentially worthless, or require tidal waves of dice to do anything, get frustrated that they have to buy, build, and paint models that might as well just be board-occupying tokens against 80% of armies.
2. Marine players staring down two dozen plasma guns watch their models get blown off the board, and because they're more expensive on account of the second wound, they're points pinatas for those specialized weapons. You might be okay with your Marines getting shot by plasma guns, but over the past couple of years I've read a lot of complaints from Marine players watching their army evaporate to massed plasma, autocannons, disintegrators, heavy bolters, and so on.
...
The combination of Marines making up a majority of armies and simultaneously having a specialized defensive profile that is very strong against certain weapons but very weak against others creates an obvious incentive to gravitate towards the hard-counter weapons. For Marines to not feel like glass by virtue of being hard-countered by any TAC list, they need to either be a minority on the tabletop (so that loading up on anti-MEQ is a bad idea to begin with), or they need to have a defensive profile so middle-of-the-road that there are no ideal anti-MEQ counters to spam.
You make good points. (And so does SemperMortis in a much more off-putting internet voice.) This is probably my own unreasonable and unpopular opinion, but I'm kind of okay with marines dying in droves to anti-marine weapons. If the narrative we're telling is that my marines charged an enemy with plasmaguns coming out their ears, then it's reasonable that they'd lose a lot of guys as part of that attack. I think there are interesting discussions to be had on perhaps limiting how heavily we can skew our weapon/unit selections and on the unhealthiness of GW promoting one faction so much more heavily than others, but those seem like their own topics to me. For what 40k is, plasma guns being pricey and also good at killing marines seems like it's working as intended.
Wyldhunt wrote: B.) I understand not wanting the lasgun guys to feel like cheerleaders, but I also kind of feel like that's how IG are intentionally designed at the moment? Needing lots of guardsmen to kill marines and being pretty bad at it except with special weapons seems (broadly) consistent with the lore. And I know, lore shouldn't dictate rules, but I don't think GW is crazy for landing on cheerleader guardsmen. I'm sure you could make a very solid case for shrinking the gap between guardsmen and marines, but I also think the current interpretation is a reasonable one. tldr; cheerleader lasguns are kind of working as intended I guess?
If that's the case then lasguns need to stop being weapons. A squad of guardsmen should have a single plasma gun and a "fire lasguns" special rule that gives them a suppressing fire debuff or D3 mortal wounds or whatever instead of rolling attacks. It's really bad game design to have to roll buckets of dice for very little effect.
Good points. My selfish and unreasonable preference would probably be for superheavies to not be in 40k at all and for the super-duper-elite factions (custodes, GK, DW) to get the imperial agents treatment. A lot of my stance is based on the idea that part of the marine identity is being the "main character" plot-armored faction who perform a bit above and beyond what they reasonably should because protagonist powers. And to clarify, I don't mean that marines should be OP or anything. I just mean that the aforementioned traits are part of what i perceive their "gimmick" to be. And if the game is going to include even more super special variations on the same basic concept, then it kind of leaves marines without a narrative or playstyle niche.
The problem is this undermines the concept of marines being elite. If marines are the "main character" faction that gets most of the lore focus, power beyond what is reasonable, etc, then they're going to continue to be the most common faction. And when marines make up 75% of the game there is no possible stat line that will ever make them feel elite, they'll always be by definition average. You'll have marines as the average, a couple horde armies as cannon fodder trash, and maybe a couple special units of GK/custodes as elites. No matter how many buffs you pile onto marines that design goal guarantees that all you will ever do is power creep what is considered average.
Wyldhunt wrote: B.) I understand not wanting the lasgun guys to feel like cheerleaders, but I also kind of feel like that's how IG are intentionally designed at the moment? Needing lots of guardsmen to kill marines and being pretty bad at it except with special weapons seems (broadly) consistent with the lore. And I know, lore shouldn't dictate rules, but I don't think GW is crazy for landing on cheerleader guardsmen. I'm sure you could make a very solid case for shrinking the gap between guardsmen and marines, but I also think the current interpretation is a reasonable one. tldr; cheerleader lasguns are kind of working as intended I guess?
If that's the case then lasguns need to stop being weapons. A squad of guardsmen should have a single plasma gun and a "fire lasguns" special rule that gives them a suppressing fire debuff or D3 mortal wounds or whatever instead of rolling attacks. It's really bad game design to have to roll buckets of dice for very little effect.
I mean, I don't disagree. Honestly, I feel like 2k games are too big for 40k's system. Too many models. Too many dice. Too much killing power packed into too small a space. I think guard (and the game as a whole really) would benefit from the "intended" game size shrinking down to like, 750-1250ish, and then tuning the stats and rules around armies of that size. Lasguns and bolters both matter more when there aren't six artillery pieces evaporating the models carrying them or simply taking out their intended targets faster and more efficiently. Plus, you'd cut down on the number of dice rolls considerably.
Good points. My selfish and unreasonable preference would probably be for superheavies to not be in 40k at all and for the super-duper-elite factions (custodes, GK, DW) to get the imperial agents treatment. A lot of my stance is based on the idea that part of the marine identity is being the "main character" plot-armored faction who perform a bit above and beyond what they reasonably should because protagonist powers. And to clarify, I don't mean that marines should be OP or anything. I just mean that the aforementioned traits are part of what i perceive their "gimmick" to be. And if the game is going to include even more super special variations on the same basic concept, then it kind of leaves marines without a narrative or playstyle niche.
The problem is this undermines the concept of marines being elite. If marines are the "main character" faction that gets most of the lore focus, power beyond what is reasonable, etc, then they're going to continue to be the most common faction. And when marines make up 75% of the game there is no possible stat line that will ever make them feel elite, they'll always be by definition average. You'll have marines as the average, a couple horde armies as cannon fodder trash, and maybe a couple special units of GK/custodes as elites. No matter how many buffs you pile onto marines that design goal guarantees that all you will ever do is power creep what is considered average.
I feel like people are conflating "average" as in the average army a player faces when they go to the game store and "average" as in the power level of the faction compared to other factions. I don't mind marine armies being common or the meta being designed around them. I just want a tactical marine to feel appreciably more durable to small arms fire than a guardsman. To me, it's about the story that the stats and rules tell. At times, a W1 marine and a scion in carapace armor felt concerningly similar in terms of durability. A W2 marine and that same scion don't.
And quick disclaimer: I do play marines, but I'm mostly an aeldari guy. So please know that if anything my biases lean against marines rather than in their favor.
Vatsetis wrote: Obsesion with "eliteness" is a very juvenile approach to a wargame... And 40k is a Wargame not just the projection of your ******* fantasies.
40K galaxy is huge... A tactical marine (or an Intercessor) is not a particularly big fish in that pond.
As I've said above, lore shouldn't dictate rules. That said, part of the appeal of 40k is telling stories and representing the characteristics of the characters in those stories through the game rules. I like my eldar to feel fast, I like my necrons to feel high-tech and relentless, and I like my marines to feel "elite."
A marine isn't a big deal next to, say, a daemon prince, but he should probably be significantly more powerful than a scion or a sister. And to me, the 2nd wound goes a long way towards that.
I think part of the problem is how densely we pack models on the table. It hinders the manoeuvre part of the game and generates so much firepower. Points for models and especially weapons have greatly reduced over the editions. Compare a 3rd edition SM army with a current SM army. The smaller battlefield many insist on using doesn't help either.
GW giving more weapons anti-MEQ capability was throwing a bone to armies that historically have had limited anti-MEQ choices in a MEQ-dominated game; more AP and more D2 was an inevitability, and the alternative is going back to large swathes of each codex staying on the shelf because they don't have a place in Marinehammer 40K.
Oh look, more Revisionism. Anti-MEQ was never a problem ever since 5th edition LOL
Also not true.
Orks relied upon Power Klaws hidden in blobs of 30 boyz to kill MEQ, they also spammed Rokkits wherever possible. SO yes, up until 8th, for Orkz Anti-Meq was a problem.
For those wondering how bad Ork boyz used to be against MEQs. Ork boyz got 2 attacks base, and a 3rd for having 2 CC weapons. 30 Boyz was 180pts, PK was 25pts (I think) and the BP which was required basically, was 5pts, so a normal mob of boyz was 210pts. 10 MEQs without upgrades was 150pts. Marines swing first, 12 attacks, 6 hits, 3 wounds and basically 3 dead Ork boyz. 26 Boyz swing back with 78 attacks, 39 hits, 13 wounds and 4.3 dead Boyz. The Nob then got to swing last with his PK with 3 attacks, 1.5 hits and 1.25 dead Marines. So 210pts of Orkz in CC killed.... 83pts of Marines.
That's not too bad a trade.
Orks lost 1/10th of their unit and killed 1/2 a marine unit.
What's the comparison like now?
Note that that assumes you just... Appear in Close Combat.
Realistically, the Marines are gonna be shooting you well before you make it there.
The Orks will also be shooting the SMs....
And in those days each unsaved wounds on the SMs end equaled a dead Marine.
12" Pistol with S4 AP6 or AP- (I forget which, but it's irrelevant) and BS2.
If all 30 are in range, that's 10 hits, 5 wounds, and 1-2 dead Marines.
Whereas the Marines shoot from 24" away with Rapid Fire S4 AP5 and BS4.
That's 10 shots, 20/3 hits, 10/3 wounds, and 3-4 dead Boys at max range. Double that to 6-7 in half range.
1-2 dead marines is not irrelevant. That's 1-2 marines who don't get to swing back 1st.
You've also apparently never seen anyone supporting their would-be chargers with fire from other units to soften up a target.
Which makes the charge harder.
And you’re now comparing a 210 point of Orks plus other army shooting against 150 points of Marines, unsupported.
Wyldhunt wrote:You make good points. (And so does SemperMortis in a much more off-putting internet voice.) This is probably my own unreasonable and unpopular opinion, but I'm kind of okay with marines dying in droves to anti-marine weapons. If the narrative we're telling is that my marines charged an enemy with plasmaguns coming out their ears, then it's reasonable that they'd lose a lot of guys as part of that attack. I think there are interesting discussions to be had on perhaps limiting how heavily we can skew our weapon/unit selections and on the unhealthiness of GW promoting one faction so much more heavily than others, but those seem like their own topics to me. For what 40k is, plasma guns being pricey and also good at killing marines seems like it's working as intended.
Hey, that's reasonable. I'm just saying, a lot of Marine players don't seem to feel that way- they feel like their Marines are squishy overall, and they're right, because a TAC list is an anti-MEQ list and that means they're participating in a meta designed to kill them.
I'd also be open to revision on those ancillary factors like access to weaponry, but that's a very fine line to walk without it either becoming un-fun for the non-Marine armies ('What are we supposed to use, harsh language?') or having knock-on effects on balance (if anti-MEQ weapons become rare, how do you deal with Knights?).
And of course there's the looming background problem of GW trying to preserve legacy statlines while in the fiction, Marines have gone from transhuman special forces to nigh-invulnerable demigods with a heaping dash of Mary Sue.
Wyldhunt wrote:I feel like people are conflating "average" as in the average army a player faces when they go to the game store and "average" as in the power level of the faction compared to other factions. I don't mind marine armies being common or the meta being designed around them. I just want a tactical marine to feel appreciably more durable to small arms fire than a guardsman. To me, it's about the story that the stats and rules tell. At times, a W1 marine and a scion in carapace armor felt concerningly similar in terms of durability. A W2 marine and that same scion don't.
This is where I think GW screwed the pooch in the transition from 7th to 8th, because the changes to wounding and AP mechanics had a huge impact on relative durability and GW seemingly just ignored the implications.
In 7th Ed when a Guardsman gets hit by a bolter, it's a wound on 3+ and no save. A W1 Marine is wounded on 4+ and gets his 3+ save. The Marine's more durable by a factor of 4. In 8th/9th when a Guardsman gets hit with a bolt rifle, it's a wound on 3+ and he gets a 6+ save, while a Marine is wounded on 4+ and gets a 4+ save. The Marine is now only more durable by a factor of 2.22- a comparative durability of half what it used to be. So you give the Marine a second wound, and that makes up for it, except...
