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I've seen a number of people who think hate 5E and think that the changes made from 4E just blow donkeycannon. So, I was curious, becaus ewhile I sue don';t think 5E is perfect I am quite convinced that it a a step in the right direction in a number of respects. I'd just be curious to see what some people consider to be "problem areas" or in some cases "whole regions of suck" in comparison to 4E.

Vehicles are, once again, immobile pillboxes. While 4e had plenty of problems relating to vehicles (including a return to the 2e "transport==deathtrap" problem), at least it offered a more dynamic playstyle for mech lists.

I agree with Janthkin. Vehicles, while alot more survivable, are somewhat of a bummer. Its a funky trade off. I am not convinced that a decent compromise has been made here, but time will tell.

I haven't played enough 5th ed to make any harsh judgments regarding changes, but I will list a few that make me wonder why the hell they did it.

TLOS.
Now I don't necessarily think this is bad, I was just always under the assumption that a model occupied the area of its base, for dynamic reasons. When thought of another way, TLOS does make for more engaging games, because you have to think about how your models are situated on the table, and forces you to get down and dirty with them to see the field from their POV.

Wound Allocation.
This one actually does drag the game down a bit. Again, not a bad rule, but until I become proficient in its use, I am non plussed by it.

Specialized CC weapons.
As a person who plays termie heavy lists, I am very chagrined about the loss of the option to turn off powerfists and simply use the normal Strength and Initiative of the wielder. Now, I am obviously biased because of my playstyle, but the omission of this option was uneeded. I have heard a few people remark about how 'cheesy' being able to do that is, but those people are bonafide morons so I discount their opinion completely.

Thats about all I can think of off the top of my head, but I am sure there will be others as I encounter them during the course of play.

The death of Elite, smaller model count armies.

I have the models to make a super-competitive "horde" Ork army, and the extra pieces that I've either not built or aren't primed are in the selling forum.

I simply do not have the will to build/paint/play that.

Past that, the way the mission setups are still done I feel as if they've tried to change some of the problems with 4th Ed, but ended up making it all worse than it was before competitively.

Application of force is more and more about just rolling tons and tons of dice more than anything else.

And on top of all that, most of the balance issues that were there in 4th Ed are still there in 5th, at least from what I can tell.

I was down on 40k in general as a game for the tail end of 4th, just about after I was all excited about the Ork dex and played the hell out of that. I just don't see it as a very good game anymore now that I've played WHFB and Warmachine as much as I have.

I'm in general a big fan of 5th edition, but the TLOS still bugs me a bit. I liked area terrain and discrete sizes of models, and I think that could have been improve by adding more categories (1: swarms, 2:infantry/bikes 3: Large infantry/light vehicles 4:Monstrous creatures/most vehicles 5: landraiders/battlewagons) rather than adopt TLOS. It's not a deal breaker for me.

In my opinion, most of the people that really hate 5th edition are using the changes as a fig leaf, and really have other reasons they're moving away from 40k. 5th might be the straw that broke their back, but I'd be genuinely surprised if an active gamer dropped 40k mainly because of 5th edition, and not lifestyle changes, other games, etc.

I agree with the vehicle changes mentioned. I don't like the idea of infantry able to keep up with my skimmer tanks.

I don't like wound allocation and this includes the part about wiping out an entire squad if one guy is in the open/seen.

I don't like TLoS as this makes terrain only an obstacle for movement. Sure, my group gave 4+ cover saves to folks if they were on the edge of cover, but we never let people shoot through woods, buildings etc. That is way beyond 'how people played it' as stated in the designer's notes.

I'm not happy with Yakface's 4th Ed FAQs being relabeled "5th edition" and not addressing how current Codexes are changed by the main rulebook changes. It is pure chutzpah.

I also agree with Voodoo Boyz in that the game has devolved to whoever throws the most dice wins. With a system that just encourages (TLoS in shooting phase, countercharge and wound allocation in HTH phase, and more extreme LD modifiers in both phases) more dice throwing. Frankly, D&D has a more challenging and thought provoking combat resolution system.

I'm not keen on the kill point system. Like escalation in the previous edition, it just seems like an afterthought only playtested with 2-3 armies a few times.

Voodoo Boyz wrote:The death of Elite, smaller model count armies.

This isn't a dig at your opinion, but I find that to be not necessarily true.

