The core rules are available through Warcom. We don't have the *full* picture yet, but it seems like we have the gist of it given that the existing books aren't being invalidated. How are we feeling so far?

My impression so far is that while there isn't much to be excited over, there are some decent little quality of life tweaks that are nice to see.

* I like the changes to Fly. My wave serpents might go back to being faster than simply walking now that they don't have to use all their movement clearing a wall.

* The Hidden/Detection Range rules seem potentially interesting. I suspect they're going to get overhauled after people realize they kind of just let you make a World Eaters army untargetable for the first couple turns, but I like the *idea* of playing around with ranges and targetability.

* I like that we're swapping magic circles for terrain features. I think it will be easier to convey a sense of story when you're fighting over the bell tower instead of the random circular patch of ground next to the bell tower.

Aside from that, it seems like a lot of side-grades and shuffling, though some of that shuffling might be easier for them to work with when writing FAQs down the road, etc.

I'll have to wait and see Detachment Points before I can form much of an opinion on those. I suspect these are going to end up being mildly broken or at least end up with winners and losers, but we'll see. There's some potential for the really bad detachments (looking at you Armored Warhost) to find a place if they no longer deny you the ability to take a better detachment alongside them.

I feel like my group avoided enough of the annoying fight phase cheese that the new charge/fight phase rules are going to be a mildly complicated side-grade, but I acknowledge that it's probably an upgrade for people who play in competitive environments.

My main sourpuss complaint is that I was hoping we'd get some of the flavor and customization back that was missing from 10th and nothing we've seen so far suggests that GW is going that direction. But maybe all the customization and fluffy rules will be locked behind whatever the new Crusade equivalent ends up being.

I want to know how my various bombers (Marauders, Nightshrouds, the AdMech one, the Tau one, Voidraven, etc) are supposed to work.
RAW in the core rules pack? Their bombing abilities simply dont function.

The transport ones are also greatly fethed up.
Things like Stormravens, Thunderhawks, & Valkyrie arent meant to skirt the edges of the battlefield.
Well, maybe the Valk at timrs as its not the toughest bird.

And the poor Harpies & Helldrakes. :(

 Wyldhunt wrote:

* The Hidden/Detection Range rules seem potentially interesting. I suspect they're going to get overhauled after people realize they kind of just let you make a World Eaters army untargetable for the first couple turns, but I like the *idea* of playing around with ranges and targetability.

My main sourpuss complaint is that I was hoping we'd get some of the flavor and customization back that was missing from 10th and nothing we've seen so far suggests that GW is going that direction. But maybe all the customization and fluffy rules will be locked behind whatever the new Crusade equivalent ends up being.

To be hidden they need to be within a terrain area with dense terrain so unless you have these less then 6" of each other across the board they will have to move out of it to get closer, unless you are just going to leave them sitting in the terrain area for two rounds and at that point are you really playing World Eaters.

From what I can tell Crusade is now a deck of cards that I think will mostly based on drawing for upgrade from a deck and agendas for missions instead of the primaries.

ccs wrote:
I want to know how my various bombers (Marauders, Nightshrouds, the AdMech one, the Tau one, Voidraven, etc) are supposed to work.
RAW in the core rules pack? Their bombing abilities simply dont function.

The transport ones are also greatly fethed up.
Things like Stormravens, Thunderhawks, & Valkyrie arent meant to skirt the edges of the battlefield.
Well, maybe the Valk at timrs as its not the toughest bird.

And the poor Harpies & Helldrakes. :(

When I first read the flyer rules I thought that you would set up the flyer at a board edge (per ingress move) and then move its distance. That’s what I thought the rules as intended were, as it would make sense, function, etc. But actually reading and flipping around the document, I don’t see the “and then move” part. So by my (admittedly half awake and undercaffinated) read of RAW, you can ingress to a board edge, shoot and hang out until the end of your opponent’s turn, and then blip back into reserves to do it again. Which for gunships is not a half bad way of representing strafing runs. But as unless you have deep strike, being stuck to the board edge is bad for flyers with other roles.

Or I’m misreading something. Which is possible.

Edit:
All the other move actions have “EFFECT: Your unit moves as described in Moving (03).” Ingress only has "EFFECT: Your unit is set up as described in Set Up (03.02)."

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of 10th, so it probably doesn't come as much of a surprise that I'm also not a fan of '10th but with a few tweaks'.

- Characters are still glued to one specific unit all game. Also can only join ze designated unit, because that was a barrel of fun.

- Speaking of characters, no sign that customisation has been improved in any way.

- Hidden probably wouldn't even need to exist if GW weren't completely wedded to TLoS.

- Stratagems still exist in the book as opposed to, say, being condemned to the pits of Hell where they belong.

- Psychic abilities are still indistinguishable from regular guns and abilities, save that they have the word 'Psychic' slapped onto them.

In short, I think I'll sleep this one out.

We won’t know about customization until we see the codexes. Can’t blame that on the core rules. Not holding my breath though. The new detachment system helps a little on that front, but probably not as much as some people would like.

Psychic actually has a bonus. You can ignore mods to hit and wound for psychic attacks, so it’s more then just a keyword.

 Nevelon wrote:
We won’t know about customization until we see the codexes. Can’t blame that on the core rules. Not holding my breath though. The new detachment system helps a little on that front, but probably not as much as some people would like.

Psychic actually has a bonus. You can ignore mods to hit and wound for psychic attacks, so it’s more then just a keyword.

Slightly hot take: I was actually fine with psychic powers just being guns that could interact with anti-psychic rules. If your opponent can use cover or forcefields or smoke grenades to defend against necron lightning guns, then it makes sense enough to me that those same tools could defend against psychic lightning attacks. That is, how much sense it makes for a psychic attack to ignore to-hit/wound mods kind of depends on the attack. Mind War where you're just telepathically mind crushing them? Probably shouldn't be impacted by a smoke grenade or forcefield. Telekinetically lobbing a rock at someone? Probably should be. Psychic fire? Probably should be unless we're going the extra step to say that it just so happens to be anti-smoke bomb/force field magic fire because reasons.

I didn't like the 7th edition psychic system, but I did think the witchfires tended to be pretty flavorful.

But yeah, mostly agree with vipoid. I'm fine with characters being glued to a single unit all game (a strat to let them join a new squad would maybe make sense), but the limitations on which squads they can join feel very artificial. Looking at you, haemonculus who isn't allowed to lead grotesques. No sign of improved customization is a big bummer for me. Sticking to a single detachment and ditching strats so we can reallocate that page space/complexity to more in-depth thematic detachment rules would have been preferable to multiple detachments per army.

I think Hidden could prove to be neat though. Especially if they go a bit farther with how things interact with it than what we've seen previewed so far.

I think the character restrictions on who they can join stem from a very SM-centric viewpoint from the designers. I think it's fine that the gravis Captain can only join the Gravis-armoured units and has some special rule to represent his armour type. But it breaks down when armies have more restricted characters and try to apply the same logic. Yes, a Haemonculus is a different type of thing in terms of size and equipment to a Grotesque, but that shouldn't prevent them joining, especially when we already see it for armies like AdMech.

The new rules seem fine but we really don't have enough info to make a judgement yet. Early reports suggest shooting is very dominant because the Hidden rules basically don't matter as much as people think and there are plenty of ways to brute-force your way through the -1 to hit for being in cover. There are rumours GW may try to implement a "fix" with a day-one patch, which is kind of peak GW. The problem is they still haven't addressed the sheer lethality of the units in the game. Until they do, everything else is just a sticking plaster over a severed limb.

The new detachment/mission system seems pretty neat. I'm concerned that it's another potential vector for imbalance but if they get it right I can see it leading to much more interesting games simply due to the asymmetry in the missions. It will be interesting to see if we get detachments with good rules but less desirable dispositions as an attempt to balance things out. The new secondary scoring allowing you to not score cards and hold onto them from turn to turn should lead to more meaningful decisions about when to discard and when to keep them.

I'm cautiously optimistic, but we'll need to see if there's a change in approach in the Codices before we can really tell which direction the game is going.

They can't lower lethality this edition, to do so would require them to level the whole game at once, which requires an index.

 Wyldhunt wrote:


Slightly hot take: I was actually fine with psychic powers just being guns that could interact with anti-psychic rules. If your opponent can use cover or forcefields or smoke grenades to defend against necron lightning guns, then it makes sense enough to me that those same tools could defend against psychic lightning attacks. That is, how much sense it makes for a psychic attack to ignore to-hit/wound mods kind of depends on the attack. Mind War where you're just telepathically mind crushing them? Probably shouldn't be impacted by a smoke grenade or forcefield. Telekinetically lobbing a rock at someone? Probably should be. Psychic fire? Probably should be unless we're going the extra step to say that it just so happens to be anti-smoke bomb/force field magic fire because reasons.

I didn't like the 7th edition psychic system, but I did think the witchfires tended to be pretty flavorful.

I think it is big hot take. Plus Turning psychic powers in to guns ended with elimination of most utility/no "witchfire" powers. I don't want psychic powers to be heavy weapon X, but with extra loops atteched to use it. I want melee buffs/debuffs, powers that affect terrain (dense it or undense it), maybe even create terrain. Make psychic powers actualy a thing.

Flyers not having plunging fire is wierd, because if anything is higher then stuff on the table, it is a flyer. What I really want to know is some faction/unit rules interactions with the core rules. Like how does the Death Company and all the other self battleshock detachments suppose to work, and I hope it is not turned in to MW to the units, because it doesn't work for elite armies. And do Deathwing terminators really ignore cover.

In general the new terrain rules are a big improvment over 10th.

Some of the non-attack psychic powers are still there. But just as flavor text on a psycher’s one abilty. One of the new marine detachments tries to highlight librarians. Hopefully GK will get something similar.

I miss the days of being able to choose powers, and generally always went for the utility ones. Plenty of units i. The codex that just strait up murder things. But if you wanted to teleport a unit across the table and turn off invulnerable saves, there was only one guy you could get.

Karol wrote:
I think it is big hot take. Plus Turning psychic powers in to guns ended with elimination of most utility/no "witchfire" powers. I don't want psychic powers to be heavy weapon X, but with extra loops atteched to use it. I want melee buffs/debuffs, powers that affect terrain (dense it or undense it), maybe even create terrain. Make psychic powers actualy a thing.

See, I want the buffs/debuffs/terrain powers too. I just also want some psykers to shoot fire and lightning, and I'm okay with shooting fire/lightning out of your brain being mechanically similar to shooting fire/lightning out of a gun. If the rules are doing a good job of making a flamer feel like it's shooting fire, then having psychic fire behave like a flamer probably means that the psychic fire *also* does a good job of feeling like fire. I remember thinking it was neat that the space wolves living lightning power in 7th edition had similar stats to a necron tesla weapon.

Sometimes the magic part of magic lightning is just that a dude conjured up some lightning. It doesn't have to be special sapient lightning that burrows through dimensions to bypass forcefields and ignore smokescreens or whatever.

Flyers not having plunging fire is wierd, because if anything is higher then stuff on the table, it is a flyer.

That *is* weird. They went out of their way to give it to knights but not planes? Strange.

Nevelon wrote:Some of the non-attack psychic powers are still there. But just as flavor text on a psycher’s one abilty. One of the new marine detachments tries to highlight librarians. Hopefully GK will get something similar.

It's not perfect, but I *do* like the librarius detachment. Its powers feel relatively fluffy, and the flexibility it provides makes it feel like your psykers know how to pull off a suite of tricks instead of being locked into one or two super specific things. (Which also felt weird in past editions.)

I miss the days of being able to choose powers, and generally always went for the utility ones. Plenty of units i. The codex that just strait up murder things. But if you wanted to teleport a unit across the table and turn off invulnerable saves, there was only one guy you could get.

Agreed! Although the killy powers had their place. I had a farseer in a red robe (because red is the angry color!) who would take a singing spear and frequently ended up with Eldritch Storm and either Doom or Mind War or Executioner, depending on the edition. All the most aggressive powers, basically. And he was my spicy little farseer whose fiery personality came through in his casting as he went around blasting enemies. It was the kind of "rpg" style customization that I really miss in 10th. Being able to project personality onto small choices like those went a long way towards making me feel like I was telling the story of my dudes instead of just loading up Pregenerated Farseer FIle 27.

Slipspace wrote:
Early reports suggest shooting is very dominant because the Hidden rules basically don't matter as much as people think and there are plenty of ways to brute-force your way through the -1 to hit for being in cover. There are rumours GW may try to implement a "fix" with a day-one patch, which is kind of peak GW.

Kinda what I figured. With most armies hitting on 3s in the first place a -1 to hit just means doing three-quarters as much damage, which isn't much of a penalty, and anything that can get a +1 from Heavy, plunging fire, or buffs just won't care. Then 15" detection range casts a pretty wide bubble so you only need one or two sacrificial spotters to get up the board turn 1. Maybe they'll patch it to a 12" detection range, which would cover about two-thirds as much area and fit a little better with the usual 6" increments.

Well, I like a lot of the changes I've seen with 11th but my usual group is pretty burnt out on 10th, so not sure how much or if we'll even play it at all. It's a shame because I felt 10th had some solid ideas with respect to play aids, USRs, and reining in stratagems, but none of my guys are happy with the current approach to listbuilding and for a group invested in Their Dudes it's become a dealbreaker. Could change in the codices but I'm not holding my breath.

Ultimately I think the people who liked 10th are going to really like 11th, but people who didn't like 10th aren't going to find 11th particularly redeeming.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Flyers not having plunging fire is wierd, because if anything is higher then stuff on the table, it is a flyer.

That *is* weird. They went out of their way to give it to knights but not planes? Strange.

For starters, they clearly either hate aircraft or have no idea how to make them work right.

I thought I saw a comment about aircraft not getting plunging fire because they're moving too fast or something. That, or not letting them have that benefit is just another example of trying to get them out of the game.

I definitely think GW is just erring on the side of caution for aircraft. They're quite happy for them to be unplayable crap, just a millstone for any narrative/thematic players. But really don't want them to be any sort of overpowered again

I think its a reasonable compromise on aircraft.

I think the tension is that GW don't want them interfering with the game with a base that should not physically exist. You can I guess argue all bases are questionable, but they sort of represent an zone of control to the respective mini that an aircraft operating thousands of feet above the battlefield shouldn't have.

This way they are stuck on a board edge further than 8" away from any opposing units, and so for the most part shouldn't interfere with the positioning of any other minis.

You could just make them skimmers but having an Ork take out a Voidraven Bomber with a choppa and a surfeit of ambition doesn't seem right either.

Yeah, the problem has always been the ability to use the space they take up on the table to interfere with units. I'd be curious if GW could adapt flight stands similar to what Legion is looking to use in the future as they seem like a really good solution.

Slipspace wrote:

The new rules seem fine but we really don't have enough info to make a judgement yet. Early reports suggest shooting is very dominant because the Hidden rules basically don't matter as much as people think and there are plenty of ways to brute-force your way through the -1 to hit for being in cover. There are rumours GW may try to implement a "fix" with a day-one patch, which is kind of peak GW. The problem is they still haven't addressed the sheer lethality of the units in the game. Until they do, everything else is just a sticking plaster over a severed limb.

I'll believe that when I see it. I've heard a lot of this as well, and it sounds like people crying doom just like they have at the start of any other edition. No one has played it yet and it's just guesswork for attention.

That being said, I'm sure that there will be something imbalanced at launch, GW has a proven track record of that as well, I just don't think it's going to be anything near as broad as shooting is OP, or melee is OP (I've heard both about this edition from many people.) If something does come out OP at launch it will likely be a specific army taking advantage of a new tweak in an unexpected way and get nerfed around as quickly as 10th edition Aeldari did at launch.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 catbarf wrote:
none of my guys are happy with the current approach to listbuilding and for a group invested in Their Dudes it's become a dealbreaker. Could change in the codices but I'm not holding my breath.