In 7th Ed a Scion gets hit with a heavy bolter. Wounds on 2+, no save. Splattered. A Marine is wounded on a 3+ and still gets a 3+ save. 3.75 times more durable. Now the Scion is only wounded on 3+ and gets a 5+ save, and the Marine gets a 4+ save, and the net result is the Marine is only 1.33 times more durable. This holds true even if the Marine has two wounds, because the heavy bolter is now D2.
The breakpoint system created much more distinction in actual, practical utility between a 3+ save, a 4+ save, and a 5+ save, carving out specific weapons that each level of protection was vulnerable to. With the modifier system that went out the window, and hitting that AP-1 breakpoint increases anti-MEQ effectiveness by a whopping 50%.
And more generally speaking the new wounding system creates much less of a differentiation between low-S and high-S weapons. That's more relevant to vehicles than Marines, but it's there too. I think if GW was less focused on trying to port over the 7th Ed statlines without changes, the logical thing to do would be to expand out both Strength/Toughness and saves, and they could do a lot to boost Marine durability (and that of heavy infantry in general) without needing W2 and creating that obvious weakness to D2 weapons.
1-2 dead marines is not irrelevant. That's 1-2 marines who don't get to swing back 1st.
You've also apparently never seen anyone supporting their would-be chargers with fire from other units to soften up a target.
And suddenly the comparison of 210pts of Orkz barely killing half a unit of Tac Marines in CC is now going to include shooting and apparently other parts of the army shooting....yeah no bud. The point being made was that Prior to 8th, Orkz lacked a lot of tools that we have now in regards to dealing with Power Armor. Most of our army was shooting based but it was terrible, the old meme of buckets of dice ring a bell?
@Catbarf:
Well-put. I pretty much agree with all of that. The only thing I'd nitpick is that the old wound/save system, although it differentiated between marines and guardsmen much better, still resulted in guardsmen one-shotting marines sometimes. Which, that's not the end of the world, but with W2 marines, it just feels more "earned"? This definitely isn't a hill I want to die on, but it is less frustrating when a single lasgunner manages to get two unsaved wounds through versus just the one. For me, I think it's because getting unlucky and dying to a single unsaved wound (even if your average durability against lasguns is reasonable) feels like it "ignored" your Toughness and Save (even though it didn't) through a quirk of the system.
Basically, caveman brain no like averages. Caveman brain want see lasgun earn kills by getting through second hitpoint.
Wyldhunt wrote: I feel like people are conflating "average" as in the average army a player faces when they go to the game store and "average" as in the power level of the faction compared to other factions.
We are, because the two are inherently linked. When one faction (in its various different colors) makes up 75% of the game that faction is by definition the average. No matter how much you stat creep all of that one faction's rules it will never feel elite. At best you can push down some of the other factions from "below average" to "wow this cannon fodder is trash" but the only way you're ever going to make marines feel elite is to make the basic GEQ stat line the most common faction and marines an occasional guest star.
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Wyldhunt wrote: @Catbarf:
Well-put. I pretty much agree with all of that. The only thing I'd nitpick is that the old wound/save system, although it differentiated between marines and guardsmen much better, still resulted in guardsmen one-shotting marines sometimes. Which, that's not the end of the world, but with W2 marines, it just feels more "earned"? This definitely isn't a hill I want to die on, but it is less frustrating when a single lasgunner manages to get two unsaved wounds through versus just the one. For me, I think it's because getting unlucky and dying to a single unsaved wound (even if your average durability against lasguns is reasonable) feels like it "ignored" your Toughness and Save (even though it didn't) through a quirk of the system.
Basically, caveman brain no like averages. Caveman brain want see lasgun earn kills by getting through second hitpoint.
That seems like a very particular personal preference thing that doesn't apply generally, and TBH that kind of preference shouldn't dictate game design.
I don't feel like a Gauss Flayer should take two failed armor saves to kill a Marine. I don't feel like a Marine should be able to effectively ignore Lasguns.
Wyldhunt wrote: I feel like people are conflating "average" as in the average army a player faces when they go to the game store and "average" as in the power level of the faction compared to other factions.
We are, because the two are inherently linked. When one faction (in its various different colors) makes up 75% of the game that faction is by definition the average. No matter how much you stat creep all of that one faction's rules it will never feel elite. At best you can push down some of the other factions from "below average" to "wow this cannon fodder is trash" but the only way you're ever going to make marines feel elite is to make the basic GEQ stat line the most common faction and marines an occasional guest star.
Respectfully, I think we might be talking past each other. I get that marines are the most common faction and that, on a meta level, they are the mode opponent that you will face. All I'm really saying is that I want marines to have a low model count, significantly better offense/defense than a guardsman, and an appropriately high points cost to match. To me, the 1W marines (especially in 8th edition) seemed like they were falling short in the "significantly better defense" category. At 2W, I'm pretty happy with how they feel. Your mileage may vary.
That seems like a very particular personal preference thing that doesn't apply generally, and TBH that kind of preference shouldn't dictate game design.
That's fair. W1 marines weren't the worst thing ever. I just very much notice the upsides of them now being W2.
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TheBestBucketHead wrote: I don't feel like a Gauss Flayer should take two failed armor saves to kill a Marine.
Oh? Why not? To be fair, gauss weapons do kind of feel like they've translated poorly into 8th and 9th from previous editions, but surviving a gauss wound doesn't seem out of the question. In the lore, it seems like gauss is kind of all over the place in terms of how long the disintegration effect keeps going. Is it unreasonable to think that gauss might be prone to putting big holes in marines but not quite taking them out of the fight?
I don't feel like a Marine should be able to effectively ignore Lasguns.
Ignore? Definitely not. Exactly how effective do you feel lasguns should be against marines though? Because I feel like it should take more than one or two dudes to reliably pew pew a marine out of the fight.
Wyldhunt wrote: Because I feel like it should take more than one or two dudes to reliably pew pew a marine out of the fight.
Er, I get not liking the possibility of a random Commissar one-shotting a Marine, but even when Marines were W1 it took an entire squad of Guardsmen all rapid firing within 12" to average killing a single Marine (with still a ~35% chance of doing nothing at all).
The situation now is that you need two squads rapid firing or four squads not-rapid-firing to kill one W2 Marine, hence why we have escalatory buffs like FRFSRF straight-up doubling fire output, and HotE throwing out mortal wounds as a kludge fix.
And even then, you roll an absolute gakload of dice for not a lot to happen. Discounting HotE, it takes an average of ~61 dice rolls between both players to resolve the shooting of a basic Infantry Squad under FRFSRF, with the average end result of a single model being removed from the table- exactly as it was with W1 Marines, except it takes longer to get there.
Wyldhunt wrote: Respectfully, I think we might be talking past each other. I get that marines are the most common faction and that, on a meta level, they are the mode opponent that you will face. All I'm really saying is that I want marines to have a low model count, significantly better offense/defense than a guardsman, and an appropriately high points cost to match. To me, the 1W marines (especially in 8th edition) seemed like they were falling short in the "significantly better defense" category. At 2W, I'm pretty happy with how they feel. Your mileage may vary.
No, I get what you're saying, my point is that all of these things are influenced by how common a faction is. Take "low model count" for example. Let's say you have 20 marines = 40 guardsmen. Marines feel like a normal army, guard feels like a horde army. Now let's make the marines more elite so that it's 10 marines = 80 guardsmen. Marines still feel like a normal army, except guard are now an extreme and barely playable horde of useless cannon fodder. The only way to make marines feel like a low model count army instead of a typical army in a low model count skirmish game is to make marines a minority so that when they have half the model count of the enemy it feels like a low model count army vs. a normal army.
The same thing is true for all the other stuff. When marines are 75% of the game no amount of defense will feel "significantly better", a positive statement about the marines. It will always be perceived as "wow that other faction sucks" with marines still feeling average. Marines will never feel like they have a high point cost because marine point costs set the reference for what is perceived as high vs. low. Marines at 100ppm would still feel like an average-cost army, it would just be that GW re-scaled the point system so that 20,000 points is a normal game instead of 2000. And yeah, marines might feel really durable against lasguns in one sense because now the guard player is rolling twice as many dice to kill one, but you're still losing the same number of marines per turn because they're rolling twice as many dice. It just takes longer for the guard player to play with their dice and tell you how many marines to remove.
Wyldhunt wrote: Because I feel like it should take more than one or two dudes to reliably pew pew a marine out of the fight.
Er, I get not liking the possibility of a random Commissar one-shotting a Marine, but even when Marines were W1 it took an entire squad of Guardsmen all rapid firing within 12" to average killing a single Marine (with still a ~35% chance of doing nothing at all).
The situation now is that you need two squads rapid firing or four squads not-rapid-firing to kill one W2 Marine, hence why we have escalatory buffs like FRFSRF straight-up doubling fire output, and HotE throwing out mortal wounds as a kludge fix.
And even then, you roll an absolute gakload of dice for not a lot to happen. Discounting HotE, it takes an average of ~61 dice rolls between both players to resolve the shooting of a basic Infantry Squad under FRFSRF, with the average end result of a single model being removed from the table- exactly as it was with W1 Marines, except it takes longer to get there.
Yeah, I'd like to know what Wyldhunt feels is the "appropriate" amount of Lagun shots here.
One of the biggest issues here is also the assumed default marine 'lens' everything is seen through. I'm not talking about the game average, I'm talking about the qualitative perspective.
The lens is always how tough marines should be, or how effective they should be and the imagery is based on the ridiculous wankery GW has produced for them.
ie, it's all seen from a marine=protagonist perspective and everything else should be balanced against how protagonisty they are.
But put an ork as the protagonist and you're asking, why should a single bolt wound kill an ork when they can live without limbs, where their healing systems are better than marines?
Why don't they knock their enemies to the ground when they charge them because they're so big and heavy. Why is it than an ork choppa, thicker than a human forearm, can't cleave a marine's arm off when swung with the force of a monstrous ork?
or an eldar aspect who is so fast and accurate, that they should be able slice a marine's head off, 2 wounds or not. Or step out of the way of incoming fire and so on.
There are innumerable ways in which you can justify any one army being as or more effective than another.
It's just everyone defaults to making sure marines and marine players' feelings are taken care of and everyone else is left to clean up the slops and be happy with it.
So I say either treat every army like they're the protagonists and give them rules commensurate with their individual awesomeness, or treat none of them like that and abstractify them into balanced armies.
Hellebore wrote: One of the biggest issues here is also the assumed default marine 'lens' everything is seen through. I'm not talking about the game average, I'm talking about the qualitative perspective.
The lens is always how tough marines should be, or how effective they should be and the imagery is based on the ridiculous wankery GW has produced for them.
ie, it's all seen from a marine=protagonist perspective and everything else should be balanced against how protagonisty they are.
But put an ork as the protagonist and you're asking, why should a single bolt wound kill an ork when they can live without limbs, where their healing systems are better than marines?
Why don't they knock their enemies to the ground when they charge them because they're so big and heavy. Why is it than an ork choppa, thicker than a human forearm, can't cleave a marine's arm off when swung with the force of a monstrous ork?
or an eldar aspect who is so fast and accurate, that they should be able slice a marine's head off, 2 wounds or not. Or step out of the way of incoming fire and so on.
There are innumerable ways in which you can justify any one army being as or more effective than another.
It's just everyone defaults to making sure marines and marine players' feelings are taken care of and everyone else is left to clean up the slops and be happy with it.
So I say either treat every army like they're the protagonists and give them rules commensurate with their individual awesomeness, or treat none of them like that and abstractify them into balanced armies.
In fairness, I do think that this is at least partially a result of Marines being the benchmark. In essence, you need to establish how the eliteness of a Marine will be represented, then you can start balancing other factions' elites around that.
The problem is that we usually spend so long arguing about what the benchmark should be, the edition changes before we can even get on to what other factions should be like.
Marine armies are currently composed of 30-40 models.
Can't get more elite than that.
But that's because Marines have ended up being 20-40 points each, which happened because they got extra wounds, damage output boosts etc, which people are saying they shouldn't have got.
I mean I'm fairly happy where things are.
Not really sure on benchmarks and so on. We've had periods where Marines are top tier and we've had periods when they've been kind of weak. The fact they are the poster boys doesn't change - the fact the meta probably has an anti-marine slant due to their preponderance doesn't change (and its usually most preponderant when they are most overpowered).
Marine armies are currently composed of 30-40 models.
Can't get more elite than that.
But that's because Marines have ended up being 20-40 points each, which happened because they got extra wounds, damage output boosts etc, which people are saying they shouldn't have got.
I mean I'm fairly happy where things are.
Not really sure on benchmarks and so on. We've had periods where Marines are top tier and we've had periods when they've been kind of weak. The fact they are the poster boys doesn't change - the fact the meta probably has an anti-marine slant due to their preponderance doesn't change (and its usually most preponderant when they are most overpowered).
The rules however do.
Honestly they should have gotten that stuff and should be a smaller army, we should not see 90+ marines on the table (I would say even 60 is too high). The problem is the damage is so high in the game even 40-50 models doesn't feel like enough at times.
Tyel 806411 11426121 wrote:
But that's because Marines have ended up being 20-40 points each, which happened because they got extra wounds, damage output boosts etc, which people are saying they shouldn't have got.
I mean I'm fairly happy where things are.
Not really sure on benchmarks and so on. We've had periods where Marines are top tier and we've had periods when they've been kind of weak. The fact they are the poster boys doesn't change - the fact the meta probably has an anti-marine slant due to their preponderance doesn't change (and its usually most preponderant when they are most overpowered).
The rules however do.
Only the look of marine armies didn't happen because of the extra wound. It happened because the regular intercessor, scout, tactical marine are very bad. And basing your army on them is a very bad idea. That is why marine armies are based around termintors, sang guard, venguard veterans etc Oddly enough the most horde marine army are the fringe marine ones like BT or GK. Specialy GK are an example of a "horde" army and they would be even more horde, if the rule of 3 wasn't a thing for infantry.
Wyldhunt wrote: Because I feel like it should take more than one or two dudes to reliably pew pew a marine out of the fight.
Er, I get not liking the possibility of a random Commissar one-shotting a Marine, but even when Marines were W1 it took an entire squad of Guardsmen all rapid firing within 12" to average killing a single Marine (with still a ~35% chance of doing nothing at all).
The situation now is that you need two squads rapid firing or four squads not-rapid-firing to kill one W2 Marine, hence why we have escalatory buffs like FRFSRF straight-up doubling fire output, and HotE throwing out mortal wounds as a kludge fix.
And even then, you roll an absolute gakload of dice for not a lot to happen. Discounting HotE, it takes an average of ~61 dice rolls between both players to resolve the shooting of a basic Infantry Squad under FRFSRF, with the average end result of a single model being removed from the table- exactly as it was with W1 Marines, except it takes longer to get there.
Yeah, I'd like to know what Wyldhunt feels is the "appropriate" amount of Lagun shots here.
You know, 10 lasguns killing one dude does seem about right. I'll have to reconsider my stance. The second wound still "feels right" on the marine side of things, but I do want the humble lasgunners to be relevant.
Backspacehacker wrote: Calling it now, we are going to see super wounds that cant be saved at all, they will be like mortal wounds but even more powerful.
Tyel 806411 11426121 wrote:
But that's because Marines have ended up being 20-40 points each, which happened because they got extra wounds, damage output boosts etc, which people are saying they shouldn't have got.
I mean I'm fairly happy where things are.
Not really sure on benchmarks and so on. We've had periods where Marines are top tier and we've had periods when they've been kind of weak. The fact they are the poster boys doesn't change - the fact the meta probably has an anti-marine slant due to their preponderance doesn't change (and its usually most preponderant when they are most overpowered).
The rules however do.
Only the look of marine armies didn't happen because of the extra wound. It happened because the regular intercessor, scout, tactical marine are very bad. And basing your army on them is a very bad idea. That is why marine armies are based around termintors, sang guard, venguard veterans etc Oddly enough the most horde marine army are the fringe marine ones like BT or GK. Specialy GK are an example of a "horde" army and they would be even more horde, if the rule of 3 wasn't a thing for infantry.
Small clarification: the Ro3 doesn't apply to Troops. And GK have great troops.
Backspacehacker wrote: Calling it now, we are going to see super wounds that cant be saved at all, they will be like mortal wounds but even more powerful.
The Nightbringer gives you a cheery wave.
This stuff bothers me more then stat creep.
Armor saves, damage that ignores armor, invulnerable saves, things that ignore invulns. MWs, etc. etc. it’s a game of one upmanship and power creep that’s getting wildly out of hand.
Backspacehacker wrote: Calling it now, we are going to see super wounds that cant be saved at all, they will be like mortal wounds but even more powerful.
The Nightbringer gives you a cheery wave.
While the Nightbringer is the bane of my Custodes, I can tolerate it since severing the mortal cord is kind of its thing. Really hope that ability doesn't start to seep into other units.
Backspacehacker wrote: Calling it now, we are going to see super wounds that cant be saved at all, they will be like mortal wounds but even more powerful.
The Nightbringer gives you a cheery wave.
While the Nightbringer is the bane of my Custodes, I can tolerate it since severing the mortal cord is kind of its thing. Really hope that ability doesn't start to seep into other units.
Oo
it already has, there are several other models and relics that do the same.
Reaper of Oblitrax for Nids being the most obvious example.
The soon to be released Voltann have a normal HQ that has a weapon that ignores wound ignoring effects
and I'm probably forgetting another way somewhere in some army.
Backspacehacker wrote: Calling it now, we are going to see super wounds that cant be saved at all, they will be like mortal wounds but even more powerful.
The Nightbringer gives you a cheery wave.
This stuff bothers me more then stat creep.
Armor saves, damage that ignores armor, invulnerable saves, things that ignore invulns. MWs, etc. etc. it’s a game of one upmanship and power creep that’s getting wildly out of hand.
Wyldhunt wrote: Because I feel like it should take more than one or two dudes to reliably pew pew a marine out of the fight.
Er, I get not liking the possibility of a random Commissar one-shotting a Marine, but even when Marines were W1 it took an entire squad of Guardsmen all rapid firing within 12" to average killing a single Marine (with still a ~35% chance of doing nothing at all).
The situation now is that you need two squads rapid firing or four squads not-rapid-firing to kill one W2 Marine, hence why we have escalatory buffs like FRFSRF straight-up doubling fire output, and HotE throwing out mortal wounds as a kludge fix.
And even then, you roll an absolute gakload of dice for not a lot to happen. Discounting HotE, it takes an average of ~61 dice rolls between both players to resolve the shooting of a basic Infantry Squad under FRFSRF, with the average end result of a single model being removed from the table- exactly as it was with W1 Marines, except it takes longer to get there.
Yeah, I'd like to know what Wyldhunt feels is the "appropriate" amount of Lagun shots here.
You know, 10 lasguns killing one dude does seem about right. I'll have to reconsider my stance. The second wound still "feels right" on the marine side of things, but I do want the humble lasgunners to be relevant.
Cool.
My follow up question is how many Marines (firing bolters) should it take to kill a Marine?
Wyldhunt wrote: Because I feel like it should take more than one or two dudes to reliably pew pew a marine out of the fight.
Er, I get not liking the possibility of a random Commissar one-shotting a Marine, but even when Marines were W1 it took an entire squad of Guardsmen all rapid firing within 12" to average killing a single Marine (with still a ~35% chance of doing nothing at all).
The situation now is that you need two squads rapid firing or four squads not-rapid-firing to kill one W2 Marine, hence why we have escalatory buffs like FRFSRF straight-up doubling fire output, and HotE throwing out mortal wounds as a kludge fix.
And even then, you roll an absolute gakload of dice for not a lot to happen. Discounting HotE, it takes an average of ~61 dice rolls between both players to resolve the shooting of a basic Infantry Squad under FRFSRF, with the average end result of a single model being removed from the table- exactly as it was with W1 Marines, except it takes longer to get there.
Yeah, I'd like to know what Wyldhunt feels is the "appropriate" amount of Lagun shots here.
You know, 10 lasguns killing one dude does seem about right. I'll have to reconsider my stance. The second wound still "feels right" on the marine side of things, but I do want the humble lasgunners to be relevant.
Cool.
My follow up question is how many Marines (firing bolters) should it take to kill a Marine?
Well marines are both unkillable and can kill everything... So when a marine tries to kill a marine, the setting resets (IE implodes).
Backspacehacker wrote: Calling it now, we are going to see super wounds that cant be saved at all, they will be like mortal wounds but even more powerful.
The Nightbringer gives you a cheery wave.
This stuff bothers me more then stat creep.
Armor saves, damage that ignores armor, invulnerable saves, things that ignore invulns. MWs, etc. etc. it’s a game of one upmanship and power creep that’s getting wildly out of hand.
Sounds like Warhammer?
I get that rules can have exceptions. But how many layers deep do we need to go? We are stacking exceptions on top of exceptions. It’s one thing if it’s a special rule on a named character or unique relic. Should “ignore invulns” be a basic tag on standard gear? I don’t think it should, but that’s obviously my opinion. YMMV.
Intercessor does, with no buffs and at 30”, 4/27 damage for 20 Points (assuming the normal bolt rifle) or .0074 Damage Per Point.
Guardsman does, with no buffs outside Hammer of the Emperor and at 24”, 1/27 damage for 6 points, or .0062 Damage Per Point.
Wyldhunt wrote: Because I feel like it should take more than one or two dudes to reliably pew pew a marine out of the fight.
Er, I get not liking the possibility of a random Commissar one-shotting a Marine, but even when Marines were W1 it took an entire squad of Guardsmen all rapid firing within 12" to average killing a single Marine (with still a ~35% chance of doing nothing at all).
The situation now is that you need two squads rapid firing or four squads not-rapid-firing to kill one W2 Marine, hence why we have escalatory buffs like FRFSRF straight-up doubling fire output, and HotE throwing out mortal wounds as a kludge fix.
And even then, you roll an absolute gakload of dice for not a lot to happen. Discounting HotE, it takes an average of ~61 dice rolls between both players to resolve the shooting of a basic Infantry Squad under FRFSRF, with the average end result of a single model being removed from the table- exactly as it was with W1 Marines, except it takes longer to get there.
Yeah, I'd like to know what Wyldhunt feels is the "appropriate" amount of Lagun shots here.
You know, 10 lasguns killing one dude does seem about right. I'll have to reconsider my stance. The second wound still "feels right" on the marine side of things, but I do want the humble lasgunners to be relevant.
Cool.
My follow up question is how many Marines (firing bolters) should it take to kill a Marine?
My gut says 3ish, and my sloppy math says that intercessors are in roughly the right spot for that. If we ignore AoC, that is.
Shooting: 3 intercessors = 3 bolters = 6 shots = 4 hits = 2 wounds at AP-1 = 1 unsaved wound.
Melee: 3 charging intercessors = 9 attacks = 6 hits = 3 wounds at AP 0 = 1 unsaved wound.
So 3 intercessors kill about 1 marine in a single turn.
Tacticals do a bit worse due to their lower number of melee attacks and the lack of AP on their bolters but presumably bump their performance up a bit if you factor in a special weapon. Personally, I like the idea of just giving tac marines intercessor stats and merging the datasheets together (basically giving intercessors access to special weapons). So a 5-man squad with 3 bolt rifles and two special weapons (sergeant and special weapon guy) would kill 1 marine plus whatever the special weapon guys do. I'm too lazy to crunch more numbers, but I think a plasmagunner plus a power sword intercessor sergeant kill something like 4ish guys between their shooting and melee? Less if they're rocking meltas instead of plasma and less than that if they went for flamers or didn't take a power sword on the sergeant or something.
My gut says that's about right, and as we all know, my gut is the best possible authority on how to balance 40k.
Wyldhunt wrote: Because I feel like it should take more than one or two dudes to reliably pew pew a marine out of the fight.
Er, I get not liking the possibility of a random Commissar one-shotting a Marine, but even when Marines were W1 it took an entire squad of Guardsmen all rapid firing within 12" to average killing a single Marine (with still a ~35% chance of doing nothing at all).
The situation now is that you need two squads rapid firing or four squads not-rapid-firing to kill one W2 Marine, hence why we have escalatory buffs like FRFSRF straight-up doubling fire output, and HotE throwing out mortal wounds as a kludge fix.