Ultimately I think the people who liked 10th are going to really like 11th, but people who didn't like 10th aren't going to find 11th particularly redeeming.

Maybe the new detachment combinations might help there? It's given me a bunch of list building ideas, and they have said that some partial weapon option points will return like in the old days, just not to that extent. It seems like they are leaning much more into make your guys your guys in 11th over 10th, though it's not all revealed yet.

Yeah, that usually happens with the odd numbered editions. We'll probably get another huge shakeup in 12th. That being said as someone who has played since 3rd, I would consider 10th one of my favourite editions (Probably 5th, then 3rd, then 10th if I had to rank them.) So am still pretty happy to be going into 11th as is.

To me, the big shakeups haven't been revealed in a way I can really judge. Hidden is a wild change I can't speak on until I've experienced it and the detachment shakeup is extremely dependent on how the whole puzzle comes together. The rest of the changes are pretty much what I'd expect so my opinion really comes down to how these work in practice.

One thing that concerns me is that a lot of the detachments that affect the entire range seem to 3 point detachments so that you cannot pair them with a bonus detachment at 2000 points. An fine balance decision meaning you can either buff your entire range a little bit or take a 2 point and a 1 point to buff the 2 parts of the range on which you want to focus.

The problem is that I mostly play 1000 point games. This means that most detachments that provide a wide buff will be unavailable and any list constructed will either be unoptimized or a skewed list as the 2 and 1 point detachments heavily incentivize certain units. I know GW does not usually consider balance outside of 2000 points, but they keep releasing rules and for lower point values so I hope some thought is put this.

 Tawnis wrote:
Maybe the new detachment combinations might help there? It's given me a bunch of list building ideas, and they have said that some partial weapon option points will return like in the old days, just not to that extent. It seems like they are leaning much more into make your guys your guys in 11th over 10th, though it's not all revealed yet.

Maybe, I don't know. I just look at my Scions army and think about whether I should count all the sergeants as having plasma pistols and power fists, or stick with their objectively completely worse modeled wargear. Inevitably I resolve this question by popping on over to the Grimdark Future listbuilder where I can keep them WYSIWYG and not feel hobbled.

I know this complaint is three years old at this point but it's been a recurring sore spot for my group. I played a decent bit of 10th with my Tyranids as they didn't suffer much from this, but for the guys in our group with Guard and Marines it's been a big point of contention.

Don't want to hijack this thread with bitching and I appreciate that your suggestion is made with constructive intent. Guess we'll see how it shakes out.

 the Signless wrote:


The problem is that I mostly play 1000 point games. This means that most detachments that provide a wide buff will be unavailable and any list constructed will either be unoptimized or a skewed list as the 2 and 1 point detachments heavily incentivize certain units. I know GW does not usually consider balance outside of 2000 points, but they keep releasing rules and for lower point values so I hope some thought is put this.

I would just houserule this one. There is very little lost in moving a 3DP down, we already use those currently. I think you're right on the money that GW doesn't consider 1k games that much and it's just a consequence of making sure that 2k is balance.

 the Signless wrote:
One thing that concerns me is that a lot of the detachments that affect the entire range seem to 3 point detachments so that you cannot pair them with a bonus detachment at 2000 points. An fine balance decision meaning you can either buff your entire range a little bit or take a 2 point and a 1 point to buff the 2 parts of the range on which you want to focus.

The problem is that I mostly play 1000 point games. This means that most detachments that provide a wide buff will be unavailable and any list constructed will either be unoptimized or a skewed list as the 2 and 1 point detachments heavily incentivize certain units. I know GW does not usually consider balance outside of 2000 points, but they keep releasing rules and for lower point values so I hope some thought is put this.

This isn't a new issue really, several editions have had common house rules to play at 1 point over or under a traditional sized game to unlock preferred rules. Playing small games at 1,001 points will give you the 3DP options.

 catbarf wrote:

 Tawnis wrote:
Maybe the new detachment combinations might help there? It's given me a bunch of list building ideas, and they have said that some partial weapon option points will return like in the old days, just not to that extent. It seems like they are leaning much more into make your guys your guys in 11th over 10th, though it's not all revealed yet.

Maybe, I don't know. I just look at my Scions army and think about whether I should count all the sergeants as having plasma pistols and power fists, or stick with their objectively completely worse modeled wargear. Inevitably I resolve this question by popping on over to the Grimdark Future listbuilder where I can keep them WYSIWYG and not feel hobbled.

I know this complaint is three years old at this point but it's been a recurring sore spot for my group. I played a decent bit of 10th with my Tyranids as they didn't suffer much from this, but for the guys in our group with Guard and Marines it's been a big point of contention.

Don't want to hijack this thread with bitching and I appreciate that your suggestion is made with constructive intent. Guess we'll see how it shakes out.

This and the fixed unit sizes are my main two issues with modern 40k. Honestly, I can tolerate just about everything else, but I don't like it when the game messes with what I have in this way.

Priced wargear has a bad reputation, but only because GW never bothered to balance it well. GW's first-take balancing is terrible, that's never changing, that's why we get quarterly updates now to fix that. Do the same with the weapons and we'd be fine. No, obviously 15 points for a plasma pistol is and was always silly. A points cost absolutely exists though, because if you made it half a point like WHFB shields used to be, it'd remain a spectacularly efficient upgrade and an autotake. The truth lies in between.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Priced wargear has a bad reputation, but only because GW never bothered to balance it well. GW's first-take balancing is terrible, that's never changing, that's why we get quarterly updates now to fix that. Do the same with the weapons and we'd be fine. No, obviously 15 points for a plasma pistol is and was always silly. A points cost absolutely exists though, because if you made it half a point like WHFB shields used to be, it'd remain a spectacularly efficient upgrade and an autotake. The truth lies in between.

I'm not sure the difference between 0 and 0.5 points is meaningful to a game.
And since I doubt taking plasma pistols on say your sergeants noticeably impacts your win rate, I tend to think they can safely be valued at zero without effect.

Its the same argument for why I think fixed unit sizes is actually a good thing.

Imagine you have an army which is 3 units of 10 and 2 units of 5 for 40 models. They have 5 units for holding objectives, doing secondary actions, move blocking, whatever. The things that actually win you the game.
And GW says the army is too good, and applies a 15% points nerf. So they need to ditch 6 models.
Well if they can just go to an army of 3 units of 8, and 2 units of 5, its likely they lose very little functionality. Their win rate, if it was too high, likely remains high. So the only option is to nerf the unit into the ground - which was GW's historical style. (And still occasionally is, but they have got a bit better).
By forcing you to lose 6 models with fixed load outs of 5 or 10, you have to change the composition of the army. You have to lose either a full unit of 10, or the two units of 5. Sure you get "4 models" worth of something else to slot into your army, but the composition is now changed. With fewer units, it likely performs worse.

I don't think GW has improved just because they are balancing on a faster pace. They've also fundamentally changed the philosophy of how they balance the game. By having much stricter controls on what an army will look like, there's much fewer variables they have to consider. Bringing back points for gear and variable unit sizes will massively increase the complexity of balancing the game.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Priced wargear has a bad reputation, but only because GW never bothered to balance it well. GW's first-take balancing is terrible, that's never changing, that's why we get quarterly updates now to fix that.

GW's quarterly regular updates have been a huge improvement to the game, but the one thing they do really, really bad is improving bad units. Their current approach is mostly data based, and you don't get any data on the things no one is playing.

I highly doubt that the quarterly updates would do anything but nerf outliers. For the vast amount of units there will still be one "correct" way to equip your models and a bunch of modeling opportunities, just like in any other edition which had points for wargear.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tyel wrote:
[I don't think GW has improved just because they are balancing on a faster pace. They've also fundamentally changed the philosophy of how they balance the game. By having much stricter controls on what an army will look like, there's much fewer variables they have to consider. Bringing back points for gear and variable unit sizes will massively increase the complexity of balancing the game.

I fully agree with this. I understand how the current state feels wrong to everyone who is used to configure every single model like a character from an RPG. But I truly think that moving the flight level of the game to squad level instead of model level has vastly improved the game part of the hobby.

The problem with free wargear is that it heavily discourages and punishes people that build for cool or theme or whatever.
There is one objectively best and correct loadout and anything else is notably inferior.

I don't think it's wrong to be questioning how much a sergeants pistol actually matters, but I do question if "take a plasma pistol or you're wrong" is the solution or even preferable to points. If we want to disregard a sergeant's pistol, I think just giving them a "sergeant's pistol" would be better way of doing it. Especially since what pistol the designer gave them is almost entirely arbitrary.

 Jidmah wrote:
I fully agree with this. I understand how the current state feels wrong to everyone who is used to configure every single model like a character from an RPG. But I truly think that moving the flight level of the game to squad level instead of model level has vastly improved the game part of the hobby.

The thing is, though, it feels like the game is trying to occupy an awkward middle-ground.

For one, if the game wants to focus on the squad-level then it seems weird to not only permit but actively enforce having as many different weapon types in a given unit as possible.

For example, take DE. In prior editions, a Warrior squad might be something like:
5 Kabalies with 1 Blaster (or Shredder).
or
10 Kabalites with 2 Blasters and 1 Dark Lance (or 2 Shredders and one Splinter Cannon).

The former has just two types of weapon to resolve. The second has either 2 or 3 (depending on whether Dark Lances have the same profile as Blasters, range notwithstanding).

This would seem good for a squad-based game as you're minimising the amount of weapon profiles (which need to be resolved separately).

However, 10th changed the Warrior squad such that you can no longer double up on special (or heavy) weapons, but instead promoted one of each to be taken. Thus, a squad will typically be:
10 Kabalites with 1 Blaster and 1 Shredder and 1 Dark Lance and 1 Splinter Cannon. That's five different weapon profiles that all need to be separately resolved.

But Warriors are an old unit, so let's look instead at the Hand of the Archon - a unit that didn't exist until 10th edition:
10 Kabalite Agents with Blaster, Shredder, Dark Lance, Splinter Cannon, Shardcarbine, Stinger Pistol

Even accounting for the Shardcarbine basically having the same profile as the Splinter Rifle, that's still six different profiles that need to be separately resolved.

And in melee it gets even worse. The normal Kabalites would have 2 melee weapon profiles at most (if the sergeant gets a special weapon). However, with the Hand of the Archon, you're looking at:
10 Kabalite Agents with 1 Pain Sculptor, 1 Power Weapon, 1 Razorflail.

That's four different melee weapon profiles on a unit that's not even particularly good in melee. And this is after Wyches had their weapons 'streamlined'.

I feel a game actually interested in squad-based rules would want to encourage simpler squads, rather than squads that appear to have collected one each of half a dozen different weapons.

Tyel wrote:
I'm not sure the difference between 0 and 0.5 points is meaningful to a game.

Because the point isn't that it should be half a point. The point is that some people will go "omg, if they weren't free, I would never take a plasma gun on my guardsmen squads" and I think that's extremely narrow-minded. If the plasma gun was half a point you can bet I would take it. It'd make its points back 20x with every shot. That's a good investment in my book.

It wouldn't be balanced at half a point. You'd need to go higher to find an equilibrium. But that equilibrium isn't zero.

And since I doubt taking plasma pistols on say your sergeants noticeably impacts your win rate, I tend to think they can safely be valued at zero without effect.

Their value is not zero. A pro player can skip their cheapest enhancement and it'd probably not impact their winrate either. That doesn't mean enhancements should be free.

Its the same argument for why I think fixed unit sizes is actually a good thing.

Imagine you have an army which is 3 units of 10 and 2 units of 5 for 40 models. They have 5 units for holding objectives, doing secondary actions, move blocking, whatever. The things that actually win you the game.
And GW says the army is too good, and applies a 15% points nerf. So they need to ditch 6 models.
Well if they can just go to an army of 3 units of 8, and 2 units of 5, its likely they lose very little functionality. Their win rate, if it was too high, likely remains high. So the only option is to nerf the unit into the ground - which was GW's historical style. (And still occasionally is, but they have got a bit better).
By forcing you to lose 6 models with fixed load outs of 5 or 10, you have to change the composition of the army. You have to lose either a full unit of 10, or the two units of 5. Sure you get "4 models" worth of something else to slot into your army, but the composition is now changed. With fewer units, it likely performs worse.

With all due respect - what are you talking about?

If my army is too strong, you nerf the workhorse units, and my response is to just cut something superfluous and keep my workhorse units intact, that indicates one of three possible scenarios:

1. The workhorse unit remains OP. You haven't nerfed it enough. Fixed unit sizes doesn't help anything here. Your tap was too light.

2. The rest of the codex sucks, and I rely on the workhorse unit to actually win games. Again, fixed unit sizes doesn't help anything here. The rest of the codex still sucks. Me having to give up a whole smaller unit instead of just a few models hasn't improved the matter, you've just worsened internal balance.

3. I want to take the workhorse unit even after nerfs, because I think it's very cool, or because its particular mechanics are necessary to the specific game plan I have in mind. Again, fixed unit sizes changes nothing here. I still want to use the unit and will continue to until nerfs make the strategy not functional at all, which probably isn't a good outcome.

The goal of a nerf isn't for a unit to stop seeing any play. It's to reach something close to an equilibrium where a powerful unit comes at an appropriate cost, and where taking it means giving up the chance to take a similar level of power in other units.

Also, fixed unit sizes is violently anti-hobby and just doesn't belong in Warhammer in general. If someone has 6 Raveners from the old kit (they were sold in 3s) let them play 6 instead of 5-10 the way you have to now. It doesn't hurt the game to have those 6 raveners running around. The game can survive it.

I don't think GW has improved just because they are balancing on a faster pace. They've also fundamentally changed the philosophy of how they balance the game. By having much stricter controls on what an army will look like, there's much fewer variables they have to consider. Bringing back points for gear and variable unit sizes will massively increase the complexity of balancing the game.

This part of the excuse but not the real reason if you look deeper. The real reason is to discourage kitbashing in an effort to boost sales of character models (who have the highest markup of all GW kits). If you can no longer play a unit of 9 Intercessors, converting one to a Captain is no longer a viable option.

This gets increasingly obvious when you see how a number of units are handled. Look at the abject comedy that is the Allarus Terminator MFM entry:



Allarus Terminators are sold in boxes of 3, and GW also lets you double up with two boxes to make 6. However, there is no separate Allarus Shield-Captain blister; that model can only be built out of this kit, leaving you a model short. For this reason GW has no choice but to allow a carveout so that box remains playable. The net result however is farcical - GW doesn't want to give you an inch more than they absolutely must, so as a result, you are allowed to play 2, 3, 5 or 6 models to a unit, but not 4, obviously. 4 would snap the game in half and would be way too much for GW to handle, evidently. An entry that says 2-6 models, 55 points per? Don't be silly! The poor new players would never understand such a layout!




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 vipoid wrote:
I feel a game actually interested in squad-based rules would want to encourage simpler squads, rather than squads that appear to have collected one each of half a dozen different weapons.

Yeah. Nemesis Claw (another very new unit) displays well why boxlocking is another big problem with 10e. That unit is just a mess. It has a gorillion weapons but due to boxlocking you can't double up on them, so you end up with a unit that sucks for both competitive, hobbyist and casual players; for competitive players, they're a chess clock time sink, for hobbyists they bar kitbashing to focus on the option you like more, and for casuals they are needlessly messy and confusing with keeping track of who has what weapon and which weapon does what.

Well, now that we're talking about it... The fundamental objection to points for wargear is that GW never gets the points right and so there are clear winners and losers. But by not having points for wargear there are still clear winners and losers anyways, often worse than when the losers at least saved a few points or provided some kind of overcosted functionality. It's not the loss of fifty wargear options for every officer that bothers me, it's that even with the greatly reduced options my 2000pts and your 2000pts may be significantly different in actual practical power due to lack of internal balance. I don't think GW has actually made the game more balanced this way, unless you're only considering strictly competitive play where avoiding trap units and wargear is a given.