And even then, you roll an absolute gakload of dice for not a lot to happen. Discounting HotE, it takes an average of ~61 dice rolls between both players to resolve the shooting of a basic Infantry Squad under FRFSRF, with the average end result of a single model being removed from the table- exactly as it was with W1 Marines, except it takes longer to get there.
Yeah, I'd like to know what Wyldhunt feels is the "appropriate" amount of Lagun shots here.
You know, 10 lasguns killing one dude does seem about right. I'll have to reconsider my stance. The second wound still "feels right" on the marine side of things, but I do want the humble lasgunners to be relevant.
Cool.
My follow up question is how many Marines (firing bolters) should it take to kill a Marine?
My gut says 3ish, and my sloppy math says that intercessors are in roughly the right spot for that. If we ignore AoC, that is.
Shooting: 3 intercessors = 3 bolters = 6 shots = 4 hits = 2 wounds at AP-1 = 1 unsaved wound.
Melee: 3 charging intercessors = 9 attacks = 6 hits = 3 wounds at AP 0 = 1 unsaved wound.
So 3 intercessors kill about 1 marine in a single turn.
Tacticals do a bit worse due to their lower number of melee attacks and the lack of AP on their bolters but presumably bump their performance up a bit if you factor in a special weapon. Personally, I like the idea of just giving tac marines intercessor stats and merging the datasheets together (basically giving intercessors access to special weapons). So a 5-man squad with 3 bolt rifles and two special weapons (sergeant and special weapon guy) would kill 1 marine plus whatever the special weapon guys do. I'm too lazy to crunch more numbers, but I think a plasmagunner plus a power sword intercessor sergeant kill something like 4ish guys between their shooting and melee? Less if they're rocking meltas instead of plasma and less than that if they went for flamers or didn't take a power sword on the sergeant or something.
My gut says that's about right, and as we all know, my gut is the best possible authority on how to balance 40k.
^Ok, nice. I think 3 Marines to kill a Marine is a reasonable place to be. But of course you're now looking at a 1W Marine and getting rid of AoC. So how do we feel about that?
The other relationship would be to look at how well the Marines kill the GEQ in return. With the AP-1 Bolter a squad of 5 Marines get 3.68 kills, Rapid Firing. Under the old AP system you'd be looking at 4.43 (which feels more appropriate to me). Or you could just give the GEQ a 6+ save instead (which was actually their 2nd edition save.)
Edit: Incidentally I ran the numbers for 2nd edition and got about the same numbers.
GEQ @ MEQ 10x.5x.333x.5 = .83w (Lasguns had AP-1, but only Space Marines could Rapid Fire, Lasguns only shot once)
MEQ @ MEQ 3x2x.666x.5x.5=.999w
MEQ @ GEQ 5x2x.666x.666= 4.4w
Insectum7 wrote: Edit2:
Oh yeah, gentle reminder that it takes fuggin 9 Marines to kill a Marine right now. Even Intercessors because of AoC. 9x2x.666x.5x.333=1.99w.
Insectum7 wrote: Oh yeah, gentle reminder that it takes fuggin 9 Marines to kill a Marine right now. Even Intercessors because of AoC. 9x2x.666x.5x.333=1.99w.
Your math is wrong. You need to include the re-roll to hit, re-roll to wound, +1 to hit, +1 to wound, automatic wounds on 6s to hit, -2 AP on 6s to wound, exploding 6s to hit, additional -2 AP, and at least one use of the shoot twice stratagem. Once you account for all that one marine kills nine marines per turn.
This just highlights the problem with 40k: the lack of lethality. Base stats alone are a hilarious slap fight where units can stand in the open trading fire and never kill each other within a full 5-turn game, so to actually have anything die you have to pile on layer after layer after layer of buffs. And then once you add some "bespoke" defensive special rules you need to pile on even more offensive special rules to make up for it, in an ever-increasing arms race until it finally reaches a point where the game isn't playable anymore. What GW needs to do is dump 90% of the special rules and make the basic stat lines work properly.
The thing is if Marines are meant to be relatively tough then they must also be relatively pillowfisted to compensate in a balanced game - since its all relative to the points. In which case you'd expect Marine on Marine fights to trade at a lower exchange rate than something more front forward - like say a Guardian on Guardian fight. (I'd also flag up that - marines are almost certainly getting more attacks in the future (cos CSM), and are meant to be a combined shooting/assaulting unit, in a way say guardians are not so much.)
Then "tough but low damage unit" meeting "fragile but high damage unit" should both counter each other out, and trade somewhere in the middle.
If something has top tier offense and defense for the points - i.e. relative to everything else in the game - then its inevitably going to be overpowered. The meta generally consists of locating such units - in combinations such that you also have a lot of movement capabilities so you can control the table and score/deny objectives.
Tyel wrote: If something has top tier offense and defense for the points - i.e. relative to everything else in the game - then its inevitably going to be overpowered.
So... just fire their cost into the sky then? You get top tier offense, top tier defense, decent mobility, and 10 dudes for ~500 points.
AtoMaki wrote: So... just fire their cost into the sky then? You get top tier offense, top tier defense, decent mobility, and 10 dudes for ~500 points.
No because the tier of your offense and defense is relative to the points of everything else.
Take say a tactical marine. He's so-so at 18 points.
Lets make him 9 points instead.
Now he's ludicrously hard to kill - and has solid damage out.
By contrast lets make him 40 points.
Now he's fragile - and has a complete joke of damage output.
One to one a Custodian Guard has a better stat line than a Marine. But this alone doesn't matter. The tier value is in how much you are paying for those stats.
Do it another way. Grots have a terrible stat line. But if they were 1 point per model, they'd have top tier offense and possibly the best defense in the game.
I really don't think it works that way. Wether or not your statline is particularly lethal or tanky is determined by your statline and accompanying special rules.
Grots could be free and their stats are still terrible. The only value they bring are bodies on the table and whatever you can do with just having a model existing within the ruleset.
You wanna talk about stats creep take a look at the new dakka boat of Votann. Thing has guns for days, a Tau Rail Cannon, and any unsaved wounds spill over, so it kills 5 Space marines on average. Not counting it's plethora of essentially HBs. Yeah, and it's 250ish points. And it's got transport capacity. Thankfully it doesn't have fly, or psyker abilities as well. This is stat creep. Forget the guard.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: You wanna talk about stats creep take a look at the new dakka boat of Votann. Thing has guns for days, a Tau Rail Cannon, and any unsaved wounds spill over, so it kills 5 Space marines on average. Not counting it's plethora of essentially HBs. Yeah, and it's 250ish points. And it's got transport capacity. Thankfully it doesn't have fly, or psyker abilities as well. This is stat creep. Forget the guard.
Bit of an error there, it only spills-over on a 6 to wound, but there's a Strat allowing you to automatically wound on a 6. Yeah it's pretty obscene how on top of that, you can't reroll wounds and it gets Armour of Contempt...because...reasons...
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: You wanna talk about stats creep take a look at the new dakka boat of Votann. Thing has guns for days, a Tau Rail Cannon, and any unsaved wounds spill over, so it kills 5 Space marines on average. Not counting it's plethora of essentially HBs. Yeah, and it's 250ish points. And it's got transport capacity. Thankfully it doesn't have fly, or psyker abilities as well. This is stat creep. Forget the guard.
True and after looking over the leak book for hours, and how I feel about other big tanks (most are over costed), I honestly think the big tank (Thunderkyn) is fine, the issue with the army will be that they are heavily a Rock, Paper, Scissor armor, you will almost certainly be able to handle them or you wont. I dont think armies like Marines, Tau, Custodes, Knights will be able to at all, but CWE, Quins, DE, Daemons, Tsons, and Guard will be able to. I do feel their troops and a couple wargear options are too cheap though. +1-2pts ont he troops and some options here and there +5pts and now the army has 2-3 less units over all and will feel a little better.
Their weakness is MWs, Speed, and Melee, oh also anti-tanky units (they all are T4-6, can be T5-7, but if you can ignore toughness with MWs, powers, and auto wounds you are good to go).
Their weakness is MWs, Speed, and Melee, oh also anti-tanky units (they all are T4-6, can be T5-7, but if you can ignore toughness with MWs, powers, and auto wounds you are good to go).
I don't know auto wounding on a +4, as long as you put 3 tokens on a unit, doesn't seem like being weak to melee. They maybe can be overloaded by a melee only army, but there aren't many of those running around right now. The votan are resilient , with flat army invs their version of mini AoC. The limiting factor they have is the cost of the army, which is only a limiting factor to some players.
Thank GW their psykers don't have to broken psychic powers, because then there would be a problem.
a_typical_hero wrote: I really don't think it works that way. Wether or not your statline is particularly lethal or tanky is determined by your statline and accompanying special rules.
Grots could be free and their stats are still terrible. The only value they bring are bodies on the table and whatever you can do with just having a model existing within the ruleset.
Yes and no. A stat line and rules on it's own are fairly meaningless. The stat line needs to be considered in relation to other stat lines. Most comparisons around stat lines talk about what an equivalent amount of points can do as it's the fairest measure we have.
Which is "more tanky" a literal Lehman Russ Tank, T8 2+ sv, 12 wounds for 135 points, or a minimum squad of Custodian Guard with spears, T5 3W each, 2+4++5+++, for 150. Strats aside, the Custodes will outlive the tank the majority of the time. But we are ignoring the blind spot of this comparison: what is shooting at us?
Until the 9th edition came along, we didn't have to worry about wounds spilling over past the first injured model. Now, a magna rail cannon can kill the squad of Custodes in a single shot. There is no more "stat lines equate to value". Everything can be easily deleted in a matter of seconds.
JakeSiren wrote: Yes and no. A stat line and rules on it's own are fairly meaningless. The stat line needs to be considered in relation to other stat lines. Most comparisons around stat lines talk about what an equivalent amount of points can do as it's the fairest measure we have.
I would say this is rather called "efficiency" and not "lethality". Assault 5 S10 AP-5 D10 is super lethal. Make it cost 5000 points and it is inefficient.
Its just gonna get worse and worse until GW realizes that the power creep they created primarily because of the Rending AP system for ranged screwed everything. The worst part is people are still going to pretend that its not the core issue of the problem, but it really is.
Blndmage wrote: I'm still waiting for them to put in making your opponent reroll successful hits/wounds/saves.
Huge untapped design space.
I mean, yeah, but just because its untapped does not mean its a good untapped area.
I think its a real shame GW did not utilized what HH did with rending earlier, and capitilze on things like rending(x) and breaching (x) and adding in another rule that was like <Some rule>(x) that on a roll of x or more turned the weapon into AP3
Backspacehacker wrote: Its just gonna get worse and worse until GW realizes that the power creep they created primarily because of the Rending AP system for ranged screwed everything. The worst part is people are still going to pretend that its not the core issue of the problem, but it really is.
What? Compared to older editions where they started throwing AP2 on everything?
Backspacehacker wrote: Its just gonna get worse and worse until GW realizes that the power creep they created primarily because of the Rending AP system for ranged screwed everything. The worst part is people are still going to pretend that its not the core issue of the problem, but it really is.
What? Compared to older editions where they started throwing AP2 on everything?
Pretty sure that they were more comparing it to this:
Backspacehacker wrote:I think its a real shame GW did not utilized what HH did with rending earlier, and capitilze on things like rending(x) and breaching (x) and adding in another rule that was like <Some rule>(x) that on a roll of x or more turned the weapon into AP3
Backspacehacker wrote: Its just gonna get worse and worse until GW realizes that the power creep they created primarily because of the Rending AP system for ranged screwed everything. The worst part is people are still going to pretend that its not the core issue of the problem, but it really is.
I'm pretty sure GW realizes and AoC existing is kind of proof of that. Same with the new Daemon saves.
GW knows it created a lot of problems. The issue is they can not fix them without doing a full stat rebalance of everything and if management doesn't want to sign off on that there is nothing the writers can do but keep introducing new rules to mitigate the issue while also perpetuating it because new armies need to atleast match old armies in output.
My hope is for a reset in 10th, or else its going to get a whole lot more stupid.
Backspacehacker wrote: Its just gonna get worse and worse until GW realizes that the power creep they created primarily because of the Rending AP system for ranged screwed everything. The worst part is people are still going to pretend that its not the core issue of the problem, but it really is.
It really isn't.
There are multiple problems, but they start from two - not thoroughly reviewing how they want units to perform relative to each other when moving from 7th to 8th, in favour of keeping stat lines in line with the legacy of 7th; and having less self-restraint than a sugar addict in a sweet shop when it came to handing out (and escalating) AP.
And, as noted, the latter applied just as much during 3rd to 7th with the increasing number of weapons with AP1, 2 or 3 as time went on through those editions.
The thing is they had to upgrade stuff, specialy marines, because they were under powered and over costed from day 1 of 8th ed. Then there was the first time books like DG, which had to have something to make people want to buy and play with the army.
The game is just impossible to balance, and I mean this by on avarge for most books, at the scale the game is played, unless everyone is playing only tournament lists and have substential skills in play w40k.
What use is the AP system if every 6 rolled is essentially a poisoned weapon? What good is a S/T system, if a las pistol can kill a Titan? Or a Russ can't wound a space marine because its 0AP attack of literally hitting the space marine with it's hull and treads does less damage than a Gene Stealer hitting it with a piece of Rebarr?
This game's damage system is complete garbage. I hope 10th reverts all troops and infantry back to 1W and gets rid of AP entirely. You get hit, you take damage. End of phase.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: What use is the AP system if every 6 rolled is essentially a poisoned weapon? What good is a S/T system, if a las pistol can kill a Titan? Or a Russ can't wound a space marine because its 0AP attack of literally hitting the space marine with it's hull and treads does less damage than a Gene Stealer hitting it with a piece of Rebarr?
This game's damage system is complete garbage. I hope 10th reverts all troops and infantry back to 1W and gets rid of AP entirely. You get hit, you take damage. End of phase.
Before commenting on the games design you might want to take a statistical probability 101 class.
I'm sorry you didn't get an education that taught you the difference between needing to roll a 6 on 1 dice and not needing to roll at all.
The thing is (within reason) - I think the jump from 7th to 8th worked okay. The issue is that almost every codex had to be an upgrade - and that went double in 9th. With GW's usual problem "chuck out power creep cos its cool" and "try to fix issues identified in the meta made by older codexes".
Beyond that, there's probably a possibly underdiscussed issue that the professional scene hates leaving things up to chance. And since that scene has more influence than ever before, its why the stats tend to be skewed.
Hitting or wounding on a 4+ is bad. Or rather has high variance. You will lose games on bad dice. Doing so on a 2+ is just about okay. But a 3+ with full rerolls is better.
It wasn't just the tournament scene, it was hard to justify some of the lore behind some of the WS or BS stats.
E.g Tyranid monster specifically designed for shooting or melee = BS 4+ and/or WS 4+. For more than a decade it was hard to justify bringing a Tyrannofex or a Haruspex because hitting on 4s kinda meant they sucked at their roles (and in the Tyrannofex case before 8th ed, gun that according in the lore can punch holes in Necron Monoliths = AP 4)
I feel that the stat inflation could become a (certainly not ideal) way of getting the game to a better place. I feel that if a guardsman is S3 T3 W1 a marine should be S5 T5 W2 and that then leaves a solid amount of room to build out different unit profiles.
But there are key parts missing to make that work. Swarm units like termagants, cultists, or guardsman still need to keep up without creating practical problems in regards to model count. GW seems to have gone with an approach of inflating their capacity too (via stats and/or abilities) which I disagree with; instead these units should come with a free respawn mechanic. Yeah, make grots 5 pts each with their terrible stats but let the controlling player have a fresh unit deploy from reserves when the first one dies, for free, the entire game. Less swarmy units could come with restrictions like respawning at half size, no special weapons, or any number of alternatives. Let players realize the narrative of the elite space marines mowing down incoming enemies with abandon. It is a mechanic I have utilized a number of times in narrative scenarios and it works far better in practice than it seems.
Speaking of elites, there are no limits on how high stats can go. Use that. Bring back a system where a given S simply cannot wound something of triple T. Make the Leman Russ T12, make Land Raiders T15, but have them with comparable wounds count to now to represent the reality that once vehicle's tremendous armour is cracked their squishy bits get wrecked in short order. Make monstrous creatures the inverse; similar T to now but with huge wound counts, because theirs is a different sort of durability.
On a similar note, the AP inflation could be fine; it allows for more diversity and better representation. But it needs a counter-stat of 'resilience'; how much AP armour ignores. Power armour could be resilience 1; it worsens incoming AP by 1. Instead of handing out invulnerable saves like candy it could be resilience, and ignoring invulnerables could also be removed (that is what MWs are for).
Tyel wrote: The thing is (within reason) - I think the jump from 7th to 8th worked okay. The issue is that almost every codex had to be an upgrade - and that went double in 9th. With GW's usual problem "chuck out power creep cos its cool" and "try to fix issues identified in the meta made by older codexes".
I think most of the issues stem from the 7th to 8th change because of the minimalist foundation they laid out for the core rules. It left them with zero design space to work with as there aren't any USRs (besides fly and vehicle for the most part) for things to do special actions or have certain functionality so everything turns into a stat block for moving, shooting, stabbing, and dying/not dying.
With no meat on the bones of the core rules, it turns to pumping up the codex rules with so much bloat and fat to make them work or be interesting that it requires constant adjustments to units and codex rules (see a Space Marine unit having half a dozen codex specific special rules) to create some sort of balance. As new things come out and power creep rears its ugly head, things swing out of balance even faster as the power of each codex is independent from each other so there isn't much in the way of commonality between each other to help keep things on common ground balance wise.
The lack of what I call "soft power" in 8th/9th in the form of utility functionality makes things boil down to being mostly about how well a thing kills things and survives being killed. It doesn't leave a lot of space for gadget units that can do certain things well or do something unorthodox compared to other units which makes them less reliant on hard power. For example 7th edition Land speeder Storms having those large blast flashbang like weapons that where only good at killing fodder infantry but the blind mechanic they had could throw a wrench into the enemy's combat ability if their units failed any initiative checks (brutal against Orks and especially Necrons). A lot of these things rely on core rules that every faction plays by (and are designed around) as having codex specific special rules that do these sorts of things often makes them unable to have much counter play against it.
Even excluding the lack of USRs and utility mechanics, the codex centric rule sets are way more prone to power creep. Instead of having core rules govern the bulk of a units or weapons mechanics and letting the codex fill in the number plus adding in that coded specific spice as needed. It just ends up with a lot of oneupmanship between the codexes (often in the form of rules bloat) instead of having more design space to tweek numbers and utilizing mechanics that everyone has some access to.
9th has lots of soft power, relating to the fact there's progressive scoring. All those rules that facilitate claiming/denying primary and secondary points (be they movement, be they "do X and still perform an action", be they "turn off your opponents obsec" etc) count for this.
I'm afraid I don't find the idea a more detailed rule-book based ruleset would in any way tone down GW's tendency towards creep. In 7th edition GW couldn't limit their rules writing to even the 100~ USRs (most of which were hardly universal) in the rulebook. I know this gets the rebuttal of "no, USRs can work, GW just suck" - but it happened. Just like every broken codex released over the last 20+ years.
The main issue is that GW have no interest in creating some sort of "balanced living rule book" that is expected to run on for decades, perhaps forever.
In this respect, Marines can be obscenely broken, as they were from Marines 2.0 until the 9th edition DE codex. They can then be crept down to being quite weak, only be bailed out with things like AoC. Until the inevitable Marines 4.0 - in this edition or the next - likely puts them right back on top. For 12-24 months, until the wheel sends them back down again.
9th "soft" power sucks. Either it doesn't work, or when it works it is what necron or sob to a degree are doing now. When there is zero interaction with the opponents army, or to be more precise, the opposing army can't really stop the accumulation of points, bar almost tabling the given army in a single turn, around turn 1-2.
And with the marines being too powerful in 9th till DE came out is just wrong. Orks, Custodes and harlequins were having much higher win rates then the best marine armies, And the non best armies are either non reporting any wins, no one plays them they are so bad, or have 1-2 dudes playing them. AoC didn't bail them out of anything, their win rates didn't suddenly catapult them to the top. In fact it is just easy to see by checking what armies have what win rates. Heck marines aren't even the most popular army played, which shows how good they are in 9th.
Yeah "Soft power" in this case is more orthagonal methods of mitigating the effectiveness of opposing units. Pinning, failing break tests, holding down in CC, stunned/shaken results to vehicles are good examples of non-lethal ways of controling the table without killing.
Karol wrote: 9th "soft" power sucks. Either it doesn't work, or when it works it is what necron or sob to a degree are doing now. When there is zero interaction with the opponents army, or to be more precise, the opposing army can't really stop the accumulation of points, bar almost tabling the given army in a single turn, around turn 1-2.
And with the marines being too powerful in 9th till DE came out is just wrong. Orks, Custodes and harlequins were having much higher win rates then the best marine armies, And the non best armies are either non reporting any wins, no one plays them they are so bad, or have 1-2 dudes playing them. AoC didn't bail them out of anything, their win rates didn't suddenly catapult them to the top. In fact it is just easy to see by checking what armies have what win rates. Heck marines aren't even the most popular army played, which shows how good they are in 9th.
But here's a big issue.
I, like many other players, could care less about the win rates and meta.
I just want to tell stories with my armies that reflect what I've read in the lore. I want to have fun playing instead of cramming a 3hr game (the book's suggested play time for a 2k game), into an hour and a half (roughly the time to play a 750 point game going by the book's numbers, with a 500 point game taking an hour, and 1,000 taking 2hrs).
They need to actually use the space the rules give them, stretch out the S/T/W numbers until they fit. That doesn't mean points changes.
Also: "Heck marines aren't even the most popular army played, which shows how good they are in 9th."
Please provide proof. GK are Adeptus Astartes. They are also Marines. Chaos Marines, DG, and TS are also Marines.
In this respect, Marines can be obscenely broken, as they were from Marines 2.0 until the 9th edition DE codex.
Until the ninth edition Dark Eldar codex Harlequins were the strongest army and Chaos Daemons were also outperforming Marines at minimum. The myth of super overpowered 9e Marines is largely just that: a myth. They just looked incredibly strong compared to the dogwater Necron codex at the time.
In this respect, Marines can be obscenely broken, as they were from Marines 2.0 until the 9th edition DE codex.
Until the ninth edition Dark Eldar codex Harlequins were the strongest army and Chaos Daemons were also outperforming Marines at minimum. The myth of super overpowered 9e Marines is largely just that: a myth. They just looked incredibly strong compared to the dogwater Necron codex at the time.
I'll give Iron Hands credit on being really powerful, but otherwise you're correct people were just more annoyed with the fact they got a second codex on top of the supplements.
I think all people were annoyed with it. Even marines. Of all types. If someone was a power gamer, they hated that the army they had got at best a side grade, and at worse a down grade. The people that weren't tournament players often got hit with nerfs, for which they had to pay. On top of it all the releases clogged stuff up, because GW can not drop all marine books within a single month+ there was covid so some people didn't even get to play with their OP rules and went straight from good to same old.
But hey still better then being a csm or an IG player, so there is that. Well maybe not if you play IF or their successor.
In this respect, Marines can be obscenely broken, as they were from Marines 2.0 until the 9th edition DE codex.
Until the ninth edition Dark Eldar codex Harlequins were the strongest army and Chaos Daemons were also outperforming Marines at minimum. The myth of super overpowered 9e Marines is largely just that: a myth. They just looked incredibly strong compared to the dogwater Necron codex at the time.
Before DE marines were some of the best though..... do you not remember DA ATV spam until it was nerf? DW dreads? WS VGV spam? pre-nerf RG rush lists? DA terminator was also early strong in 9th, etc.... after DE it didn't go to Quins it went to Admech and Orks tablling to them being nerf to Tau to them being nerf to Custodes to them being nerfed, then Nids to them being nerfed, and then Quins, once Quins got to the top DE was already nerfed to a 50% win rate (and still are but slowly going down to a 47% win rate) and has not been a top army since the release of the Nids books.