My position is that even if plasma pistols were under-costed and still an auto-take, I would feel less bad about not having a plasma pistol on all my sergeants because it would mean saving points I could put somewhere else, and that would be closer to 'correct' than having no compensation at all for an objectively inferior loadout. I'm not expecting or looking for perfection. Less wrong would be enough.

I think even GW recognises that free wargear isn't the way. They had already begun pulling it back during 10th indirectly by splitting up datasheets (which achieves the same thing in a roundabout way, but consumes way more page space and is impractical for complex units) and now 11th edition continues it.

I can only hope 12th edition seals the deal again. The truth is, a unit like Scourges in a free wargear world will just -always- take Dark Lances (occasionally haywires if the meta is -very- vehicle heavy). They had to split off the sheet to make the carbines stop being a troll pick, but that still leaves plenty of guns like blasters, splinter cannons and shredders which will never exist while their big brothers are free.

Special/heavy weapons are at least an ideal case for differentiating options as sidegrades rather than upgrades. It isn't going to break the lore if Blasters, Splinter Cannons, and Shredders all have respective strengths and weaknesses that put them on par with Dark Lances, so there's a reason to take any of them. Then having the choice of either Shardcarbine squad as fast harassers or heavy weapons squad as fire support is a decent way to split it up.

The reason I chose plasma pistols and power fists on sergeants as my example is because they're an example of a free wargear choice where (1) balancing the options to be functionally equivalent isn't a viable option, and (2) the objectively correct choice doesn't match the lore; it has never been the case that every single Krieg or Scion sergeant is supposed to be packing a plasma pistol.

So the result of this free wargear scheme is that the fluffy, historically standard loadout represents a trap choice that is strictly worse than the competitively optimal one, and an army built to maximize the rules doesn't fit the fluff. It's the worst possible outcome.

In order to balance these options GW would need to either attach significantly useful special rules to the suboptimal options, nerf the better options to be on the same level as the weaker ones (or consolidate their rules), nix the better options entirely... or just attach a points cost to taking the better stuff.

Are options #1-3 actually easier than #4? I doubt it. So GW hasn't settled on a design that makes it easier to balance the game, they've simply decided to focus on external balance at the expense of internal balance.

 catbarf wrote:
Special/heavy weapons are at least an ideal case for differentiating options as sidegrades rather than upgrades. It isn't going to break the lore if Blasters, Splinter Cannons, and Shredders all have respective strengths and weaknesses that put them on par with Dark Lances, so there's a reason to take any of them. Then having the choice of either Shardcarbine squad as fast harassers or heavy weapons squad as fire support is a decent way to split it up.

Are they going to be on par though? Not every role is equally viable. Shredders are a close-range, anti-light infantry gun, and that's not what people are clamouring to get more of in their lists.

You'd have to give it obscene stats for it to contribute the same value as a dark lance does, and then you'd end up making life even worse for said light infantry units which themselves don't tend to have a very good time at all in this game (there's a reason Termagant swarms aren't flooding the boards...)

There was some talk about some of the wargear points coming back, at least for "big things." I don't know what that means, but some wargear points is better than none.

And I think that at least for marines, sergeant gear matters. Power fist on a marine is a meaningful upgrade over a chainsword. They are just releasing a new intercessors, with a sergeant in a very cool chainsword slashing pose. I'd like to actually use that model and not be punished for it.

I've been saying for a while that a good compromise between the old points system and the simplified-but-unsatisfying setup we have now is to basically break up a unit's wargear options into a smaller number of simplified options. So using scourges as an example, your options would look something like the following. Points values are placeholders:

* Take your basic scourge squad: 60 points.
* Take up to 5 extra bodies: +40 points.
* Let the solarite swap out his shard carbine for options on the solarite wargear list: +10 points.
* One of the following either:
A.) Up to 4 scourges swap their carbines out for one of the good weapons (blasters, splinter cannons, shredders, etc.) for +20 points OR
B.) Up to 4 scourges swap their carbines out for one of the option A weapons or one of the better weapons (lances, haywire blasters, etc.) for +40 points.

So instead of calculating a bunch of different prices for individual models, you just have to add together at most 4 numbers to determine the price of the squad. The designers at that point don't have to try to make blasters and shredders equally as appealing as dark lances; they can acknowledge that the lances are better than a lot of the other options, but they also don't have to agonize over whether a lance and a haywire blaster are *exactly* as desirable as one another as long as they're in the same ballpark and have reasonably appealing use cases.

You'd end up with a feeling of customization and ownership over your unit. You have a reason to not give your sergeants plasma pistols every time (because you'd save the 5 or 10 points per squad that it would normally take to unlock the plasma pistol option). And the designers still get a relatively small number of combinations to stress stress about balancing.

 catbarf wrote:
Special/heavy weapons are at least an ideal case for differentiating options as sidegrades rather than upgrades. It isn't going to break the lore if Blasters, Splinter Cannons, and Shredders all have respective strengths and weaknesses that put them on par with Dark Lances, so there's a reason to take any of them. Then having the choice of either Shardcarbine squad as fast harassers or heavy weapons squad as fire support is a decent way to split it up.

Eh. I get the point you're making but I think even this is stretching it, honestly.

The trouble is, particularly with regard to Shredders and Splinter Cannons, you're having to try and balance around not only their effectiveness in the anti-infantry role but also taking into account that most units in the DE list have basically the same profile by default.

As in, even if the Splinter Cannon and Shredder are considered as good at anti-infantry as Dark Lances and Blasters are at anti-vehicle/monster, the ubiquity of anti-infantry weapons in the DE list mean those options are still likely going to be inherently less valuable than the anti-monster/vehicle weapons.

Anyway, not disagreeing with your overall point. Just wanted to point out that, even when you're only comparing 'upgrade' weapons, it's still extremely difficult to not have clear winners and losers if they all cost the same.

 Crimson wrote:
There was some talk about some of the wargear points coming back, at least for "big things." I don't know what that means, but some wargear points is better than none.

And I think that at least for marines, sergeant gear matters. Power fist on a marine is a meaningful upgrade over a chainsword. They are just releasing a new intercessors, with a sergeant in a very cool chainsword slashing pose. I'd like to actually use that model and not be punished for it.

Definitely. In 5e I mained Orks (ah, how time flies) and my favoured strategy was flooding the field with Orks.

I could fit 180 Boyz into a standard FOC's troops slots, and it set me back just over 1000 points naked. It was completely overwhelming for many enemies to deal with and incredibly effective. 6 points for 4 S4 WS4 attacks on the charge killed plenty of things, including mowing down whole Terminator squads before they could fight back.

But when going more restrained, you could see how the options really mattered. I could take a mob of 10 boyz and they're a fair, effective infantry unit, cheap, great at using cover saves since they waste little of their power budget on armour, and easily bodying other units in their weight class such as Hormagaunts.

On the other hand, I could buy them a Nob (+10 points) and give the nob a Power Klaw (+25 points). Now the unit is quite a bit more expensive, but drastically more dangerous, to the point its role is basically completely transformed. Extremely few things in the game wanted to deal with a PK nob sitting behind 10+ ablative boyz in melee.

Making the Nob free and the PK free would have made the game play way more shallow and boring. The naked boyz mob had plenty of purpose.

Disappointed, now that all games are using terrain layouts the game is cooked. It'll be minimum 6yrs of not playing, which at that point there will be no going back to my once hobby.

 vipoid wrote:
For one, if the game wants to focus on the squad-level then it seems weird to not only permit but actively enforce having as many different weapon types in a given unit as possible.

I honestly don't see the difference between a big tank or walker having a bunch of different guns and any of your examples.

Both the kill rig and the battlewagon have three ranged and three melee profiles they can use at the same time.

The game pieces are squads now, often single or double sized. How many different profiles they have, and whether that makes sense is a discussion completely detached from that.


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 Ashiraya wrote:

Tyel wrote:
I'm not sure the difference between 0 and 0.5 points is meaningful to a game.

Because the point isn't that it should be half a point. The point is that some people will go "omg, if they weren't free, I would never take a plasma gun on my guardsmen squads" and I think that's extremely narrow-minded. If the plasma gun was half a point you can bet I would take it. It'd make its points back 20x with every shot. That's a good investment in my book.

There are a bunch of free plasma pistols scattered over the DG codex. They have caused less than 10 wounds over the course of 10th edition, and most of those were inflicted on the shooter themselves. If those pistols were 0.5 points and a bolt pistol is 0, I would never bring a single one of them.


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 Crimson wrote:
There was some talk about some of the wargear points coming back, at least for "big things." I don't know what that means, but some wargear points is better than none.

They were talking about role-defining wargear options like the main guns of big walkers. It enables them to make both guns on a tank like the repulsor executioner relevant, while also not needing 20 datasheets to cover all versions of the leman russ. Outside of those cases, they seem to be fairly happy with the results of removing datasheet costs.

 Jidmah wrote:
There are a bunch of free plasma pistols scattered over the DG codex. They have caused less than 10 wounds over the course of 10th edition, and most of those were inflicted on the shooter themselves. If those pistols were 0.5 points and a bolt pistol is 0, I would never bring a single one of them.

Cool. I'd not force you to bring them. I sure would, and by mathhammer, at 0.5 points they would be probably the most insanely undercosted thing in the entire game. To put it this way, if you could pay 50 points to give 100 cultists plasma pistols, would you? I sure would (assuming I am doing a cultist horde in the first place). Boom, these 100 cultists have now gone from a moveblocking nuisance to a Problem that will delete whole squads if ever left to shoot. Or hell, imagine seeing 50 Black Templar Crusaders who -all- have been given plasma pistols for 25 points total. Horrifying!

You might go "oh, but that's 100 plasma pistols, 100 plasma pistols might do something but 1 plasma pistol won't". Okay, but this is Warhammer. Prices in Warhammer don't scale. The maths here are genuinely additive. Two plasma pistols do twice as much average damage as one. Yes, in tactical practice there all manner of considerations involved, but the game has never and will never price around it. Your third Lictor has never been cheaper or more expensive than your first. Your 100th boy has never been cheaper or more expensive than your first. That's just not how Warhammer works*.

(*exceptions for occasions where units have been X points each for the first Y models and then Z points each for every model beyond that, but that's mostly a thing in 10th to compensate for frontloaded wargear, and is otherwise rare.)

Crisis Suits, 9th Edition, had guns cost X for the first copy, X+Y for the second, and so on.
So not 100% accurate, Ashiraya. But mostly accurate.

For what it's worth, I don't think the jump from Laspistol to Bolt Pistol is worth even a single point. But going from Las or Bolt to Plasma should, ideally, cost at least a couple. Not much-it's uncommon for it to be used. But something.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Definitely. In 5e I mained Orks (ah, how time flies) and my favoured strategy was flooding the field with Orks.

I could fit 180 Boyz into a standard FOC's troops slots, and it set me back just over 1000 points naked. It was completely overwhelming for many enemies to deal with and incredibly effective. 6 points for 4 S4 WS4 attacks on the charge killed plenty of things, including mowing down whole Terminator squads before they could fight back.

But when going more restrained, you could see how the options really mattered. I could take a mob of 10 boyz and they're a fair, effective infantry unit, cheap, great at using cover saves since they waste little of their power budget on armour, and easily bodying other units in their weight class such as Hormagaunts.

On the other hand, I could buy them a Nob (+10 points) and give the nob a Power Klaw (+25 points). Now the unit is quite a bit more expensive, but drastically more dangerous, to the point its role is basically completely transformed. Extremely few things in the game wanted to deal with a PK nob sitting behind 10+ ablative boyz in melee.

Making the Nob free and the PK free would have made the game play way more shallow and boring. The naked boyz mob had plenty of purpose.

That's not how I remember it at all. During 5th I already was writing tactics on this page and dakka was kind of the top tier WAAC competitive community, similar to what goonhammer or r/warhammercompetitive is today.

If you were playing to win, PKs, boss poles and nobz were mandatory in boyz mobs, full stop. Units of 10(12!) had no place outside of trucks, 'ard boyz and stikkbombs were a trap choice and large mobs were usually best played as units of 20 because otherwise you would loose out on nobz, clump up around terrain and often couldn't get everyone in combat. Shootas were vastly more powerful stronger than choppas.
The classic green tide was nothing but a skew list that won against badly prepared opponents. Many competitive armies like guard, GK, space wolves, BA could easily handle them. It wouldn't have survived a single balance dataslate if those existed back then.

The only true choice boyz offered was whether you spent 10 points on a rokkits or not and whether you were willing to spend more money to build shoota boyz instead of using your bucket of AOBR boyz you found on ebay for $4. Everything else was just the illusion of choice, baiting you to spend points to get an objectively worse unit.


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 Ashiraya wrote:
Cool. I'd not force you to bring them. I sure would, and by mathhammer, at 0.5 points they would be probably the most insanely undercosted thing in the entire game. To put it this way, if you could pay 50 points to give 100 cultists plasma pistols, would you? I sure would (assuming I am doing a cultist horde in the first place). Boom, these 100 cultists have now gone from a moveblocking nuisance to a Problem that will delete whole squads if ever left to shoot. Or hell, imagine seeing 50 Black Templar Crusaders who -all- have been given plasma pistols for 25 points total. Horrifying!

You might go "oh, but that's 100 plasma pistols, 100 plasma pistols might do something but 1 plasma pistol won't". Okay, but this is Warhammer. Prices in Warhammer don't scale. The maths here are genuinely additive. Two plasma pistols do twice as much average damage as one. Yes, in tactical practice there all manner of considerations involved, but the game has never and will never price around it. Your third Lictor has never been cheaper or more expensive than your first. Your 100th boy has never been cheaper or more expensive than your first. That's just not how Warhammer works*.

(*exceptions for occasions where units have been X points each for the first Y models and then Z points each for every model beyond that, but that's mostly a thing in 10th to compensate for frontloaded wargear, and is otherwise rare.)

Congratulations, you have understood why units must be costed as a whole and why costing single pieces of war gear does not work

I know the debate of Boys vs. Toys was still an open debate in 5th, and had proponents on both sides. Even as a non-ork player. “The best upgrade you can give a boy is another standing next to him” Now people might have been unyielding in their camps convinced that there was only one correct answer, and I cant speak for performance at the tournament level. But my recollection was is was not codified into a final absolute.

As a marine player I was alway in the boys camp. More squads was generally better then fewer, overequipped ones. That said, you needed to make sure they had the tools they needed to get their job done. But there was a place for a sternguard squad just pumping out special ammo, and not combi-weapon spam. Or bare-bones scouts vs. camo cloaked snipers. The tac squad does not need a sword or a fancy pistol, but a combi to match the special in the squad was worth the points to get the unit to function at it’s job better.

 Jidmah wrote:
Congratulations, you have understood why units must be costed as a whole and why costing single pieces of war gear does not work

In the same way that armies must be costed as a whole, and costing single units does not work.

Which is to say that 'does not work' here just means 'doesn't achieve the strawman of Perfect Balance(tm)'. Who cares. Imperfect points are better than not trying at all.

 Jidmah wrote:

 vipoid wrote:
For one, if the game wants to focus on the squad-level then it seems weird to not only permit but actively enforce having as many different weapon types in a given unit as possible.

I honestly don't see the difference between a big tank or walker having a bunch of different guns and any of your examples.

Both the kill rig and the battlewagon have three ranged and three melee profiles they can use at the same time.

So literally half the number of ranged profiles as Hand of the Archon. Which makes them the same for some reason.

 Jidmah wrote:
The game pieces are squads now, often single or double sized. How many different profiles they have, and whether that makes sense is a discussion completely detached from that.

I think we must be talking at cross-purposes because "The game pieces are squads now" would otherwise appear to be blatantly wrong.

Taken literally, it would suggest that the game has changed into something more akin to Apocalypse wherein you have a single model that represents an entire squad. Instead, each model in the squad is still individually represented.

So instead I can only presume you are talking about how the game handles squads. Yet even here the argument would appear to fall flat.