Marines got a lot of early nerfs bc power creep wasn't as bad and was very strong, now yeah they are not all that strong mostly bc of power creep, even with AoC they still struggle, but even DE now actually struggle into Marines if they dont have loads of Incubi, i've seen 8 Hellions (3 attacks each 2D) literally do no damage to Sguard and other 2+ save marines bc 2+ save with AoC against -1ap (and a few -2ap) attacks is very strong. Marines for a lot of players feels strong when you dont net list and play with fun units. Imagine a DE player with 15-20 Kabals, 15-20 Wyches, some Hellions, mix of Venoms and raiders, and minimal Incubi/Grots, just a fun army, well it does literally zero damage to marines outside the lances/blasters.
To make things worst, some Marines factions are also dog sh t bad while others are actually good, having flat buffs that effect all the same is bad, the lower 4-5 marines needs a buff that just effects their traits at this point.
Harlequins were the best army at the release of 9th yes. But given the number of players running Harlequins could almost be counted on one hand, whereas something like 1 player in 3 showed up with Marines, I'm fairly confident you had far more Marine lists placing in tournaments throughout that period. (Obviously the whole phase was a bit weird due to Covid.)
Tyel wrote: Harlequins were the best army at the release of 9th yes. But given the number of players running Harlequins could almost be counted on one hand, whereas something like 1 player in 3 showed up with Marines, I'm fairly confident you had far more Marine lists placing in tournaments throughout that period. (Obviously the whole phase was a bit weird due to Covid.)
Whoever thought Voidweavers are 90pts was a good idea should be fired. Same with buffing DT.
Probably the same person who thought Wracks should be the cost they came out at. Which I think was 5-6 right? I remember it was stupidly low. Then they raised it to 8 and the world almost ended. I think the banking system has finally started to recover.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: Probably the same person who thought Wracks should be the cost they came out at. Which I think was 5-6 right? I remember it was stupidly low. Then they raised it to 8 and the world almost ended. I think the banking system has finally started to recover.
Pretty sure wracks were 8 points in the new codex (down from 12 in the initial 9th points for everyone document) and have remained at 8 throughout 9th. Various people have suggested they should probably be higher, but GW have instead tried to change/nerf just about everything else that can effect them instead.
Pretty sure the Voidweaver is just classic GW having no idea how the mathematics behind their own game works.
Someone at GW wrote the 8th edition rules, and probably thought they were good.
The community however said they sucked - because they did.
So they massively boosted the guns and defense, producing the most efficient 90 points in the game.
You had a very similar dynamic with the Squigbuggy's joke release, meteoric 9th edition rise and subsequent nerf into oblivion.
While Wracks are probably still too cheap they were never as low as 5 or 6 points. Fezzik is probably thinking of Razorwing Flocks, which were stupidly cheap for the number of wounds they had at the start of 8th. That was when GW hadn't done even basic playtesting to discover there was a lot of value in units simply existing.
The Voidweaver is a classic GW overcorrection. I sometimes feel they have 2 or 3 different people looking at how to make substandard units better in a new Codex. It's like all 3 groups suggest a different fix that would be fine in isolation but GW ends up implementing all 3 fixes at once. It doesn't help that GW never seem to ask the very simple question of what happens if you spam a particular model. It feels like their playtesting is using one of each thing and assuming it's fine if it doesn't break things too hard.
Slipspace wrote: While Wracks are probably still too cheap they were never as low as 5 or 6 points. Fezzik is probably thinking of Razorwing Flocks, which were stupidly cheap for the number of wounds they had at the start of 8th. That was when GW hadn't done even basic playtesting to discover there was a lot of value in units simply existing.
The Voidweaver is a classic GW overcorrection. I sometimes feel they have 2 or 3 different people looking at how to make substandard units better in a new Codex. It's like all 3 groups suggest a different fix that would be fine in isolation but GW ends up implementing all 3 fixes at once. It doesn't help that GW never seem to ask the very simple question of what happens if you spam a particular model. It feels like their playtesting is using one of each thing and assuming it's fine if it doesn't break things too hard.
Didn't wracks briefly dip pretty low in points as part of a Chapter Approved update shortly before their codex came out? I feel like there was a period of time where their new and improved rules had been leaked/teased and their points had been recently lowered, so people were mistakenly thinking they'd get both the improved rules and the lower points cost at the same time. And then The codex came out and their points were somewhat higher than they had been in the recent Chapter Approved. But maybe I'm misremembering.
Blndmage wrote: I'm still waiting for them to put in making your opponent reroll successful hits/wounds/saves.
Huge untapped design space.
A fast-play system could leverage those mechanics but I don't see the point in 40K when it's redundant to essentially modifiers.
Like instead of AP you could have 'low-AP' weapons that allow the target to re-roll a failed save, or 'high-AP' weapons that force the target to re-roll successful saves. But with an AP modifier system, what's the utility?
GW keeps cramming more and more mechanics into the game to compensate for the shallowness of the existing ones. Rather than throw in new ways to affect what you have to do to score a wound, I'd just like a S v T system that actually works.
Well GW could make some heavy weapons, lets say melta, do a lot of wounds d6+6 etc and then have other heavy weapons , lets say lascanon type ones, do mortal wounds but with lower number of wounds caused. Then there could be anti infantry units, lower AP for more shots.
Hybrid weapons or stuff like rocket launchers would be balanced against those with weapon cost and through utility. Lowering of units speed, making it unable for unit to perform actions, maybe grenade launchers, mortars etc could shot LoS blockers.
Backspacehacker wrote: Its just gonna get worse and worse until GW realizes that the power creep they created primarily because of the Rending AP system for ranged screwed everything. The worst part is people are still going to pretend that its not the core issue of the problem, but it really is.
It's not, it's just GW's issue with power creep. 2e wasn't like this and it had rending ap.
Tyel wrote: Harlequins were the best army at the release of 9th yes. But given the number of players running Harlequins could almost be counted on one hand, whereas something like 1 player in 3 showed up with Marines, I'm fairly confident you had far more Marine lists placing in tournaments throughout that period. (Obviously the whole phase was a bit weird due to Covid.)
Whoever thought Voidweavers are 90pts was a good idea should be fired. Same with buffing DT.
They're almost certainly insulated by the organizational structure of GW, which seems to reward incompetence.
People take units more based on their looks and points cost, not their stats. Look at Ork Boyz as an example, do you see more of them with their improved stats? How about Drukhari Khymera? They weren't taken in 8th, got an AP and S, still not taken in 9th.
The reason they fell off a cliff in 9th compared to 8th is because the rules dramatically changed which made them go from B tier units to F Tier units. For most of this edition they were 50% more expensive then they were in 7th (now only 33%) and yeah they gained T5 and Base S4 they also lost morale and a host of other buffs while point for point becoming less durable then they were in 7th.
People stopped taking them because their pts efficiency as I pointed out was one of the two main reasons people pick or do not pick units, sorry if my message was unclear. Changing stats and adding Stratagems to improve balance is like trying to knock in a nail with a sledgehammer, wrong tool for the job because it is much more likely to end up damaging the wall you are knocking the nail into.
Insectum7 wrote: Yeah "Soft power" in this case is more orthagonal methods of mitigating the effectiveness of opposing units. Pinning, failing break tests, holding down in CC, stunned/shaken results to vehicles are good examples of non-lethal ways of controling the table without killing.
Would anyone be willing to trade their improved anti-vehicle profiles for anti-vehicle suppression mechanics on their anti-vehicle weapons? Like making dark lances D6 Damage again and making vehicles and monsters damaged by any dark lances -1WS/BS. I personally just want 8th edition profiles back on Necron weapons, the only one that would hurt is the Lokhust Heavy Destroyer weapon but that could be fixed by nerfing the Lokhust Destroyer gun so that it isn't as good as Heavy Destroyers against vehicles.
In this respect, Marines can be obscenely broken, as they were from Marines 2.0 until the 9th edition DE codex.
Until the ninth edition Dark Eldar codex Harlequins were the strongest army and Chaos Daemons were also outperforming Marines at minimum. The myth of super overpowered 9e Marines is largely just that: a myth. They just looked incredibly strong compared to the dogwater Necron codex at the time.
Yeah...that isn't true. Marines DOMINATED early 9th no matter how much you want to rewrite history. July 2020 9th came out, between then and the start of 2021 Marines of all flavors racked up 19 top placings at Big events, Aeldari (Eldar, DEldar, Ynnari and Harlquins) combined racked up...wait for it....19. Yeah Harlies were damn good but they weren't head and shoulders better than Marines who were the dominant release faction. Mind you, when DE and Ad Mech came out both were thoroughly dethroned
Pretty sure the Voidweaver is just classic GW having no idea how the mathematics behind their own game works.
Someone at GW wrote the 8th edition rules, and probably thought they were good.
The community however said they sucked - because they did.
So they massively boosted the guns and defense, producing the most efficient 90 points in the game.
You had a very similar dynamic with the Squigbuggy's joke release, meteoric 9th edition rise and subsequent nerf into oblivion.
I love the fact that anytime Orkz have anything remotely competitive its labeled broken or absurdly powerful. A Squigbuggy ON ITS OWN, as in no other buffs was getting 2D6 shots at BS4 and 1D6 shots at BS5 with the smaller gun getting 18' range compared to the 36 of the bigger one. The big gun AVERAGED 7 shots, 3.5 hits, 2.3 wounds and 1.5 dead Marines. The little gun at half the range averaged 3.5 shots, 1.16 hits, 0.77 wounds and 0.51 dead Marines. All told this thing AVERAGED 2 dead Marines a turn. Now, lets compare it to the ridiculous Voidweaver that you said was just as bad as the squigbuggy. Voidweaver, without buffs averaged 1.3 dead Marines with just its secondary guns, add in the Prismatic cannon and it became 2.4 dead Marines with ease, the biggest difference being the Squigbuggy couldn't hurt vehicles very well, the Voidweaver could switch to a secondary weapons type and plunk S12 -4AP 2D3 dmg shots into vehicles.
I love the fact that anytime Orkz have anything remotely competitive its labeled broken or absurdly powerful. A Squigbuggy ON ITS OWN, as in no other buffs was getting 2D6 shots at BS4 and 1D6 shots at BS5 with the smaller gun getting 18' range compared to the 36 of the bigger one. The big gun AVERAGED 7 shots, 3.5 hits, 2.3 wounds and 1.5 dead Marines. The little gun at half the range averaged 3.5 shots, 1.16 hits, 0.77 wounds and 0.51 dead Marines. All told this thing AVERAGED 2 dead Marines a turn. Now, lets compare it to the ridiculous Voidweaver that you said was just as bad as the squigbuggy. Voidweaver, without buffs averaged 1.3 dead Marines with just its secondary guns, add in the Prismatic cannon and it became 2.4 dead Marines with ease, the biggest difference being the Squigbuggy couldn't hurt vehicles very well, the Voidweaver could switch to a secondary weapons type and plunk S12 -4AP 2D3 dmg shots into vehicles.
Both those were 90pts btw.
I think GW is legitimately worried about people losing to orks and getting the impression that Astartes are not the best faction.
I love the fact that anytime Orkz have anything remotely competitive its labeled broken or absurdly powerful. A Squigbuggy ON ITS OWN, as in no other buffs was getting 2D6 shots at BS4 and 1D6 shots at BS5 with the smaller gun getting 18' range compared to the 36 of the bigger one. The big gun AVERAGED 7 shots, 3.5 hits, 2.3 wounds and 1.5 dead Marines. The little gun at half the range averaged 3.5 shots, 1.16 hits, 0.77 wounds and 0.51 dead Marines. All told this thing AVERAGED 2 dead Marines a turn. Now, lets compare it to the ridiculous Voidweaver that you said was just as bad as the squigbuggy. Voidweaver, without buffs averaged 1.3 dead Marines with just its secondary guns, add in the Prismatic cannon and it became 2.4 dead Marines with ease, the biggest difference being the Squigbuggy couldn't hurt vehicles very well, the Voidweaver could switch to a secondary weapons type and plunk S12 -4AP 2D3 dmg shots into vehicles.
Both those were 90pts btw.
I think GW is legitimately worried about people losing to orks and getting the impression that Astartes are not the best faction.