Wargear is still based on individual models. So rather than 'the squad' having a plasmagun, a specific marine within the squad will have a plasmagun. If that Marine is killed, the plasmagun dies with them.

Indeed, a squad's firepower is entirely based on the individual models comprising it. There's no abstraction - you literally count all the models with Gun A, all the models with Gun B etc. Again, one might think a squad-based game would abstract the squad's firepower (especially when it comes to, say, small-arms).

It's a similar story with e.g. LoS in that LoS is measured to and from individual models. e.g. Models A1 and A2 in squad A may have LoS to models B3 and B5 in squad B, whilst models A3 and A4 in squad A don't have LoS and so can't shoot at squad B. One would think a squad-based game would instead be based around what squad A as a whole can see (not the individual models within it). This also goes back to the above point in that, rather than a squad having a rocket launcher that one of them can use, an individual model has a rocket launcher and so whether or not it can fire is based entirely on what targets that specific model can see.

It's a similar story with damage inflicted to a squad, which is dealt to individual models within the squad, which are then removed one at a time. Again, I would expect a squad-based game to have a more abstract damage system (based on the squad taking damage, losing morale etc.). As opposed to damage being 1:1 vs. the individual models in the squad.

Frankly, if this is supposed to be a squad-based game then it's so flimsy that GW haven't even reached the 'half-arsed' point. I don't think we're even at a 10th of an arse yet.

 Jidmah wrote:
That's not how I remember it at all. During 5th I already was writing tactics on this page and dakka was kind of the top tier WAAC competitive community, similar to what goonhammer or r/warhammercompetitive is today.

Okay. It worked well enough for me. I might not have won any tournaments (I didn't go to any) but it worked just fine even if it wasn't cut-throat optimal. I am cool with that standard.

Congratulations, you have understood why units must be costed as a whole and why costing single pieces of war gear does not work

Huh? Is this a reply to the wrong post?


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 catbarf wrote:
Which is to say that 'does not work' here just means 'doesn't achieve the strawman of Perfect Balance(tm)'. Who cares. Imperfect points are better than not trying at all.

Right. GW is never going to achieve perfect balance. It's effectively impossible, and it's not the point. The point is ensuring no option feels like a troll pick. Right now a sergeant with a chainsword is a troll pick, a Retributor with a heavy bolter is a troll pick, a Scourge with a Shredder is a troll pick, a Nob with a Choppa is a troll pick. This state of affairs is not making the game better.

 catbarf wrote:
Imperfect points are better than not trying at all.

That's a perfectly valid opinion to have.

However, in the context of GW being in charge of 40k, all evidence points toward no points for upgrades being just as good or bad as having points for upgrades, except GW is now doing a better job at balancing the game as a whole. Whether that is related or coincidental is a matter of opinion.


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 vipoid wrote:
Taken literally, it would suggest that the game has changed into something more akin to Apocalypse wherein you have a single model that represents an entire squad. Instead, each model in the squad is still individually represented.

So instead I can only presume you are talking about how the game handles squads. Yet even here the argument would appear to fall flat.

Wargear is still based on individual models. So rather than 'the squad' having a plasmagun, a specific marine within the squad will have a plasmagun. If that Marine is killed, the plasmagun dies with them.

(note that I cut the rest of your post so others can read mine better, not because I didn't read it.

I understand where you are coming from, but a gun disappearing over the course of a game isn't a new concept and not related to flight level either. There used be a damaged weapon status and there still are one-shot weapons. Vehicles and Monsters feel different from infantry and mounted units because they react differently to taking damage.

And, of course, GW is inconsistent about applying this concept, and they are still have baggage from decisions taken decades ago. But GW being inconsistent is very much like the sky being blue.


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 Ashiraya wrote:
Okay. It worked well enough for me. I might not have won any tournaments (I didn't go to any) but it worked just fine even if it wasn't cut-throat optimal. I am cool with that standard.

Consider yourself blessed. Your average game was probably much more fun than mine during 5th. Though I loved the tactical challenge, most of my opponents were the kind of people I would avoid today.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Huh? Is this a reply to the wrong post?

No, I was not. Your example of the plasma pistol spamming cultist just perfectly illustrates one of the reasons why it's impossible to put a price tag on a single gun. The exact same pistol is worthless when brought four times and game-crushing overpowered when brought a twenty times.

Right. GW is never going to achieve perfect balance. It's effectively impossible, and it's not the point. The point is ensuring no option feels like a troll pick. Right now a sergeant with a chainsword is a troll pick, a Retributor with a heavy bolter is a troll pick, a Scourge with a Shredder is a troll pick, a Nob with a Choppa is a troll pick. This state of affairs is not making the game better.

100% agree, but points have failed to fix this problem for decades now. The only thing which fixes "troll picks" is fixing the weapon profile to make all options equally valuable.

 Jidmah wrote:

No, I was not. Your example of the plasma pistol spamming cultist just perfectly illustrates one of the reasons why it's impossible to put a price tag on a single gun. The exact same pistol is worthless when brought four times and game-crushing overpowered when brought a twenty times.

But it's not worthless when brought four times? Why would it be? It's a fifth of the strength when brought twenty times.

In some situations it will be much better than when it's brought twenty times, because the sixteen guys with no plasma pistols are cheaper ablative wounds for your guys with actual strength, AP and damage on their pistol.

Sixty Primaris Crusaders are a terrifying force. That doesn't mean ten Primaris Crusaders are such a trivial force that they may as well be almost free? What kind of logic is that...?

100% agree, but points have failed to fix this problem for decades now. The only thing which fixes "troll picks" is fixing the weapon profile to make all options equally valuable.

For those decades GW has largely not done much post-launch balancing. I should remind you that if it had been abandoned to its launch state, 10th edition 40k would rightly have a level of infamy comparable to 7th by now. It was beyond atrocious. Admech paid 12.5ppm for a body with guardsman stats whereas Aeldari could wipe out whole armies without having to bother with such trivialities as "line of sight" or "rolling to wound".

Free wargear has not fixed the troll picks. It has created them. Heavy bolter Retributors were never optimal (and will never be optimal, their role just isn't as useful in the kind of game that 40k is) but pre-10th they at least had the bloody decency of being cheap, and you surely see why that's an upgrade?


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 JNAProductions wrote:
Crisis Suits, 9th Edition, had guns cost X for the first copy, X+Y for the second, and so on.
So not 100% accurate, Ashiraya. But mostly accurate.

True. That was a truly fantastic system and solution to the age-old problem of managing Crisis loadouts. It landed a bit unpolished, the numbers needed further tuning, but it was the ideal answer to how you resolve their equipment balancing; you can build the spam-one-particular-weapon loadout that's always been meta, while paying an appropriate cost for doing so, and if you do want to build a fluffy box cover-style mixed gun unit, your unit is much cheaper to compensate for its loss of rules efficiency.

And then 10e flipped the table and wargear locked the unit, splitting it into three separate squads, one of which you can't even build out of a single Crisis box, while making the box cover unit unplayable. Sodding hell, I hate this edition.

 Jidmah wrote:
However, in the context of GW being in charge of 40k, all evidence points toward no points for upgrades being just as good or bad as having points for upgrades, except GW is now doing a better job at balancing the game as a whole.

I don't think there's enough evidence to actually conclude that. I think you, and GW, have simply chosen to accept worse internal balance in favor of better external balance, and shift it to the player's responsibility to pick the obviously imbalanced best choice and avoid the obviously imbalanced trap choices.

I'm sure better external balance is an improvement for competitive play, where it's a given that you take the best of the best from your codex and ignore all the weak stuff that, like you said, GW does a poor job of recognizing and elevating.

But there's more to the game than tournament play. So I don't accept the implicit premise that a change primarily to the benefit of competitive play constitutes an objective improvement for the game as a whole.

 Jidmah wrote:

Right. GW is never going to achieve perfect balance. It's effectively impossible, and it's not the point. The point is ensuring no option feels like a troll pick. Right now a sergeant with a chainsword is a troll pick, a Retributor with a heavy bolter is a troll pick, a Scourge with a Shredder is a troll pick, a Nob with a Choppa is a troll pick. This state of affairs is not making the game better.

100% agree, but points have failed to fix this problem for decades now. The only thing which fixes "troll picks" is fixing the weapon profile to make all options equally valuable.

That might be possible with a heavy bolter and a lascannon but there's no way to reconcile it with a laspistol and a plasma pistol, or a chainsword and a power fist, without fundamentally changing the definition of those weapons in the lore. It's like saying that a game needs to make a slingshot and a glock equally viable.

And to expand on Catbarf's point on internal and external balance, let's say the Ork codex now just lets you take 50 models, whether they be grots or boys or nobs. Since nobs are objectively the best Ork players take nothing but nobs, and the Space Marine players likewise take nothing but terminators. By completely destroying each army's internal balance in this fashion you have actually made external balance very easy: GW only really needs to balance the nobs and terminators in order to maintain balance between those factions, which is far simpler than balancing them when a bunch of different units are viable. Few players, however, would be happy with this tradeoff.

By the same logic, rendering a bunch of equipment options non-viable simplifies the unit just as removing those options entirely would; our space marine character is purely balanced on the assumption that he is taking a power fist and not a chainsword, because the power fist is objectively better and costs nothing. If the character was cheaper but had to pay for the power fist then now there are more variables which makes things more complex and therefore more difficult to balance. But this would likewise be true if the character had a choice between a power fist and a super-chainsword that were equally powerful (and free) but which had very different roles.

Ashiraya wrote: a Retributor with a heavy bolter is a troll pick

B-but I like my heavy bolter retributors! The extra range and rerolls actually makes them pretty decent at throwing around chip damage from relative safety, and they kill meq reasonably well!

Orkeosaurus wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

Right. GW is never going to achieve perfect balance. It's effectively impossible, and it's not the point. The point is ensuring no option feels like a troll pick. Right now a sergeant with a chainsword is a troll pick, a Retributor with a heavy bolter is a troll pick, a Scourge with a Shredder is a troll pick, a Nob with a Choppa is a troll pick. This state of affairs is not making the game better.

100% agree, but points have failed to fix this problem for decades now. The only thing which fixes "troll picks" is fixing the weapon profile to make all options equally valuable.

That might be possible with a heavy bolter and a lascannon but there's no way to reconcile it with a laspistol and a plasma pistol, or a chainsword and a power fist, without fundamentally changing the definition of those weapons in the lore. It's like saying that a game needs to make a slingshot and a glock equally viable.

And to expand on Catbarf's point on internal and external balance, let's say the Ork codex now just lets you take 50 models, whether they be grots or boys or nobs. Since nobs are objectively the best Ork players take nothing but nobs, and the Space Marine players likewise take nothing but terminators. By completely destroying each army's internal balance in this fashion you have actually made external balance very easy: GW only really needs to balance the nobs and terminators in order to maintain balance between those factions, which is far simpler than balancing them when a bunch of different units are viable. Few players, however, would be happy with this tradeoff.

By the same logic, rendering a bunch of equipment options non-viable simplifies the unit just as removing those options entirely would; our space marine character is purely balanced on the assumption that he is taking a power fist and not a chainsword, because the power fist is objectively better and costs nothing. If the character was cheaper but had to pay for the power fist then now there are more variables which makes things more complex and therefore more difficult to balance. But this would likewise be true if the character had a choice between a power fist and a super-chainsword that were equally powerful (and free) but which had very different roles.

Yep. Pretty much this. There's only so much you can do to make a las pistol better before it stops feeling appropriately *un*impressive for its lore. And I don't *want* them to make plasma pistols feel significantly less impressive in order to justify the two items costing the same amount. They really should simply attach a point cost to the plasma pistol or (failing that) have it compete with some other similarly useful piece of kit.

I kind of feel like this is what happened to melta weapons and blasters in 10th. Historically, melta weapons have been able to reliably wound tanks and do solid damage to them, which is notably more valuable than what flamers and plasma guns (which frequently compete for the same slots as meltaguns) are able to do. But because they took away wargear points, they couldn't simply make the meltagun a few points more expensive than its competitors, so instead, they functionally nerfed it by not having its strength increase to match the increased Toughness stats of tanks. So now meltaguns are a gamble when used against what has historically been their preferred target (tanks), and I think it's because they realized no one would ever tank a plasma gun or flamer if they had the option to take an S10+ melta instead. So they made meltaguns less fluffy because they couldn't make them more expensive. At least, that's my theory.

 Ashiraya wrote:
What kind of logic is that...?

The kind of logic where having multiples of something increases the value of each single thing. "bring multiples or bring none" has always been a core principle of 40k list building.

Your 5th edition green tide is the perfect example of that. one ork boyz is no threat whatsoever, 30 ork boyz without gear are trivial to deal with, at 60-90 orks they start causing headaches, at 180 they are winning games.

Same with plasma pistols. Four plasma pistols spread across a tallyman, a noxious blightbringer and two melee squad champions have no impact on the game four out five times, and split the last one between failing hazardous and dealing 2 damage to something of value.

Even in your fictional squad of 20 cultists, 4 plasma pistols just don't do enough to base your decisions for that squad around it. However, once you are able to take 20 plasma pistols the squad is able to threaten elite infantry and vehicles, so you absolutely want to push them forward to deal damage with them.

I should remind you that if it had been abandoned to its launch state, 10th edition 40k would rightly have a level of infamy comparable to 7th by now. It was beyond atrocious. Admech paid 12.5ppm for a body with guardsman stats whereas Aeldari could wipe out whole armies without having to bother with such trivialities as "line of sight" or "rolling to wound".

None of that is related to wargear having point values though? And they did update 8th and 9th after launch, and both were worse in terms of balance, despite them tweaking wargear costs.

Free wargear has not fixed the troll picks. It has created them.

I just listed a bunch of troll picks from 5th edition a few posts ago.

I think melta guns and blasters got nerfed because monsters/tanks were dying too much. It's not to balance them against flamers.

Then you are getting into fluff Vs game. It may be fluffy for a guardsman to sneak up and one shot a tank with a melta gun shot from the back. But mechanically it's kind of busted. The game isn't a single player RPG.

To my mind recent 40k has been far more balanced than Middlehammer and this can see in the number of factions placing and the variety of units being used. 7th may have been a low point, but competitively only about 20% of factions mattered, and of them perhaps only 20% of datasheets. I don't remember it being much better in 5th. In 7th I'd have labelled the whole Ork faction a trap. The same for DE and Tyranids outside of day mass Reavers with caltrops or Flying Hive Tyrants with devourers.

Yes you could take Scourge with four shredders for 100 points and this was cheaper than Scourge with 4 dark lances for 160. But both sucked so who cares? Maybe you could really squint and if you list tailored into a friend (you monster) the shredders might be worth it but probably not.

If you aren't planning to go to the LVO I feel the vast majority of stuff in 10th edition 40k has been viable into everything else. Which is far healthier for casual players. It's also why you've had such variety in placing lists from competitive players. Not all the time obviously. Is your friendly casual list beating three defilers right now? Probably not. But this is something of an exception rather than a rule.

Part of this is the faster rate of change. If Index Eldar had been in place for 3-5 years a lot more people would have got an Eldar army and the broader meta would have been more cut throat as a result (like 5th-7th). But it didn't so they mostly didn't. But I also think it's due to a changed philosophy of balancing. "I think retributors with heavy bolters should be better for the points" is different to "SoB are functionally unplayable right now into the decent 2-4 factions that make up the competitive meta."

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
That might be possible with a heavy bolter and a lascannon but there's no way to reconcile it with a laspistol and a plasma pistol, or a chainsword and a power fist, without fundamentally changing the definition of those weapons in the lore. It's like saying that a game needs to make a slingshot and a glock equally viable.

GW has made decent shots at balancing chainsword and power fists against each other, by making one be a threat to vehicles and monsters and the other good at killing a ton of badly armored infantry.
If all models of a unit can have both as slingshot and a glock, they need to be different datasheets, because they are obviously not fulfilling the same role. But then again, most units in 40k don't actually work that way. It's usually "one dude in your unit of slingshots can have a glock" and it understandably feels wrong to veterans to have the clear troll option to not take the glock.