If that were AT ALL the case, they'd not be the first codex each new edition and getting consequently powercrept to oblivion.
Yeah...that isn't true. Marines DOMINATED early 9th no matter how much you want to rewrite history. July 2020 9th came out, between then and the start of 2021 Marines of all flavors racked up 19 top placings at Big events, Aeldari (Eldar, DEldar, Ynnari and Harlquins) combined racked up...wait for it....19. Yeah Harlies were damn good but they weren't head and shoulders better than Marines who were the dominant release faction. Mind you, when DE and Ad Mech came out both were thoroughly dethroned
Link your source. I don't remember the name of the old tournament data site (it was seemingly abandoned at one point) and the Goonhammer site's layout is dogshit and I don't want to go through the effort of learning how to look for old tournament data in a comprehensive way.
vict0988 wrote: Space Marines were the last codex in 8th and powercrept everyone else into oblivion. I don't think you have actually dispelled Hecaton's hypothesis.
vict0988 wrote: Space Marines were the last codex in 8th and powercrept everyone else into oblivion. I don't think you have actually dispelled Hecaton's hypothesis.
As the person creating the hypothesis, the onus is on Hecaton to provide sufficient evidence to prove both aspects of it. And SM 2.0 wasn't the last 'dex in 8th - that was the SoB.
Having said that, EviscerationPlague is factually inaccurate with their "every edition" claim - though I'd argue that using 8th to try to refute it is abusing a black swan, given it is the only edition to date with two distinct versions of Codex: Space Marines being launched within it (and I doubt people would try to claim that the first one hadn't suffered due to power creep in other books as 8th progressed).
1st Ed - No such thing as a Codex.
2nd Ed - First Codex was Codex: Space Wolves, which might qualify, but the genericSM Codex at the time, Codex: Ultramarines, was no earlier than 4th, given it was released in 1995.
3rd Ed - Codex: Space Marines was the first released Codex this edition
4th Ed - Codex: Space Marines was the first released Codex this edition
5th Ed - Codex: Space Marines was the first released Codex this edition
6th Ed - Codex: Space Marines wasn't the first released Codex this edition (Chaos SM got that honour). While Dark Angels were second, generic Codex: Space Marines was back in sixth spot out of thirteen released this edition.
7th Ed - Codex: Space Marines wasn't the first released Codex this edition (Orks got that honour). Blood Angels, Grey Knights and Space Wolves were all released before generic Codex: Space Marines, which was back in thirteenth spot out of eighteen released this edition - possibly fourteenth, depending on when in June 2015 it and the Dark Angels book were released.
8th Ed - v1 was definitely the first 'dex released in 8th.
9th Ed - Codex: Space Marines was either first or second in 9th, with both it and Necrons marked as being released in the same month. Don't really feel like trying to go back through two years of WHC posts to nail the specifics of that bit down, thank ye very much.
We've got four, maybe five, editions out of eight where Codex: Space Marines was definitely the first released in an edition, with three where it clearly wasn't. Enough to back up a "most" claim, but definitely not enough to back up an "every" claim. Heck, if Necrons released on an earlier weekend in Oct 2020, we end up on a 50/50 split, and even "most" goes out of the window (though you could still evidence a claim that it was the book that was most commonly released first, as no other faction comes anywhere near four).
I'm not touching the power creep part of EC's claim, merely the "released first every edition" part.
I love the fact that anytime Orkz have anything remotely competitive its labeled broken or absurdly powerful. A Squigbuggy ON ITS OWN, as in no other buffs was getting 2D6 shots at BS4 and 1D6 shots at BS5 with the smaller gun getting 18' range compared to the 36 of the bigger one. The big gun AVERAGED 7 shots, 3.5 hits, 2.3 wounds and 1.5 dead Marines. The little gun at half the range averaged 3.5 shots, 1.16 hits, 0.77 wounds and 0.51 dead Marines. All told this thing AVERAGED 2 dead Marines a turn. Now, lets compare it to the ridiculous Voidweaver that you said was just as bad as the squigbuggy. Voidweaver, without buffs averaged 1.3 dead Marines with just its secondary guns, add in the Prismatic cannon and it became 2.4 dead Marines with ease, the biggest difference being the Squigbuggy couldn't hurt vehicles very well, the Voidweaver could switch to a secondary weapons type and plunk S12 -4AP 2D3 dmg shots into vehicles.
Both those were 90pts btw.
I think GW is legitimately worried about people losing to orks and getting the impression that Astartes are not the best faction.
There is an unconfirmed rumor that GW is legitimately worried about properly balancing orks, as ork players have a high tendency to be focused on just that faction and thus are more experienced with their army than the average marine and eldar player. Allegedly, they are afraid that when they give orks a codex a 50% W/L baseline codex, the ork veterans with thousands of games under their belt will be walking all over their respective communities.
I'm not sure how much truth there is to this rumor, but it makes a lot of sense actually. No matter how bad the ork army is, there are always a few ork veterans placing first or second with completely bonkers list, and even in my group I have heard people voice complaints about how they will never be able to play any of their ~10 armies as well as me who has been playing nothing but orks for almost a decade. And of course, every ork player knows how people will completely lose their gak and demand nerfs as soon orks look even vaguely competitive.
Of course, this is no excuse for not giving a gak about writing a coherent codex without mistakes. Tune it in any way you like, but put effort into it.
Yeah...that isn't true. Marines DOMINATED early 9th no matter how much you want to rewrite history. July 2020 9th came out, between then and the start of 2021 Marines of all flavors racked up 19 top placings at Big events, Aeldari (Eldar, DEldar, Ynnari and Harlquins) combined racked up...wait for it....19. Yeah Harlies were damn good but they weren't head and shoulders better than Marines who were the dominant release faction. Mind you, when DE and Ad Mech came out both were thoroughly dethroned
Link your source. I don't remember the name of the old tournament data site (it was seemingly abandoned at one point) and the Goonhammer site's layout is dogshit and I don't want to go through the effort of learning how to look for old tournament data in a comprehensive way.
You dont remember DA getting major nerfs? ATV spam with Apoths was stupidly insane. No one had the fire power back then to kill a full unit so you just rezed and healed them to full. With 9 on them on the table, 2 Apoths on Bikes, that was enough alone to win against some armies, and you still had 800pts left over.
Marines, and by marines we have to mean WS and for a split second salamanders, were never better then harlequins. custodes had higher win rates too, orks pre codex had similar win rates to the better marines. And the state was a thing up until DE came out, and suddenly doing drive by attacks with liquifires and undercosted units was better, then doing the same with harlequins.
DA with their "crazy" inner circle rules and combined detachments, which were suppose to kill the game, never even reached 65% win rates. I don't think they even held 60% for a time comperable to DEs or Harlis.
There is an unconfirmed rumor that GW is legitimately worried about properly balancing orks, as ork players have a high tendency to be focused on just that faction and thus are more experienced with their army than the average marine and eldar player. Allegedly, they are afraid that when they give orks a codex a 50% W/L baseline codex, the ork veterans with thousands of games under their belt will be walking all over their respective communities
.
It is not even a question of player expiriance. It is problem of what GW thinks they can give to orks or any other horde army. They do seem to understand that horde armies, maybe more money to them, but they make it very unfun for everyone else to play against. Including mirrors. And history wise, when orks had good lists or good stuff, it seems to be a spam of nob bikers, tons of heavy weapons, artilery, buggies. Making the stompa "OP" would be less problematic to the game, then lets say suddenly big shootas or rokkits becoming a valid corner stone of an army. Because a stompa will get focused fired, a horde of 260 orks with heavy weapons won, unless GW designes an army to precisly do that , but then the weight of fire generated often kills everything else too, starting with marines and ending with vehicles. But on the flip side GW has no problem to do necron style updates, where an army plays soliter, so who knows. Orks, to me, fall in to the same cathegory as marines, as far as design goes. GW assumes that they will sell more or less no matter what they do to the rules. They can start low, then go high or vice versa. There is no need for them to stay good for a long time. Still better then being IG where GW just seems to not care at all, what ever the rules are good or bad, or if they should be updated and how long one has to wait for such an update.
Yeah...that isn't true. Marines DOMINATED early 9th no matter how much you want to rewrite history. July 2020 9th came out, between then and the start of 2021 Marines of all flavors racked up 19 top placings at Big events, Aeldari (Eldar, DEldar, Ynnari and Harlquins) combined racked up...wait for it....19. Yeah Harlies were damn good but they weren't head and shoulders better than Marines who were the dominant release faction. Mind you, when DE and Ad Mech came out both were thoroughly dethroned
Link your source. I don't remember the name of the old tournament data site (it was seemingly abandoned at one point) and the Goonhammer site's layout is dogshit and I don't want to go through the effort of learning how to look for old tournament data in a comprehensive way.
Karol wrote: Marines, and by marines we have to mean WS and for a split second salamanders, were never better then harlequins. custodes had higher win rates too, orks pre codex had similar win rates to the better marines. And the state was a thing up until DE came out, and suddenly doing drive by attacks with liquifires and undercosted units was better, then doing the same with harlequins.
DA with their "crazy" inner circle rules and combined detachments, which were suppose to kill the game, never even reached 65% win rates. I don't think they even held 60% for a time comperable to DEs or Harlis.
yeah...that also isn't true. Specifically
orks pre codex had similar win rates to the better marines.
. In 9th, the same year that Marines had 19 Top placings orkz had....7. Even during their "OMG they are broken!" phase (2021), orkz had only about 10 more wins than Marines. Drukhari had more than 2x as many as Orkz and Ad Mech had 11 more wins than Orkz.
But of those 3 factions with better tournament placings, which got beaten to death with the nerf hammer? Orkz.
vict0988 wrote: Space Marines were the last codex in 8th and powercrept everyone else into oblivion. I don't think you have actually dispelled Hecaton's hypothesis.
You mean the 2.0 codex that lasted half a year until the new one for 9th came out? LOL okay
vict0988 wrote: Space Marines were the last codex in 8th and powercrept everyone else into oblivion. I don't think you have actually dispelled Hecaton's hypothesis.
You mean the 2.0 codex that lasted half a year until the new one for 9th came out? LOL okay
Yeah, poor SM, only getting to be head and shoulders better than everyone else for the first 6 months of 8th and the last 6 months of 8th....and the first 6months of 9th....
Backspacehacker wrote: *Laughs in being right*
I remember when i was told i was insane and was complete wrong in the stat bloat getting worse and worse.
Calling it now, we are going to see super wounds that cant be saved at all, they will be like mortal wounds but even more powerful.
Hey look! i was, as i always am, 100% right again.
Behold, super mortal wounds that cant be saved against and bleed over, even more powerful super wounds! We have come full circle in 40k, BACK to wound bleed over. this is amazing to watch, its like a train wreck in slow motion.
JNAProductions wrote: You can use your armor against them.
Hell, Bullgryns can get a 3+ against it.
Edit: Less snark, but wounds spilling over is not new. It's not common, but not new.
Oh of course it was not new, but its something that GW went outta their way to talk about how it was removed, even going so far to say "Your guys dont die of sympanthy wounds." Yet here we are again.
My snark aside, i was right, the creep IS getting worse and worse, because every interation we just get more deadly and more insane weapons. We went from AP -2 being all over the place, then multi wounds, then notable to wound on anything other hten a 4+, then we got ignore invuln wounds, then we got unmodifiable saves from daemons, now we have weapons that bleed into the squad.
Its blatently obvious at this point that those writing the rules for 40k have no idea what they are doing, or are being willful participants in making blatently broken weapons to push model sales to the point of they cant even hide it.
The stat creep is a run away train, that is not going to stop until someone blows the tracks and we try again.
I will continue to be snarking to a degree though because eveyrone kept telling me oh im wrong im crazy thats never going to happen, and yet the only thing between me being wrong and right is about a 2 month window.
JNAProductions wrote: You can use your armor against them.
Hell, Bullgryns can get a 3+ against it.
Edit: Less snark, but wounds spilling over is not new. It's not common, but not new.
Oh of course it was not new, but its something that GW went outta their way to talk about how it was removed, even going so far to say "Your guys dont die of sympanthy wounds." Yet here we are again.
My snark aside, i was right, the creep IS getting worse and worse, because every interation we just get more deadly and more insane weapons. We went from AP -2 being all over the place, then multi wounds, then notable to wound on anything other hten a 4+, then we got ignore invuln wounds, then we got unmodifiable saves from daemons, now we have weapons that bleed into the squad.
Its blatently obvious at this point that those writing the rules for 40k have no idea what they are doing, or are being willful participants in making blatently broken weapons to push model sales to the point of they cant even hide it.
The stat creep is a run away train, that is not going to stop until someone blows the tracks and we try again.
I will continue to be snarking to a degree though because eveyrone kept telling me oh im wrong im crazy thats never going to happen, and yet the only thing between me being wrong and right is about a 2 month window.
Wait. When did we *not* have spillover damage? Mortal Wounds have been spilling over since 8th. This is just a slightly less powerful version of that, isn't it?
JNAProductions wrote: You can use your armor against them.
Hell, Bullgryns can get a 3+ against it.
Edit: Less snark, but wounds spilling over is not new. It's not common, but not new.
Oh of course it was not new, but its something that GW went outta their way to talk about how it was removed, even going so far to say "Your guys dont die of sympanthy wounds." Yet here we are again.
My snark aside, i was right, the creep IS getting worse and worse, because every interation we just get more deadly and more insane weapons. We went from AP -2 being all over the place, then multi wounds, then notable to wound on anything other hten a 4+, then we got ignore invuln wounds, then we got unmodifiable saves from daemons, now we have weapons that bleed into the squad.
Its blatently obvious at this point that those writing the rules for 40k have no idea what they are doing, or are being willful participants in making blatently broken weapons to push model sales to the point of they cant even hide it.
The stat creep is a run away train, that is not going to stop until someone blows the tracks and we try again.
I will continue to be snarking to a degree though because eveyrone kept telling me oh im wrong im crazy thats never going to happen, and yet the only thing between me being wrong and right is about a 2 month window.
Wait. When did we *not* have spillover damage? Mortal Wounds have been spilling over since 8th. This is just a slightly less powerful version of that, isn't it?
Spill over wounds from weapons stopped in 8th, mortal wounds were allocated 1 at a time so they spilled over, but only from things like powers which there are not many powers out there able to do a lot of mortal wounds.
Spill over from weapons is something just now coming back into play with this, and its unsalable, its that fact that now we are seeing this on regular war gear thats a big deal, and this is just one of their weapons that a normal dude is running around with, i cant wait to see their vehicles.
JNAProductions wrote: What about Flail weapons?
Like the sarge’s weapon in Deathwing Knights.
That would be a melee weapon, melee has never been one of the major problem children of 40k, espeically in 8th and 9th. Strapping this to a weapon at range is exactly what i was talking about
Plus the flail does not ignore invulns like this one, you have here, pretty much a melta sniper that ignores invulns and spills over. This is what i was saying we were gonna see happen and its happening again.
Like we can play the cherry picking game all we want, but we have seen now that GW is introducing this kinda power on a base tropp now, vs Deathwing which are an elite.
JNAProductions wrote: What about Flail weapons?
Like the sarge’s weapon in Deathwing Knights.
That would be a melee weapon, melee has never been one of the major problem children of 40k, espeically in 8th and 9th. Strapping this to a weapon at range is exactly what i was talking about
Plus the flail does not ignore invulns like this one, you have here, pretty much a melta sniper that ignores invulns and spills over. This is what i was saying we were gonna see happen and its happening again.
Like we can play the cherry picking game all we want, but we have seen now that GW is introducing this kinda power on a base tropp now, vs Deathwing which are an elite.
They're not introducing NEW mechanics, though. They're just increasing power.
The two are not the same.
For what it's worth, yeah, that's pretty blatant power creep, I agree. But it's not NEW creep-it's just old things turned up in power.
If we want to say technically its not a new thing, yes its not new.
However reasonably you cant equate the two.
One is a melee weapon that spills over wounds swinging at S4 + Weapons Strength.
The other is a S9 AP-4 D3+3 24" range spilling over, and ignores any invuln saves.
Its not equitable it would be like saying yes both a tomato and a water melon are a fruit, but we all know damn well a tomato does not go in a fruit salad, we all know damn well, this weapon is not the same to compare to a flail.
Backspacehacker wrote: *Laughs in being right*
I remember when i was told i was insane and was complete wrong in the stat bloat getting worse and worse.
Calling it now, we are going to see super wounds that cant be saved at all, they will be like mortal wounds but even more powerful.
Hey look! i was, as i always am, 100% right again.
Behold, super mortal wounds that cant be saved against and bleed over, even more powerful super wounds! We have come full circle in 40k, BACK to wound bleed over. this is amazing to watch, its like a train wreck in slow motion.
*Brags about being always right*
*Posts proof of himself being wrong*
*Repeats inaccurate claim just to underscore the point*
Backspacehacker wrote: If we want to say technically its not a new thing, yes its not new.
However reasonably you cant equate the two.
One is a melee weapon that spills over wounds swinging at S4 + Weapons Strength.
The other is a S9 AP-4 D3+3 24" range spilling over, and ignores any invuln saves.
Its not equitable it would be like saying yes both a tomato and a water melon are a fruit, but we all know damn well a tomato does not go in a fruit salad, we all know damn well, this weapon is not the same to compare to a flail.
Yeah. The Flail can reliably body 6-8 GEQ on its own (4 attacks, hitting on 2+ with potential RR1s, wounding the same, no save and 2 dead GEQ per failed save) while this will usually only kill one. It kills a little more than half as many if it gets a 6 to-wound.
Again, I'm not disagreeing that this is power creep... But it's not revolutionary.
Backspacehacker wrote: If we want to say technically its not a new thing, yes its not new.
However reasonably you cant equate the two.
One is a melee weapon that spills over wounds swinging at S4 + Weapons Strength.
The other is a S9 AP-4 D3+3 24" range spilling over, and ignores any invuln saves.
Its not equitable it would be like saying yes both a tomato and a water melon are a fruit, but we all know damn well a tomato does not go in a fruit salad, we all know damn well, this weapon is not the same to compare to a flail.
Yeah. The Flail can reliably body 6-8 GEQ on its own (4 attacks, hitting on 2+ with potential RR1s, wounding the same, no save and 2 dead GEQ per failed save) while this will usually only kill one. It kills a little more than half as many if it gets a 6 to-wound.
Again, I'm not disagreeing that this is power creep... But it's not revolutionary.
Don't they have some ability that makes the wounds auto-6?
That is vomit worthy and a reinforcement to me of why I ran away screaming from this point of the game. How depraved do you need to be as a designer that you feel this fine? I'm going to laugh my ass off at the sheer lethality a lasgun or it's mary sue upgrade in the 4month codex.
Gibblets wrote: That is vomit worthy and a reinforcement to me of why I ran away screaming from this point of the game. How depraved do you need to be as a designer that you feel this fine? I'm going to laugh my ass off at the sheer lethality a lasgun or it's mary sue upgrade in the 4month codex.
Not gonna lie, I'm going to take a break from the game again. GW needs to stop hiring their "rules" writers for attitude.
It's there in the rules; proccing Judgement Tokens automatically wounds and those count as rolling a 6 for whatever extra purposes. I'd post a screenshot of the rule but of course I don't have the full Codex in a convenient PDF on my phone.
I mentioned this previously but it is extremely easy to stack Judgement Tokens along with subfaction bonuses to make that trigger very reliable. The best combination I have seen is:
- Thurian subfaction treats 2 Tokens as 3
- Thurian also includes a special character who can place a Token on 2 units per turn, and use a strat to turn one of those into 2 (3 with the subfaction bonus).
- Said character can also auto-6 one hit roll per turn for a friendly model.
- Thurians can reroll one Hit roll per turn, including deliberately rerolling a successful hit in the hope of triggering Judgement.
This all builds up to use the characters auto-6 to guarantee one Magna-Rail roll per turn, and then have a second on a 75% chance for the cost of 1CP.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to highlight how absolutely bonkers-good the Forgemaster is when he rocks his Relic Sniper and his personal Judgement strat.
What an incredibly fun an innovative mechanic...which will have a work-around when the 9ed version of "Gathering Storm/Psychic Awakening" comes around!
Space Marines dominated for about a period of 18 months, from the 2nd Codex of 8th all the way up until a combination of Drukhari/Admech dropping and eating huge points nerfs in MFM2021 brought them back down. And even at the height of that, certain chapters like Iron Hands, White Scars and Deathwatch were still able to regularly post strong results.
Racerguy180 wrote: What an incredibly fun an innovative mechanic...which will have a work-around when the 9ed version of "Gathering Storm/Psychic Awakening" comes around!
When you really look at all the numbers, Votann honestly has less units, wounds, models, even less shooting and melee depending on the list. The only way to get lots of shooting is bike spam.
My test Votann list that I played a few games with is 11 units at 115 wounds
My UM list that I play normally has 18 units with 137 wounds
The wounds are close but 7 more units is a huge deal. Also 22 less wounds, thats 11 more Marines, or 7.3 Terminators, which also is a lot.
This also isn't looking at other armies like my DE for example, which has 175 wounds and 22 units lol.
So while they do get better odds of wounding, they actually are working with less. The question is, is that amount of easily wounds too much compare to how much less they have? When I play them I do more damage per unit over all, but it has not really been more damage on a army by army base so far. I can however with Votann more reliably kill though, but at the cost of going for secondaries, actions, objectives, etc....
Basically I am saying, each unit is stronger, but with less units and wounds, each unit needs to be, and IDK if its too strong yet (it could be, but also might not be).
I love the fact that anytime Orkz have anything remotely competitive its labeled broken or absurdly powerful. A Squigbuggy ON ITS OWN, as in no other buffs was getting 2D6 shots at BS4 and 1D6 shots at BS5 with the smaller gun getting 18' range compared to the 36 of the bigger one. The big gun AVERAGED 7 shots, 3.5 hits, 2.3 wounds and 1.5 dead Marines. The little gun at half the range averaged 3.5 shots, 1.16 hits, 0.77 wounds and 0.51 dead Marines. All told this thing AVERAGED 2 dead Marines a turn. Now, lets compare it to the ridiculous Voidweaver that you said was just as bad as the squigbuggy. Voidweaver, without buffs averaged 1.3 dead Marines with just its secondary guns, add in the Prismatic cannon and it became 2.4 dead Marines with ease, the biggest difference being the Squigbuggy couldn't hurt vehicles very well, the Voidweaver could switch to a secondary weapons type and plunk S12 -4AP 2D3 dmg shots into vehicles.
Both those were 90pts btw.
The thread's moved on a bit (and so its off topic) - but I feel you are underselling this a bit. Because you would have Speedwaaagh up for 2 turns, so you'd expect to kill 2.6 (give or take) marines (no AOC then). You'd also potentially have freebooterz up - which buffs that smaller gun and pushes it to 2.9 or so (although in practice it was common to get Freebooterz up with Squigbuggies as they got less benefit than everything else in the list - but you may have had multiple units of squigbuggies.)
But, most importantly, you could do all this through walls/any other LOS blocking terrain. Which was a massive advantage that not even Voidweavers got.
Following general creep and the hard nerf to ignore LOS shooting, the Squigbuggy is now no great thing. But that wasn't the case in mid 2021.
Anyway, clearly Voidweavers were worse/more overpowered relative to everything else then available in the game - but the point is it was the same zero to hero approach. Squigbuggies in 8th were awful. In 9th they got a massive buff (gaining triple the firepower, ramshackle etc) and went down 10 points versus their final 8th edition incarnation. (I can't remember what they were on initial release of 9th. In initial 8th they were 140 before getting a cut.)
I think the magna rail is going to be a problem, but there's another thread for that.
The rending on 6s thing was added in the 6th edition codex. The jetbikes getting 1 heavy weapon per bike was also added in 7th (maybe 6th?) when they got their new kit with extra guns on the sprues. They then proceeded to be the pain in the neck known as "scatbikes" for an edition before being booted out of the troop slot to atone for their sins. So 
t bad while others are actually good, having flat buffs that effect all the same is bad, the lower 4-5 marines needs a buff that just effects their traits at this point.