And to expand on Catbarf's point on internal and external balance, let's say the Ork codex now just lets you take 50 models, whether they be grots or boys or nobs. Since nobs are objectively the best Ork players take nothing but nobs, and the Space Marine players likewise take nothing but terminators. By completely destroying each army's internal balance in this fashion you have actually made external balance very easy: GW only really needs to balance the nobs and terminators in order to maintain balance between those factions, which is far simpler than balancing them when a bunch of different units are viable. Few players, however, would be happy with this tradeoff.

I didn't want to respond to catbarf's post because he literally just responded "I don't think your facts are real", but I'll address the issue.

First of all, we have hard numbers proving that internal balance is way better than in any previous edition. The amount of units played from each codex has vastly increased compared to any oldhammer edition and to 9th and the majority of archetypes are not bringing the maximum number of any "best unit" anymore unless your codex is just three flavors of marines and a primarch.
The effect you're he described simply doesn't exist. Therefore one cannot argue that removing points from wargear has made internal balance worse.

The flaw in your argument is that you ignore unit composition, split datasheets, existing models and wargear loadouts. A unit where you are allowed to replace every single model with a strictly better one is a badly designed unit.
You could put point costs on the nob/terminator upgrade and there most likely would still be a optimal choice and all others would be traps.
In theory, there should be sweet spot where both are perfectly balanced against each other points wise, but in practice this never really worked out. For some things, it's really hard to find the sweet spot, because it's a moving target - see the plasma pistol discussion above. Some units just have too many options to make them all equal (GW's historical limit is 3), sometimes one option is worth more in very efficient setups, but less in others. Sometimes you never want a specific option because it's simply something that doesn't fit your army's game plan.

It's important to understand that removing wargear costs from the equation is not just "giving up" or "being lazy". Complexity is something which affects everything you do with a system. When you understand that a system you struggling balance too complex for you to handle, reducing complexity is a very valid option to tackle that.
In my opinion one of the reasons why 10th was a much better experience as a player than 9th is because GW reduced complexity to level they are able to manage.

By the same logic, rendering a bunch of equipment options non-viable simplifies the unit just as removing those options entirely would; our space marine character is purely balanced on the assumption that he is taking a power fist and not a chainsword, because the power fist is objectively better and costs nothing. If the character was cheaper but had to pay for the power fist then now there are more variables which makes things more complex and therefore more difficult to balance. But this would likewise be true if the character had a choice between a power fist and a super-chainsword that were equally powerful (and free) but which had very different roles.

That's more or less what I'm trying to argue.
Not having wargear points is not inherrently the superior choice. But in practice, we have seen an edition which was no worse at balancing wargear than any of the seven editions before it.
So, while it feels wrong - nothing was actually lost.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Yep. Pretty much this. There's only so much you can do to make a las pistol better before it stops feeling appropriately *un*impressive for its lore. And I don't *want* them to make plasma pistols feel significantly less impressive in order to justify the two items costing the same amount. They really should simply attach a point cost to the plasma pistol or (failing that) have it compete with some other similarly useful piece of kit.

Character pistols are a mess, which IMO cannot be fixed by either points or datasheets.
I'm honestly happy that many DG characters don't have an option do downgrade from a plasma pistol to a bolt pistol in exchange for points, because otherwise I would never play one.

I kind of feel like this is what happened to melta weapons and blasters in 10th. Historically, melta weapons have been able to reliably wound tanks and do solid damage to them, which is notably more valuable than what flamers and plasma guns (which frequently compete for the same slots as meltaguns) are able to do. But because they took away wargear points, they couldn't simply make the meltagun a few points more expensive than its competitors, so instead, they functionally nerfed it by not having its strength increase to match the increased Toughness stats of tanks. So now meltaguns are a gamble when used against what has historically been their preferred target (tanks), and I think it's because they realized no one would ever tank a plasma gun or flamer if they had the option to take an S10+ melta instead. So they made meltaguns less fluffy because they couldn't make them more expensive. At least, that's my theory.

Honestly, I disagree with the analysis of melta. For an infantry-sized gun It's still a good weapon for taking a decent sized chunk out of tanks due to its AP and reliable, high damage. Especially imulti-meltas do see a lot of play. Wounding on fives isn't that bad if you get to ignore their armor afterwards.
What has changed is that vehicles and monsters are no longer one-shottable, so the risk of bringing a melta gun close enough to risk a whole unit simply doesn't pay off anymore unless you have a way of keeping your melta unit safe.
I think it fair and flavorful that meltas are great at melting armor and not so much at punching through completely unarmored deamons and monsters.

 Jidmah wrote:
First of all, we have hard numbers proving that internal balance is way better than in any previous edition. The amount of units played from each codex has vastly increased compared to any oldhammer edition and to 9th and the majority of archetypes are not bringing the maximum number of any "best unit" anymore unless your codex is just three flavors of marines and a primarch.
The effect you're he described simply doesn't exist. Therefore one cannot argue that removing points from wargear has made internal balance worse.

If you have hard numbers proving that units are bringing a greater variety of wargear options than they did in prior editions, and that units taking suboptimal wargear picks are still more accurately valued under the new system than under the old, I'm all ears.

Because I actually like this system on principle. So I'm open to evidence that the new approach of adjusting rules rather than costs is working better than before at providing meaningful options and fairly assessing the value of an army, particularly one that is not chosen according to strict competitive optimization. I'd like to believe that all the little things that stand out to me in optimized lists- plasma pistols and power weapons on every podunk sergeant, Tyranid Warriors being two-thirds heavy weapons, Devourers never appearing because they're worthless when Deathspitters exist- are exceptions rather than the rule and will be cleaned up in the next codices. I'd like to believe that not taking these sorts of lore-unfriendly competitive optimizations doesn't noticeably impact the combat power of an army, and that 2000pts of an army built pre-free-wargear is still in rough parity with 2000pts of post-free-wargear, which has been the sticking point for my group.

But after playing through the entirety of 10th I'm still not seeing it. Hence my [citation needed].

Don't take it personal, but I dredged up the data three or four times in discussion here on dakka already, and each time a post that took hours to write got deflected by a two-liner nitpick, strawman or ad hominem attack.
Considering how your first line is already moving goalposts, I have zero confidence in this being worth my time.

If you are truly interested, search my post history for the post where I went through three months of top 10 tournament placements.

My personal experience is that weapons are much closer than they used to be. I still run a mix of big choppa and PK nobz despite the PK being better, because the difference is not that big. Is still run blighlords with just combi-bolters, because it's one of my best painted units and don't have the spitter and the reaper autocannon painted. I run a winged demon prince despite the one without wings being much better for DG, because by two princes are winged. Same is true for many other units.

And yet, unless I mess around or face a truly great player, I usually win my games by a landslide. This is definitely not something that was possible in previous editions, doubly so with orks.

 Jidmah wrote:

The kind of logic where having multiples of something increases the value of each single thing. "bring multiples or bring none" has always been a core principle of 40k list building.

Your 5th edition green tide is the perfect example of that. one ork boyz is no threat whatsoever, 30 ork boyz without gear are trivial to deal with, at 60-90 orks they start causing headaches, at 180 they are winning games.

Actually, a singular Boy would be an insane unit. It would be the cheapest objective holder (and nowadays, action monkey) in the game by a massive margin, also soaking overwatch, being an insane roadblock in bottlenecks, and so on, and if ignored it could genuinely threaten weak backliners (such as Guard HWTs - they are so bad in melee the solo Boy might genuinely win). Yes, it'd die the moment anything serious touches it, but pretty much anything shot at it will be massively overkill, wasting the enemy's firepower, and you can hide the Boy to create even more headaches.

So it's not that simple.

Even comparing, say, 30 to 180 it's not as trivial. Yes, 180 are objectively stronger. But the points you save by not taking 150 boyz can be spent on something else that makes the 30 boyz way harder to deal with. They absolutely still have their place.

Same with plasma pistols. Four plasma pistols spread across a tallyman, a noxious blightbringer and two melee squad champions have no impact on the game four out five times, and split the last one between failing hazardous and dealing 2 damage to something of value.

I am going to be perfectly frank here; you having bad dice luck is your experience. I don't want GW to balance around your dice luck. It sounds like this particular gun never does anything for you, okay, so don't take it. Let the rest of us who might want to have some fun. What do you care? You seem to hate plasma pistols anyway and insist they do you more harm than good, so why would you mind if they have a price tag? You'd just not take them (as I assume you don't take them now) so nothing'd change for you.

Even in your fictional squad of 20 cultists, 4 plasma pistols just don't do enough to base your decisions for that squad around it. However, once you are able to take 20 plasma pistols the squad is able to threaten elite infantry and vehicles, so you absolutely want to push them forward to deal damage with them.

In isolation. This is why points exist. Everything contributes. A squad of 20 plasma pistol is made up of 1 plasma pistol, 20 times. I am not sure if that's fundamentally sunken in here. Each and every one of those plasma pistols contribute to something impactful. Should I stop going to my job because a single day's salary isn't enough to afford me anything exciting? Should my work stop paying me anything because in a single day's work I ultimately don't achieve anything groundbreaking?

This isn't really that weird. An army is made up of many pieces. Like, surely it's not that complicated? If we made a singular cultist with a plasma pistol free because a single plasma pistol achieves nothing, would you be okay with me taking a single plasma pistol cultist, a hand flamer cultist, an inferno pistol cultist, a gamma pistol cultist, a pulse pistol cultist, a blast pistol cultist, a bolt pistol cultist, a synaptic disintegrator cultist, a shuriken pistol cultist, a splinter pistol cultist, a slugga cultist, an autopistol cultist, a photon blast pistol cultist, a macrostubber cultist [repeat ad infinitum] in my army all for a grand total of 0 points since they're all supposedly meaningless alone? I feel like that wouldn't be balanced.

None of that is related to wargear having point values though? And they did update 8th and 9th after launch, and both were worse in terms of balance, despite them tweaking wargear costs.

When in 8th/9th? All three editions are rollercoasters. End of 9th was definitely more balanced than end of 10th. Guard were fine once nerfed, whereas Defilers reign unnerfed to this day. Look at tournament podiums, it's a crab rave.

I just listed a bunch of troll picks from 5th edition a few posts ago.

Yes, and now we have even more.

A flamer was always worse than a meltagun. It's still worse, just as always, and now you pay for the meltagun whether you actually bring it or not. This is endemic across the game. The moment the 10e Guard codex released with GW not even attempting to balance, say, multilasers and heavy bolters against the now-free lascannons they compete for sponson and hull slots with, I knew things were cooked. The multilaser was never a great gun (beyond the s6/7 glory days of 6e) but it was objectively better balanced when it was at least cheap/free.

 Jidmah wrote:
Don't take it personal, but I dredged up the data three or four times in discussion here on dakka already, and each time a post that took hours to write got deflected by a two-liner nitpick, strawman or ad hominem attack.
Considering how your first line is already moving goalposts, I have zero confidence in this being worth my time.

If you are truly interested, search my post history for the post where I went through three months of top 10 tournament placements.

My personal experience is that weapons are much closer than they used to be. I still run a mix of big choppa and PK nobz despite the PK being better, because the difference is not that big. Is still run blighlords with just combi-bolters, because it's one of my best painted units and don't have the spitter and the reaper autocannon painted. I run a winged demon prince despite the one without wings being much better for DG, because by two princes are winged. Same is true for many other units.

And yet, unless I mess around or face a truly great player, I usually win my games by a landslide. This is definitely not something that was possible in previous editions, doubly so with orks.

Respectfully, I don't think asking you to support the full extents of the claims you've made is moving goalposts. I've seen the data demonstrating good overall tournament balance and the variety of datasheets appearing within lists, but that does not address the comparative viability of options within a single datasheet, which is the specific aspect of internal balance that's in contention. Nor do tournament lists demonstrate the impact on balance for casual play, which I've consistently articulated as a concern. And I've yet to see evidence that the greater competitive balance between units is a result of the current free wargear system, rather than the simplified design space, greatly reduced options, and greater investment in regular balance cycles. There's a correlation-vs-causation issue here.

I mean, I wouldn't expect you can put hard data to any of this, and that's fine. We're talking subjective experiences and I'm not discounting yours. But you don't get to say there's hard proof that this system is just as good, reference data that doesn't actually substantiate that claim, and then assert that I'm denying facts.

Just for funsies, I grabbed the first five Astra Militarum lists on Listhammer, all of which went 4-1 or better. There's a decent variety of units, even if three of the lists are tripling-up on their star players. But looking at the infantry, there's not a single grenade launcher or long-las across the five lists, and the only flamers are on units that can't take other weapons. Otherwise it's all plasma and melta on every squad (plus a handful of HSVGs), the standard-issue freebie upgrades, and a plasma pistol and power weapon or power fist on every officer. Despite these units still retaining a decent number of options, the outcome is cookie-cutter to a degree that has not always been the case.

These lists track with my anecdotal observation that the current approach creates more always-take and never-take wargear choices than before. I don't think this makes for a great experience, and I am not convinced that putting some coarse costs on the obvious standout choices would create any significant design overhead, or detract perceptibly from balance.

I think melta guns and blasters got nerfed because monsters/tanks were dying too much. It's not to balance them against flamers.

Honestly, I disagree with the analysis of melta. For an infantry-sized gun It's still a good weapon for taking a decent sized chunk out of tanks due to its AP and reliable, high damage. Especially imulti-meltas do see a lot of play. Wounding on fives isn't that bad if you get to ignore their armor afterwards.

Admittedly, the meltaguns-got-nerfed-because-points-went-away thing is mostly just me being salty about meltaguns while wearing my tinfoil hat.

That said, I do find it very annoying and unfluffy that a meltagun that hits a T10 tank will fail to do any damage to it at all 2/3rds of the time. If we *needed* to nerf meltaguns, then my personal preference would have been to let them continue to wound reliably but do a bit less damage. Something like moving the melta bonus from the Damage stat to the Strength stat instead would have done the trick. But that's a topic for another thread.

 catbarf wrote:
the standard-issue freebie upgrades, and a plasma pistol and power weapon or power fist on every officer. Despite these units still retaining a decent number of options, the outcome is cookie-cutter to a degree that has not always been the case.

People will read "it was cookie cutter before too" but in support of catbarf I have to stress that before there were mitigating factors.

If loading your unit up with expensive gear was the meta choice but your unit was naked, your unit was suboptimal, but at least it's cheap.

If running your unit barebones was the meta choice, and you loaded up with expensive gear, your unit was suboptimal, but at least you did get some fancy toys for your points even if they're not top efficiency.

This resulted in a dampening effect on worst-case scenarios, which opens up more options for casual players to do things "a bit wrong" for thematic reasons without completely torpedoing themselves in the process. It also was much more new-player friendly, as it wasn't -catastrophic- no matter how you built the unit; you always had at least a consolation prize, even if you built your unit for aesthetics without knowing what the meta loadout is.

Contrast with the current situation. If loading up your unit with expensive gear is the meta choice but your unit is naked, your unit is not only weak, it's also much more expensive than it used to be, which is ruinous.

If running your unit barebones would have been the meta choice, it now doesn't matter, the unit has its points baked in, so you are paying for that expensive gear regardless (often leading to a unit that's terrible on a full datasheet level).

Personally I'll take unit variety over loadout variety any day, much as I'd much rather a game have a variety of viable factions see play over a few that dominate no matter what build they take.

I do think part of the current challenge is a result of something 10th has done really well, which is give units themselves much stronger purposes for taking altogether. It means that often instead of swapping guns in a unit, you're probably going to just take a different unit.

It's also a bit of an issue with the desire to keep weapons consistent across units, which is why the most successful build varieties seem to be from things like Inceptors that have unique variants of common weapon types. Gladiators are probably the big example of weapon swaps working simply because they just treat it as a new datasheet.

I think my main issue with points is they don't really solve these core issues. They feel good on principle, but in practice they make lists really sterile. It is more punishing to pay extra for stuff that isn't worth it than to take a subpar option that costs the same and that makes flushing extras out of lists far more of an advantage than making sure you have the best option wherever possible.

I do think a lot of the options in 10th are on the right track, but GW clearly overvalued some things like 1 extra attack on a model that makes 6 vs making every existing attack more reliable. I think there's a lot of potential to design weapons that feel more distinct now than ever and I really hope we see GW take another crack at things that for various reasons just did not work as designed in 10th.

 Tawnis wrote:

That being said, I'm sure that there will be something imbalanced at launch, GW has a proven track record of that as well, I just don't think it's going to be anything near as broad as shooting is OP, or melee is OP (I've heard both about this edition from many people.) If something does come out OP at launch it will likely be a specific army taking advantage of a new tweak in an unexpected way and get nerfed around as quickly as 10th edition Aeldari did at launch.

If only there was some kind of rules development process that would involve the player base and result in better balance.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
the standard-issue freebie upgrades, and a plasma pistol and power weapon or power fist on every officer. Despite these units still retaining a decent number of options, the outcome is cookie-cutter to a degree that has not always been the case.

People will read "it was cookie cutter before too" but in support of catbarf I have to stress that before there were mitigating factors.

If loading your unit up with expensive gear was the meta choice but your unit was naked, your unit was suboptimal, but at least it's cheap.

If running your unit barebones was the meta choice, and you loaded up with expensive gear, your unit was suboptimal, but at least you did get some fancy toys for your points even if they're not top efficiency.

This resulted in a dampening effect on worst-case scenarios, which opens up more options for casual players to do things "a bit wrong" for thematic reasons without completely torpedoing themselves in the process. It also was much more new-player friendly, as it wasn't -catastrophic- no matter how you built the unit; you always had at least a consolation prize, even if you built your unit for aesthetics without knowing what the meta loadout is.

Contrast with the current situation. If loading up your unit with expensive gear is the meta choice but your unit is naked, your unit is not only weak, it's also much more expensive than it used to be, which is ruinous.

If running your unit barebones would have been the meta choice, it now doesn't matter, the unit has its points baked in, so you are paying for that expensive gear regardless (often leading to a unit that's terrible on a full datasheet level).

Yep. Agree with all that. And anecdotally, I was one of those people who liked to put extra toys on some of their units even when more boys were better and vice versa. I had sybarites that I'd give power swords to because it was fun to watch them actually have a chance in melee and occassionally pull off something unexpected. I could fluff those guys as being trueborn who had been sent to prove themselves among the rabble after they'd managed to embarrass their superiors. Or I had a squad of bare bones kabalites without so much as a blaster to their name. I used identical models for each of them and painted them up with graying hair. I called them "the withered vine", and their fluff was that they were the result of a batch of vat-born that hadn't mixed properly and functionally made a bunch of genetic duplicates instead of variety of different genomes. They were given the worst gear, tasked with the most gak jobs, and were kind of keeping eachother alive out of sheer spite for the way others treated them.

Again, nota massive impact to the win percentages of my games, but it let me project some personality (and lore) onto my units without feeling like I was just leaving free money (points) on the table. If I ran the withered vine today, it would feel like I was essentially paying twice as much as the unit was actually worth, and I'd be slightly bitter if I thought I'd lost the game as a result.

Of course it is only a short step from 'one obvious equipment choice' to having simplified profiles for squads and then the rules can start to match the model density...

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Tawnis wrote:

That being said, I'm sure that there will be something imbalanced at launch, GW has a proven track record of that as well, I just don't think it's going to be anything near as broad as shooting is OP, or melee is OP (I've heard both about this edition from many people.) If something does come out OP at launch it will likely be a specific army taking advantage of a new tweak in an unexpected way and get nerfed around as quickly as 10th edition Aeldari did at launch.

If only there was some kind of rules development process that would involve the player base and result in better balance.

Yeah.... you don't want this. You really, really don't want this.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
Of course it is only a short step from 'one obvious equipment choice' to having simplified profiles for squads and then the rules can start to match the model density...

I think GW has painted themselves into a corner here, because on the one hand it makes total sense to abstract things in this way with how big battles can get, but on the other hand GW is a miniatures company first, they want the power swords and power fists and thunder hammers and lightning claws to feel like all those things, because that is ultimately what they're selling to you, much more so than the rules.

Napoleonics can abstract stuff as much as they want, they don't care, equipment options aren't that big deal in such a setting and miniatures tend to be straightforward to match. Warhammer miniatures, in comparison, are extremely elaborate, and GW is no doubt painfully aware that the models are why GW is successful - it's not their rules writing skills that have blazed a path through the wargame medium, to put it mildly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LunarSol wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:
If only there was some kind of rules development process that would involve the player base and result in better balance.

Yeah.... you don't want this. You really, really don't want this.

I think they mean playtesting. Which GW used to do, with more than just the handful of actual rules writers, but they stopped doing it because it resulted in relentless leaks.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
the standard-issue freebie upgrades, and a plasma pistol and power weapon or power fist on every officer. Despite these units still retaining a decent number of options, the outcome is cookie-cutter to a degree that has not always been the case.

People will read "it was cookie cutter before too" but in support of catbarf I have to stress that before there were mitigating factors.

If loading your unit up with expensive gear was the meta choice but your unit was naked, your unit was suboptimal, but at least it's cheap.

If running your unit barebones was the meta choice, and you loaded up with expensive gear, your unit was suboptimal, but at least you did get some fancy toys for your points even if they're not top efficiency.

This resulted in a dampening effect on worst-case scenarios, which opens up more options for casual players to do things "a bit wrong" for thematic reasons without completely torpedoing themselves in the process. It also was much more new-player friendly, as it wasn't -catastrophic- no matter how you built the unit; you always had at least a consolation prize, even if you built your unit for aesthetics without knowing what the meta loadout is.

Contrast with the current situation. If loading up your unit with expensive gear is the meta choice but your unit is naked, your unit is not only weak, it's also much more expensive than it used to be, which is ruinous.

If running your unit barebones would have been the meta choice, it now doesn't matter, the unit has its points baked in, so you are paying for that expensive gear regardless (often leading to a unit that's terrible on a full datasheet level).

I miss 8th Edition Imperial Guard. Especially during the brief period when GW actually put effort into balancing wargear prices. Before they just threw all of it in the bin in 9th. And then released an IG codex that more closely resembled something normally found below a squatting dog.

I made an infantry army where the officers (3-4 Company Commanders, a Lord Commissar, 1-2 Tempestor Primes, a Primaris Psyker etc.) had different wargear options. I also took various artefacts seen as weak/bad (like the relic swords) to give them extra flavour. Really made them feel like distinct characters.

Alas, I was clearly having fun wrong. Thank goodness GW has set me right on both counts.

I miss relics so Gork damn much, man.

I converted and did special paintjobs for my Chaos Knights relics. I painted a glowing magma claw for my Gauntlet of Ascension, a similar incandescent head for the Helm of Dogs, and gave my Warp-Borne Stalker a pair of wings kitbashed from a Hive Tyrant to hint at its increased mobility.

All gone now. That sort of thing just sucks the fun and character out of it all.

 Ashiraya wrote:
I miss relics so Gork damn much, man.

There still are relics? They renamed them into enhancements.

During the codex updates they swapped which ones were available but that is pretty standard. You can still model the enhancements onto models too.

LunarSol wrote:I think my main issue with points is they don't really solve these core issues. They feel good on principle, but in practice they make lists really sterile. It is more punishing to pay extra for stuff that isn't worth it than to take a subpar option that costs the same and that makes flushing extras out of lists far more of an advantage than making sure you have the best option wherever possible.

I do think a lot of the options in 10th are on the right track, but GW clearly overvalued some things like 1 extra attack on a model that makes 6 vs making every existing attack more reliable. I think there's a lot of potential to design weapons that feel more distinct now than ever and I really hope we see GW take another crack at things that for various reasons just did not work as designed in 10th.

I actually agree with this in general. Points are not a substitute for design, or capable of solving design issues. Having a choice between two weapons that do different things is better than having two that do the same thing but one is better and the other is cheaper. If you have two units that do the same thing, the most likely outcome is that whichever is more efficient is the only one that sees play.

As you mentioned one of the best things GW has done with 10th is give units individual identity, and I like that in many cases they've tried to reframe wargear options as role-based sidegrades. On the whole the game is more interesting, better balanced, and more fitting to the lore for having armies go into battle with their doctrinal allotment of special and heavy weapons rather than a bunch of naked bodies to hold objectives.

Still, there are edge cases where options are not equivalent in utility, and cannot easily be made equivalent without more design effort than assigning an in-the-ballpark points value. I don't care about 1pt power swords and bolt pistols, but if GW can put a price on a single Ripper Swarm or minor enhancement, they can absolutely assign a number to a pair of plasma cannon sponsons for a Leman Russ.

 the Signless wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
I miss relics so Gork damn much, man.

There still are relics? They renamed them into enhancements.

During the codex updates they swapped which ones were available but that is pretty standard. You can still model the enhancements onto models too.

It wasn't just a renaming, though. There are whole classes of artefacts that no longer exist.

Take Imperial Guard - the 8th edition book had at least three different relic swords.

Please name one relic sword Enhancement available to IG in 10th.

Yep, that. And also the points upgrades, like aforementioned Warp-Borne Stalker. Favours of the Dark Gods added a crucial element of depth to listbuilding, to compensate for the naturally thin roster Chaos Knights have. Without them the faction just isn't as interesting.

 LunarSol wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Tawnis wrote:

That being said, I'm sure that there will be something imbalanced at launch, GW has a proven track record of that as well, I just don't think it's going to be anything near as broad as shooting is OP, or melee is OP (I've heard both about this edition from many people.) If something does come out OP at launch it will likely be a specific army taking advantage of a new tweak in an unexpected way and get nerfed around as quickly as 10th edition Aeldari did at launch.

If only there was some kind of rules development process that would involve the player base and result in better balance.

Yeah.... you don't want this. You really, really don't want this.

Yeah, I'm with LunarSol on this. Ask 100 people on the internet what's imbalanced in a game, you'll get 20 different answers and 50 different ways to "fix" the problem. Also, who, aside from those whose full time job it is, has time to test all the matchups and various conditions armies could be played in.

GW is far from perfect but their ability to balance a game with so many variations and moving parts anywhere near as well as they do does not get the respect it deserves. If every faction had a win rate between 60-40 that is still very good and would be a healthy place to be at, but we often get even better these days. (As a reminder, Chess a game with 2 identical forces and perfect information, has a 52.5-47.5 balance strictly because of its one single variable, first turn advantage.)

Looking at the detachment points for my eldar, the 3DP detachments definitely feel like they got screwed over. Warhost was generally considered pretty mid too. It would have benefitted greatly from being 2DP so that you could combine it with something else to give your army a boost. Still paying for the sins of being good prior to the quadrouple nerf it took a few months ago, I guess.

It does put me in an awkward spot as I tend to play a lot of 1k games. I imagine we'll probably end up house ruling that 3DP detachments count as 2DP at lower points, but if not, I'll have to choose a 2DP detachment to commit to. Which is tricky for my eldar because none of the 2DP detachments are really "generic." The closest thing to that is probably either one of the corsair detachments (where I'd ignore all the enhancements and half the benefits because I don't have a lot of pirate units in my collection) or the seer council (which means starting every list with a few hundred points of psykers in order to use any of the detachment benefits.)

My tyranids are in a similar boat. I lost the ability to play invasion fleet as my default detachment in smaller games. Fortunately, my collection lends itself moderately well to a 1k vanguard list.

My drukhari were mostly unaffected. Reaper's Wager *is* my go-to detachment (I play PT, so the harlequin teamup is fluffy), but I can still play my cartel or a cult list at lower points and be fine.

My marines came out ahead (shocking). I mostly play Shadowmark Talon, so I basically just gained the ability to make my phobos or psyker units more powerful in larger games without needing to change my list.

EDIT: Definitely feels like we have some winners and losers right out the gate.

Just took a glance at the DE faction pack.

I see GW are still turning over Enhancement design to people whose imagination leaked out of their ears long ago.

"So what Enhancement should we give to a Succubus?"

"Uh... um.... well... um... maybe we could... uh... you know... we could... give her... uh... the thing? You know... um... the thingy thing?"

"Come on, we can do this! We need to give her something cool. Something that reflects her being a seasoned pit-fighter. We can't just cop out and give her something crap like plus one toughness-"

"Right! Plus one toughness! That's exactly what I was going to say."

"What? That's terrible. She used to get that just with Combat Drugs."

"See - we've even got precedent for it. Plus it's almost lunch time."

"Good point. Plus one toughness it is."

 vipoid wrote:
Just took a glance at the DE faction pack.

I see GW are still turning over Enhancement design to people whose imagination leaked out of their ears long ago.

"So what Enhancement should we give to a Succubus?"

"Uh... um.... well... um... maybe we could... uh... you know... we could... give her... uh... the thing? You know... um... the thingy thing?"

"Come on, we can do this! We need to give her something cool. Something that reflects her being a seasoned pit-fighter. We can't just cop out and give her something crap like plus one toughness-"

"Right! Plus one toughness! That's exactly what I was going to say."

"What? That's terrible. She used to get that just with Combat Drugs."

"See - we've even got precedent for it. Plus it's almost lunch time."

"Good point. Plus one toughness it is."

lol. On the plus side, the DP costs do make it more inviting to mix your subfactions together at higher points. You can take cartel or spectacle as your main detachment, then still sprinkle in a 1DP coven or cult detachment so that members of other subfactions are getting something.

But yeah, there's a tragic lack of flavor behind most of the new strats and enhancements that is indicative of what I was really tired of in 10th.

"This detachment gives lethal hits to your wyches!"
"'Kay."
"But not against vehicles though..."
"'Kay."
"Unless you spend 1CP to let a single squad have lethal hits against vehicles!"
"'Kay..."

Meanwhile in 9th edition:
"So after your succubus gets killed, it triggers this booby trap she had rigged inside her own body that makes her skeleton erupt into a bunch of spiked growths, skewering her killer."

Meanwhile in older editions:
"So then you can plop down a persistent webway portal, reshaping the battlefield, and allowing your units to enter from reserves from a new angle, dramatically changing what unit loadouts are viable and forcing your opponent to think on their feet!"

I'm definitely not wowed by the initial design of the detachment system. That may change with the codex releases, but currently it just feels like 3 DP is stuff you should play and 2 DP is stuff no one touches with the hope one of the 1 DP options makes them viable. There's definitely nothing about the system that feels like it takes advantage of the design space yet.

Also, Deathwatch being locked to 2000 points is irritating.

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm definitely not wowed by the initial design of the detachment system. That may change with the codex releases, but currently it just feels like 3 DP is stuff you should play and 2 DP is stuff no one touches with the hope one of the 1 DP options makes them viable. There's definitely nothing about the system that feels like it takes advantage of the design space yet.

Also, Deathwatch being locked to 2000 points is irritating.

...If I'm reading the detachment rules correctly (which I may not be) none of them actually restrict what units you can take in them, beyond subfaction keyword? So you can still take Deathwatch with one of the generic 2p detachments at 1,000pts? Sure, no SIA that way, but nobody else gets their cool Chapter-specific stuff at 2 detachment points either?

I'm probably just being thick but where does it say how many DP a given detachment costs?

 vipoid wrote:
I'm probably just being thick but where does it say how many DP a given detachment costs?

Only place I've seen is the WC article announcing the download for SM. No idea if they're planning on putting that info somewhere usable at some point.

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm definitely not wowed by the initial design of the detachment system. That may change with the codex releases, but currently it just feels like 3 DP is stuff you should play and 2 DP is stuff no one touches with the hope one of the 1 DP options makes them viable. There's definitely nothing about the system that feels like it takes advantage of the design space yet.

Also, Deathwatch being locked to 2000 points is irritating.

There seems to be three reasons behind getting hit with 3DP in what I can gleam from what we've got so far.

1. Generalist detachments that effect everything are getting hit. At the moment, it seems more of a philosophy than anything else, but the ones that effect the entire army with no restrictions have generally been quite powerful. War Horde, War Host, Mont'Ka, Invasion Fleet, Gladius, Awakened Dynasty, ect. I think that these are the most likely ones that could get dropped down to 2DP in the future after people get a better feel for 11th and it's more clear that not all of them are powerhouses on their own.

2. Detachments that look to have problematic interactions with combinations that limit design space: Stormlance Task Force, Liberator Assault Group, ect. (Mostly in Space Marines where they have to work around so many more 1DP detachments.)

3. Detachments that are seen as powerful enough right now that they don't to risk breaking with more bolt on rules: Subterranean Assault, Blade of Ultrammar, Aspect Host, Canoptek Court, ect.

As for Deathwatch, there may be another way to run them in 1k games via Imperial Agents once we get the info for that. I think the SM one is meant as the large scale version. Time will tell there.

 Tawnis wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm definitely not wowed by the initial design of the detachment system. That may change with the codex releases, but currently it just feels like 3 DP is stuff you should play and 2 DP is stuff no one touches with the hope one of the 1 DP options makes them viable. There's definitely nothing about the system that feels like it takes advantage of the design space yet.

Also, Deathwatch being locked to 2000 points is irritating.

There seems to be three reasons behind getting hit with 3DP in what I can gleam from what we've got so far.

1. Generalist detachments that effect everything are getting hit. At the moment, it seems more of a philosophy than anything else, but the ones that effect the entire army with no restrictions have generally been quite powerful. War Horde, War Host, Mont'Ka, Invasion Fleet, Gladius, Awakened Dynasty, ect. I think that these are the most likely ones that could get dropped down to 2DP in the future after people get a better feel for 11th and it's more clear that not all of them are powerhouses on their own.

2. Detachments that look to have problematic interactions with combinations that limit design space: Outrider Task Force, Liberator Assault Group, ect. (Mostly in Space Marines where they have to work around so many more 1DP detachments.)

3. Detachments that are seen as powerful enough right now that they don't to risk breaking with more bolt on rules: Subterranean Assault, Blade of Ultrammar, Aspect Host, Canoptek Court, ect.

As for Deathwatch, there may be another way to run them in 1k games via Imperial Agents once we get the info for that. I think the SM one is meant as the large scale version. Time will tell there.

1. It definitely seems to be more of a philosophy/vibes thing than anything else. Warhost for eldar has been considered pretty bad since the nerfing a few months ago where they took away our re-embarkation tricks. So it feels like they just slapped 3DP on it because "it's the generic one." Which is a shame, because mixing something like Warhost with a 1DP detachment could be a decent way to help resurrect it.

2. See, that would make sense, but Ynnari are a 2DP detachment right now. Maybe the 1DP detachments for eldar are just mediocre enough right now that they're not worried about it? But I'd have guessed that Devoted of Ynnead was going to end up being 3DP purely for the extra complexity that comes with mixing in the drukhari units.

3. This does seem to be the case for a few of them. Reaper's Wager for drukhari is probably 3DP for this reason. I'd question whether aspect host is *actually* still all that good at the moment (last time I checked, the win rate was in the low 40s), but I do think that *GW* thinks it's powerful.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm definitely not wowed by the initial design of the detachment system. That may change with the codex releases, but currently it just feels like 3 DP is stuff you should play and 2 DP is stuff no one touches with the hope one of the 1 DP options makes them viable.

I'm worried it might actually be a little worse than that. My understanding is that my Shadowmark Talon detachment (2DP) was already considered pretty good and is now able to add a 1DP detachment on top of what it previously had. So all the benefits I had before, plus a bunch of phobos buffs or the librarius tricks.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm definitely not wowed by the initial design of the detachment system. That may change with the codex releases, but currently it just feels like 3 DP is stuff you should play and 2 DP is stuff no one touches with the hope one of the 1 DP options makes them viable. There's definitely nothing about the system that feels like it takes advantage of the design space yet.

Also, Deathwatch being locked to 2000 points is irritating.

...If I'm reading the detachment rules correctly (which I may not be) none of them actually restrict what units you can take in them, beyond subfaction keyword? So you can still take Deathwatch with one of the generic 2p detachments at 1,000pts? Sure, no SIA that way, but nobody else gets their cool Chapter-specific stuff at 2 detachment points either?

Every other chapter has multiple 2 DP options. Even the special compliant Chapter locked options are all 2 DP except Blades and Ultramarines have Reclamation at 2 DP as another option.

Realise its all kind of mechanical, which isn't going to be popular in Commorragh, but I don't think DE have done too badly.

It might be very "boring" (that was my snap judgement on the faction focus and I stand by it) but the 1 DP choices seem reasonably strong compared with some factions (looking at you CWE).
So taking one in addition to a 2 DP choice feels like a respectable upgrade rather than a token improvement.

For all the mockery having lethal hits against non-Vehicles & Monsters on all Wych Cult melee attacks is pretty good. Wyches get a bazillion attacks so this will add up. Hellions perhaps benefit less due to their boosted S and Lance - but they have a bag of attacks too.
Sustained hits 1 on Kabal & Blades for hire shooting versus non-Vehicle and Monster isn't bad either. Although in practice your priority for these things is going to tend to be vehicles & monsters so its perhaps less good than it could be.

Competitively Spectacle of Spite plus Kabalite Agonysts seems like the thing to do. You'd have to play Purge but if the pros all claim that's the best mission set who cares? Its not that big a boost because your shooting is arguably there as dedicated anti-large, but sometimes you have to hose down bikers or something with darklight. The ability to keep a unit of Scourge hidden after they've just blown something up could also be game winning - so its nice to have the ability in your pocket.

You can take say Realspace Raiders and play anything except Reconnaissance. Or Skysplinter Assault and anything but Priority Assets. Not sure this should really be complimented though - because GW could have just let you play everything.
But it does let you mess about with your friends while keeping bound to the writ of the rules.

Does one of the 1 DP choices help Realspace Raiders get over the line? As people quickly discovered you just generally have enough pain tokens unless your game plan is falling apart. There's no real benefit to sitting there with half a dozen in hand. So as much as I want to say yes I'm not sure it is.
You could take this logic to its extreme and ditch RSR to take all 3 of 1 DP choices instead (although no Priority Assets for you) - and you get Cults with lethal into non-large, you get kabalites and friends with sustained hits into non-large and you get Talos/Cronos with -1 to wound vs higher S. Which isn't a bad set of bonuses across a "balanced" DE army. Not convinced the enhancements are game changers, but if they were cheap there are few useful ones here. The testing would have to be whether the stratagems are good enough.

Eldar by contrast start in a much worse spot and none of this feels good.
Like we often see, these rules look like they were written for the game as it stood 9-12 months ago, and very much not as it exists today.
As Wyldhunt says - Aspect Host and War Host might have been 3 DP back in the day, but not now. In fact as a rule Eldar are deeply in trouble, so not sure there's a lot to be happy with here.
The best list right now is Seer Council and I guess you can now stack on Armoured Warhost for some potentially situational buffs to your Fire Prisms. Means you are playing Priority Assets or Recon - so you need those action monkeys.
In fact this is probably the go-to choice for all Eldar forces.
Not persuaded at all on splashing in a couple of Harlequin units and I think the ranger one just feels irrelevant to most detachments. Maybe there's some synergy in the Corsair Coterie because they have that stratagem that buffs ranger/shroud runner shooting, so you are likely bringing a unit or two. That's also Priority Assets and Recon for missions.

I'm feeling very disappointed for my Tau.

We have only 7 detachments now - the next lowest faction count has 9.
Additionally, GW advertised 3 new detachments - but 2 of the 3 are preexisting detachments they've just chopped and changed (read: nerfed) to make cheap 1pt detachments, so really it's just 1 new detachment.
Why do Votann get more detachments? They've practically got a detachment per unit

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I'm feeling very disappointed for my Tau.

We have only 7 detachments now - the next lowest faction count has 9.

Imperial Agents is at 5 and will remain at 5.

Sisters of Battle is going up to 8 with the 1 pointers, assuming they do not lose any of their current detachments.

 Tawnis wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

If only there was some kind of rules development process that would involve the player base and result in better balance.

Yeah.... you don't want this. You really, really don't want this.

Yeah, I'm with LunarSol on this. Ask 100 people on the internet what's imbalanced in a game, you'll get 20 different answers and 50 different ways to "fix" the problem. Also, who, aside from those whose full time job it is, has time to test all the matchups and various conditions armies could be played in.

Having done professional playtesting, GW playtesting and testing other systems, there is a way of doing it that isn't crowd surfing opinions. Being able to run playtests and understand the results you get from them is part of being a game designer.

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm definitely not wowed by the initial design of the detachment system. That may change with the codex releases, but currently it just feels like 3 DP is stuff you should play and 2 DP is stuff no one touches with the hope one of the 1 DP options makes them viable. There's definitely nothing about the system that feels like it takes advantage of the design space yet.

Also, Deathwatch being locked to 2000 points is irritating.

I'm also a little concerned. I don't think GW have fully appreciated the interplay between the 1DP and 2DP detachments. You obviously need a good 2DP detachment to go with a 1DP detachment but a lot of the current combinations just seem pretty poor. One other concern is that GW are currently not presenting this info in the best way, so building armies feels a lot clunkier right now.

It will be interesting to see how detachments look in the first codex. Right now I’m getting a lot of “just slap some numbers on the old stuff to patch things and get them playing 11th”. Not making real updates to the legacy stuff that’s going to be replaced soon.

Of course, some armies are going to be stuck with these for years.

It is going to make army building more complicated. But once the apps and list builders catch up, that should be eased.

#New40k – World Champion’s top 5 changes

The way points costs work is being updated in two main ways. First, there will be separate point costs for some wargear on units, allowing different weapon options to become viable choices. This change won't be on every unit with wargear, but units like Adepta Sororitas Retributors or Adeptus Mechanicus Ironstrider Ballistari will have a lower base cost, but pay points for their best wargear.*

Second, a new system of point steppers will typically increase the cost of some datasheets on your third unit. Some extremely powerful datasheets, like the Defiler, may have this additional cost if you take a second and third unit. This change will help with internal diversity for armies and encourage players to consider their other available options.

Color me interested.

On-topic for the thread, I am undecided how I feel about fliers. On the one hand, it makes thematic sense for flybys and such, but bombers have been severely nerfed by having to survive the response to the bomber turning up to be used, and I did enjoy using the fliers bases to deny objectives.

That all said, it was always very sucky to get cornered for a good firing line by the restrictive movement rules, and then have to fly off the board next turn to come back on a later turn.

I think that I may be experimenting with some fliers in my armies and seeing how they do before I judge.

I've also noticed that pivoting for extra movement on vehicles is back, so long, narrow units like Ork Trukks can deploy on the edge of their deployment zone and then pivot to get a little extra movement. Rhino and Chimera chassis'd vehicles can do this a little as well. Sorry Monolith.

Listened to a summary of changes and the idea of consolidation all happening at the end of the combat phase is better, IMHO, as it stops slowing things down.

Are Flyers allowed to arrive turn 1 now?
If not, bombers can't affect the enemy until after they've had two full turns, even three if the enemy went first. A bomber that can basically only hinder the enemy on their turn 4+ is really lacklustre.

I'm glad they can't moveblock anymore. That always felt arbitrary and silly

 Nevelon wrote:
It will be interesting to see how detachments look in the first codex. Right now I’m getting a lot of “just slap some numbers on the old stuff to patch things and get them playing 11th”. Not making real updates to the legacy stuff that’s going to be replaced soon.

Of course, some armies are going to be stuck with these for years.

It is going to make army building more complicated. But once the apps and list builders catch up, that should be eased.

I threw them into a spreadsheet and it made it a lot easier to parse. Starting with the glut of Marine options did no favors.

 some bloke wrote:
On-topic for the thread, I am undecided how I feel about fliers. On the one hand, it makes thematic sense for flybys and such, but bombers have been severely nerfed by having to survive the response to the bomber turning up to be used, and I did enjoy using the fliers bases to deny objectives.

That all said, it was always very sucky to get cornered for a good firing line by the restrictive movement rules, and then have to fly off the board next turn to come back on a later turn.

I think that I may be experimenting with some fliers in my armies and seeing how they do before I judge.

I've also noticed that pivoting for extra movement on vehicles is back, so long, narrow units like Ork Trukks can deploy on the edge of their deployment zone and then pivot to get a little extra movement. Rhino and Chimera chassis'd vehicles can do this a little as well. Sorry Monolith.

Listened to a summary of changes and the idea of consolidation all happening at the end of the combat phase is better, IMHO, as it stops slowing things down.

Sadly, I still think that airplanes were a bad idea for a game of 40k's scale. They just don't fit the rest of the game terribly well, and not just because the game wants something like a sergeant's choice of pistol to matter. Even if we accept that a battle on the scale of a 2k game could/should feature air support from flyers, they probably shouldn't be so close to the ground and moving so slowly that the enemy is figuring out how to kill them with infantry. They shouldn't be doing donuts like a banshee from Halo. The models are cool, and I totally get the appeal, but they really belong in something more like Aeronautica or epic.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 some bloke wrote:
On-topic for the thread, I am undecided how I feel about fliers. On the one hand, it makes thematic sense for flybys and such, but bombers have been severely nerfed by having to survive the response to the bomber turning up to be used, and I did enjoy using the fliers bases to deny objectives.

That all said, it was always very sucky to get cornered for a good firing line by the restrictive movement rules, and then have to fly off the board next turn to come back on a later turn.

I think that I may be experimenting with some fliers in my armies and seeing how they do before I judge.

I've also noticed that pivoting for extra movement on vehicles is back, so long, narrow units like Ork Trukks can deploy on the edge of their deployment zone and then pivot to get a little extra movement. Rhino and Chimera chassis'd vehicles can do this a little as well. Sorry Monolith.

Listened to a summary of changes and the idea of consolidation all happening at the end of the combat phase is better, IMHO, as it stops slowing things down.

Sadly, I still think that airplanes were a bad idea for a game of 40k's scale. They just don't fit the rest of the game terribly well, and not just because the game wants something like a sergeant's choice of pistol to matter. Even if we accept that a battle on the scale of a 2k game could/should feature air support from flyers, they probably shouldn't be so close to the ground and moving so slowly that the enemy is figuring out how to kill them with infantry. They shouldn't be doing donuts like a banshee from Halo. The models are cool, and I totally get the appeal, but they really belong in something more like Aeronautica or epic.

I totally understand the scifi "helicopters" like the Valkyrie and Vendetta. They fit the IG theme and they worked VTOLing around the tabletop.

What didn't fit was the Marauder Bomber lumbering across the tabletop... or that nightmare Tau Orca that just kinda ate up all the real estate on the table....


(I can get behind the Manta though, it's essentially a set piece for giant games).

The Manta is just an aura farming tool, as the kids put it these days.

If you bring one you win the game just on style points.

The Thousand Sons detachments look pretty usable, but I'm left even more perplexed by the DP values being assigned. Grand Coven being 3DP makes sense as it was generally agreed to be the most powerful and most generally useful detachment. But they also made Phalanx 3DP despite all the anti-synergy it has.

In contrast I feel like the 1DP Ritual of Regeneration detachment is almost as good on its own as the 3DP Phalanx detachment. I wonder if we're going to see a major re-pricing of detachments in a few months' time.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
The Thousand Sons detachments look pretty usable, but I'm left even more perplexed by the DP values being assigned. Grand Coven being 3DP makes sense as it was generally agreed to be the most powerful and most generally useful detachment. But they also made Phalanx 3DP despite all the anti-synergy it has.

In contrast I feel like the 1DP Ritual of Regeneration detachment is almost as good on its own as the 3DP Phalanx detachment. I wonder if we're going to see a major re-pricing of detachments in a few months' time.

I like the Ritual of Regeneration. I was thinking of playing a Ritual of Regeneration for infantry with the vehicle detachment for the vehicles. I think that could be pretty good.

I also like that the CSM psyker detachment is 1, and Vets is 2 so I can play them together as I love me some psykers.

I am ok with the psychic phase not coming back, although I think they could have used the TS book as a guide to how to do it in 11th. But I do like that psychic ignores the cover which does at least do something.

Not getting a lot out of the broader Chaos options. Always interested in the CSM/Daemons allied detachments, but nothing really strikes me as that interesting. But its perhaps because without playing them I struggle to see how things click together.

What I'm sort of getting is how important the 1 DP options are going to be for "Index 11th". And the factions that don't have good options are going suck. Which they'll resolve by codexes and maybe some Christmas options but idk.

Small but important change I noticed in the Deathguard Pack

Nurgle's Gift, Skullsquirm Blight
Change to:
‘Each time a model in this unit makes a melee attack, subtract 1 from
the Hit roll.’

Before it was just the hit roll now it is only in melee, so Skullsquirm Blight just got nerfed meaning that Rattlejoint will likely be taken even more often then it is now and I can't piss off my Ork friends anymore.

It'd annoy Guard more than Orks, I figure. That move seems intended to prevent it stacking with cover for an effective -2 to hit.

GW just dropped rules for imperial factions.

Agents detachments are all 3DP, which feels like satire. The faction straight up can't play Incursion. What an absolutely miserable book. Yeah sure GW, Veiled Blade is just as strong as Gladius, Liberator and Blade of Ultramar...

 Ashiraya wrote:
GW just dropped rules for imperial factions.

Agents detachments are all 3DP, which feels like satire. The faction straight up can't play Incursion. What an absolutely miserable book. Yeah sure GW, Veiled Blade is just as strong as Gladius, Liberator and Blade of Ultramar...

Well, if any of them were 2 DP GW would have had to have made a 1 DP to fill the gap and that requires putting some thought into Agents for the first time ever and no one is prepared for that. Realistically I think they probably could have made the Fleet and Blade 1 DP each and the others 2 DP each and actually had an interesting design, but its pretty clear they don't want 12 Strategem detachments in the mix no matter how bad.

If there are factions that don’t have 1 or 2 DP detachments that’s a pretty big issue. Not every game is 2k. Sure, you can hand waive it, but it should be adressed.

 Nevelon wrote:
If there are factions that don’t have 1 or 2 DP detachments that’s a pretty big issue. Not every game is 2k. Sure, you can hand waive it, but it should be adressed.

The list of issues with Imperial Agents that should be addressed is longer than the codex they phoned in for them. This is just the latest bit of negligence.

Though, now that I've seen the actual final design, I honestly don't see any reason to limit detachments to game size. It really doesn't do anything to improve 1k games IMO.

The detachment point system feels like the biggest miss of the new edition so far. They mess with list construction at different game sizes without much thought for design or balance. They seem balanced around 2000 points but break 1000 point balance. They have not said that higher point apocalypse games get higher budgets but adding more rules to keep track of is the last thing those games need.

Releasing the new detachments with a rule called something like "supplemental: this detachment can be taken in addition to 1 other detachment" and giving some old ones "solo: no supplemental detachments can be taken with this one" may have been cleaner. You lose the ability to take 3 1 pointers at 2000 points but who cares.

I suspect we'll all just play 3 DP at 1k since its not like anyone is regulating that game size anyway.

I did notice a couple cool things today.

The Vindicare Assassin gets an extra trick to negate the impact of Hidden - as well as ignoring Lone Operative, all enemy units have +15” Detection Range when a Vindicare shoots.

This might actually be useful to take now as my Custodes don't have a reliable way of picking out hidden units.

Just remember it only lasts until the Vindicare has shot. He doesn't expose them for any other unit.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Just remember it only lasts until the Vindicare has shot. He doesn't expose them for any other unit.

Oh, I totally miss read that then. Thanks.

Hmmm... back to the drawing board since I won't use Draxus (one of the dumbest looking models IMO, and I subscribe to the rule of cool. If the model looks really bad, I won't use it, even if it gives out free candy every turn.)

You could convert or kitbash your own Draxus, perhaps? Inquisitors are fun projects.

 Ashiraya wrote:
You could convert or kitbash your own Draxus, perhaps? Inquisitors are fun projects.

After the negative feedback I got when asking about using the HH Land Raider as a Venerable Custodes Land Raider in 40k, I'm a little hesitant to convert a named character.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
You could convert or kitbash your own Draxus, perhaps? Inquisitors are fun projects.

After the negative feedback I got when asking about using the HH Land Raider as a Venerable Custodes Land Raider in 40k, I'm a little hesitant to convert a named character.

Your takeaway from that thread was negative? It was overwhelmingly “sounds cool, but check with your opponents; I have no problem with it”

The thing is, we can’t promise that you won’t run into someone with a bee in their bonnet about 100% adherence to official models. Hypothetically those people are out there. Although very few people claim to have seen one in the flesh. And we don’t want to suggest slapping down the money for an expensive model and the hours to build/paint it, just to discover that jerk lives next door, and the owner of the FLGS has some weird house rules.

The Rule of Cool covers a lot of sins. As long as counts-as are vaguely the right size, and you are not playing in tournaments with strict rules, you are probably safe. And might be safe even in those circumstances.

But you will never get a 100% guaranteed answer. But should be like 98% safe.

GW needs to come out and just admit IA are not a real faction. It's kind of ludicrous they created a "Codex" for them just to put the rules for various add-on units behind a paywall.

The really stupid thing here is I can't see any problem with making all the IA detachments 2DP. I don't think you have to spend all 3 points on detachments in a 2k game so this is functionally the same as they are now, but makes them useable at less than 2k points. They couldn't even put that level of thought into them.

One of my first thoughts when they started talking about the new detachment system was Imperial Agents. It’s a great way to splash allies back into the game. Let you take a few units, give them a few tricks. Now with all detachments giving bonuses to everything it has some issues. You’d need to be real careful with keywords. Or break the system a little and say agents don’t get the other detachments bonuses and vice versus. Obviously not running that way now.

We have a book of hodge podge units gathered together. Give each little one a 1DP detachment. If you want to build an army out them, take the 3 that match the units you like the best and run with it. This is a codex that the new DP system could showcase. It’s perfect for it.

In the digital age I don’t know if we need an actual book to be the catch-all for all the random units, but we do need solid rules support for them. Hopefully GW will give them the love they need. With this new system of detachments, it could be the best edition ever for them.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
You could convert or kitbash your own Draxus, perhaps? Inquisitors are fun projects.

After the negative feedback I got when asking about using the HH Land Raider as a Venerable Custodes Land Raider in 40k, I'm a little hesitant to convert a named character.

What on earth kind of opponents are you playing against?

If someone wasn't cool with converting characters I'd find another game group. This is Warhammer, not checkers. The game has always been mediocre at best. The appeal here is the miniatures, which includes making them your own with conversions and paintjobs. Sure, if your converted Inquisitor rides a colossal Xeno-beast I could see the on-foot Draxus being less than suitable a profile to represent it, but otherwise an Inquisitor with WYSIWYG equipment should be something no one has any ground to stand on when complaining about.

 Nevelon wrote:
One of my first thoughts when they started talking about the new detachment system was Imperial Agents. It’s a great way to splash allies back into the game. Let you take a few units, give them a few tricks. Now with all detachments giving bonuses to everything it has some issues. You’d need to be real careful with keywords. Or break the system a little and say agents don’t get the other detachments bonuses and vice versus. Obviously not running that way now.

We have a book of hodge podge units gathered together. Give each little one a 1DP detachment. If you want to build an army out them, take the 3 that match the units you like the best and run with it. This is a codex that the new DP system could showcase. It’s perfect for it.

In the digital age I don’t know if we need an actual book to be the catch-all for all the random units, but we do need solid rules support for them. Hopefully GW will give them the love they need. With this new system of detachments, it could be the best edition ever for them.

Totally agree. To quote myself from another thread:

As someone who doesn't think imperial agents should really be looked at as an actual standalone army, I feel like imperial agents are actually one of the places where the new DP system could actually work really well. 1DP to splash in an inquisitor and some units associated with their ordo (or their merry band of henchmen) feels very fitting, and the 1DP detachments have just enough benefits to convey some of that flavor without being clunky. A primarily guard army with 1 DP of DW or GK or sisters splashed in, possibly lead by an inquisitor, would be a great way to represent those factions and make them feel more "elite."

I've had my reservations about the new detachment system, but I really thought imperial agents were where the new system was going to shine. It's bonkers to me that they fumbled what should have been a grand slam. Touchdown!

They may still end up that way eventually. It's pretty clear a lot of this stuff is dirty ported for compatibility rather than a design they really worked on. There may be something with a bit more effort with the codex(?) but 10th has given me VERY low expectations for Agents.

GW wrote: we've seen a lot of questions about whether you can use a 3DP detachment as your only detachment in your army at 1000 points (a common size for doubles games). Our intent is to let you do so and we will be making an update to clarify that in the first update to the Muster Army rules after launch. Effectively, you can always choose to pick any one, lone detachment, regardless of the mission size, even if it costs more Detachment Points than that game might normally allow.

In regards to the smaller games and DP issue, from today’s event article

This is such overcomplicated nonsense. I'm kind of entertained.

 LunarSol wrote:
This is such overcomplicated nonsense. I'm kind of entertained.

This makes me kind of miss the overwrought rules of Horus Heresy.

 Nevelon wrote:

GW wrote: we've seen a lot of questions about whether you can use a 3DP detachment as your only detachment in your army at 1000 points (a common size for doubles games). Our intent is to let you do so and we will be making an update to clarify that in the first update to the Muster Army rules after launch. Effectively, you can always choose to pick any one, lone detachment, regardless of the mission size, even if it costs more Detachment Points than that game might normally allow.

In regards to the smaller games and DP issue, from today’s event article

So what's the point of limiting 1k pt games to 2dp???

Because you can still run 2 1dp detachments or any single detachment. Seems simple enough, could’ve been clear from the beginning but it’s resolved it.

ccs wrote:

So what's the point of limiting 1k pt games to 2dp???

I guess it still means you can only pick two 1dp detachments at any one time, rather than 3. But yes, it does seem like they have kinda undone the entire point of this in a panic response to the Imperial Agents cockup.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
You could convert or kitbash your own Draxus, perhaps? Inquisitors are fun projects.

After the negative feedback I got when asking about using the HH Land Raider as a Venerable Custodes Land Raider in 40k, I'm a little hesitant to convert a named character.

I kitbashed my own Ragnar, before I got the actual model (Long before the resculpt was ever done)
He used to be painted, but I stripped and re-primed him to paint again.
Mine's the one on the right LOL.

Am I missing it?

How do we determine the army's disposition?

Do you pick it? Or, does each detachment comes with a disposition?

The reason why I'm now a little gunshy about using other stuff is that I have a couple issues that I think will make everything plain.

About a year ago I moved to Florida, during the process, my Imperial Knight army and a smattering of allies were lost in the move.

For a bit, I wasn't sure if I was going to get back in, and after a few stalled attempts I decided on Custodes.

Currently, I don't know the current gaming groups, most of what I can look forward to are Warhammer Store Combat Patrol games or another shop where it's all about paid league games and training for tournaments.

I'm also temporarily bound by public transportation. Getting to a shop takes a long time and I can only carry so much stuff. I don't really want to worry about showing up to a shop to have someone point and say, "you can't use that." And Im SOL for the day.

That's why.

 whembly wrote:
Am I missing it?

How do we determine the army's disposition?

Do you pick it? Or, does each detachment comes with a disposition?

It's determined by the Detachment. All of the preview articles contain a list of detatchments, their disposition and DP cost. This will likely be in the MFM or a similar document soon.

 whembly wrote:
Am I missing it?

How do we determine the army's disposition?

Do you pick it? Or, does each detachment comes with a disposition?

GW said those will be in the next Munitorum Field Manual, together with the actual points.
Edit: To be clear, disposition depends on your chosen detachments, and the MFM will list which detachments will have which disposition.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
The reason why I'm now a little gunshy about using other stuff is that I have a couple issues that I think will make everything plain.

About a year ago I moved to Florida, during the process, my Imperial Knight army and a smattering of allies were lost in the move.

For a bit, I wasn't sure if I was going to get back in, and after a few stalled attempts I decided on Custodes.

Currently, I don't know the current gaming groups, most of what I can look forward to are Warhammer Store Combat Patrol games or another shop where it's all about paid league games and training for tournaments.

I'm also temporarily bound by public transportation. Getting to a shop takes a long time and I can only carry so much stuff. I don't really want to worry about showing up to a shop to have someone point and say, "you can't use that." And Im SOL for the day.

That's why.

I had something similar happen to me.

Lost my entire collection (40k SW and 2nd ed rules + codex, Fantasy Dwarves + rules + army book, Man-o-war elves fleet, necromunda gang + rules)
This was back in 2000-2001. Me and my ex had all our stuff in storage as we had moved out of state as a trial-run to see if the move would be permanent. We ended up splitting up and had agreed we would take turns paying the storage fee. (we both had stuff in there, plus our kid's stuff)
At some point, she had decided not to pay so everything was lost before I could get any of it out.

At any rate, what I would do in your shoes: Plan on using the conversion as most would be fine with it, but have a replacement unit or something so if you get there and they say no, you can just swap it out and still get a game in.
As I said though, most people would be fine with it.

*edit to add*
I carried it all in one of these:
Top was for large models and all the books
1 tray for 40k
1 tray for fantasy
last tray for necromunda and MOW

It's a good carry solution if you're not worried about padding your minis to protect the paint. (although they should be fine if they have sealer on them)
Now my 40k army takes 2.
Anyway, the point is you can carry a lot in 1 so should be able to bring lots of options without taking up much room or being cumbersom on public transport.

 LunarSol wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Am I missing it?

How do we determine the army's disposition?

Do you pick it? Or, does each detachment comes with a disposition?

It's determined by the Detachment. All of the preview articles contain a list of detatchments, their disposition and DP cost. This will likely be in the MFM or a similar document soon.

 Tallandra wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Am I missing it?

How do we determine the army's disposition?

Do you pick it? Or, does each detachment comes with a disposition?

GW said those will be in the next Munitorum Field Manual, together with the actual points.
Edit: To be clear, disposition depends on your chosen detachments, and the MFM will list which detachments will have which disposition.

Thanks guys, I was reading all the previews and was struggling with this. I'm not missing it... just need to be patient.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I'm also temporarily bound by public transportation. Getting to a shop takes a long time and I can only carry so much stuff. I don't really want to worry about showing up to a shop to have someone point and say, "you can't use that." And Im SOL for the day.

If you can afford to play 40k, surely you can afford a car?

But if they can afford 40k and a car, can they still afford fuel?

 Dysartes wrote:
But if they can afford 40k and a car, can they still afford fuel?

Touché

 vipoid wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I'm also temporarily bound by public transportation. Getting to a shop takes a long time and I can only carry so much stuff. I don't really want to worry about showing up to a shop to have someone point and say, "you can't use that." And Im SOL for the day.

If you can afford to play 40k, surely you can afford a car?

I have a car, but I can't drive until September 6th due to a March 6th seizure...

Could be a similar situation.

 RaptorusRex wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I'm also temporarily bound by public transportation. Getting to a shop takes a long time and I can only carry so much stuff. I don't really want to worry about showing up to a shop to have someone point and say, "you can't use that." And Im SOL for the day.

If you can afford to play 40k, surely you can afford a car?

I have a car, but I can't drive until September 6th due to a March 6th seizure...

Could be a similar situation.

Oof. Sorry to hear that.