The only games I have played in 5th ed were using deathwing rules. The one that I lost was against a huge ork horde, and its was very close to the end until Belial got turned into a squig (which was pretty damned cool, even being on the receiving end.) I found how close it was to be surprising because I thought the same as you, that small elite armies are dead. Judging by my very limited experience, this may not be quite true.

The one area I have an issue with is forests and TLOS. Just giving a cover save (which is essentially all it does) doesn't play well. If you put enough trees/foliage to block LOS, you can't move your models in it w/o it becoming problematic.

KP's is another iffy decision.

TLOS is a nad sucker. The rest of 5th is an improvement tho'

Wound grouping is the thing for me. I like how most aspects of the game flow better and make the gameplay more smooth - but wound grouping/allocation makes everything come to a crashing halt.

Polonius wrote:
In my opinion, most of the people that really hate 5th edition are using the changes as a fig leaf, and really have other reasons they're moving away from 40k. 5th might be the straw that broke their back, but I'd be genuinely surprised if an active gamer dropped 40k mainly because of 5th edition, and not lifestyle changes, other games, etc.

This is it for me. I was getting bored with 4th edition and was hoping that 5th ed would spark it up a little more than it did.

I like Run, the mission deployment table, the new skimmer moving fast, and the dice for first player including deployment. That's about it. Everything else was either an equal trade-off or worse than 4th edition in my humblest of opinions. I imagine a perfect world of 40k where we kept 4th ed and added just those things.

So I guess for me it's more that I was losing interest in 40k to begin-with, and probably set my hopes too high for 5th edition fixing it. (Stupid leaked PDF)

While I like 5E a lot the way vehicles are handled could have been done slightly better.

I think 5E should have used cover saves as a kind of "to hit" modifier depending on vehicle speed. The faster the shooting vehicle moves the higher the cover save granted to the target. This would be good compensation for allowing all of the vehicles weapons to fire regardless of speed as well. For example; My Predator moves at combat speed (6"max) - I can fire all weapons, but my target gets a 4+ cover save. Additionally my Predator moves at cruising speed (12"max) - I can fire all weapons, but my target gets a 3+ cover save.

I personally enjoy 5th ed a lot. More survivable vehicles (even if they are more pillboxes, all non-skimmers were just cardboard tombs in 4th), TLOS, and only troops scoring are changes that I thought I'd be very much opposed to, but then played a bit, and now view much more favorably.

In my personal experience at my FLGS, the people most opposed to 5th ed are (and I honestly do not direct this at anyone here) the more "tactically deficient" players. They're the one-dimesional army list players that wanted to plunk down the same list and in every situation employ the same tactics and still win.

Taking away the obscure 'leveled' terrain and turning LOS into a dynamic rather than walled off aspect of gameplay have both made the game much more interesting from my perspective. It gives shooting armies with 48" range weapons actual options against the tyranid Nidzilla-cuz-it's-easy player who'd plunk down three building pieces in the middle of the board, slowly march over, and kill everything because a low hedge blocks battlecannon shots to a 18 foot tall monster bug.

Likewise wound allocation, while taking very slightly longer to resolve, helps keep Sergeant Powerfist from hurling the corpses of his squadmates at incoming fire.

The combination of abundant cover, scoring troops, and elimination of the bogus Reserves scenario rule helps to keep army lists diverse, as opposed to the ultra elite plasma toting minimalist "armies".

I don't take particular beef with any of the above I've listed (except vehicle survivability) in 4th ed, but when taken all together they've eliminated a lot of the "stupid"-ness that 4th ed seemed to promote and make 5th ed a more tactically diverse and interesting version of 40k.

As someone else said, it traded one set of gamey tactics for another. Overall, I like Fifth Edition more than Fourth Ed.

I haven't played a single game of 5th ed yet, but I've read a lot of battle reports and somethings are just obvious.

Vehicles rules. The fact that vehicle shooting has been tuned down sucks rocks. I'm a tread head. I love my tanks, but if foot sloggers are just as manuverable and in some cases put out more firepower, why take them. If I'm going to go all infantry, I'd play fantasy.

I hate the fact you can loose a whole squad if only one guy pops his head out. TLOS has dumbed down the shooting phase in my opinion, and everybody gets a cover save is not a fair compromise.

Assaults are not nearly as tactical as they used to be. With run, its impossible to stall an assault with careful setup. It also was important to know which models to move first in a charge to inflict favorable results. Now with counter charge, its just everybody mash in and the guy who rolls the best dice win.

I dislike the starting distances in the sinerios. It seems to be a huge blow to shooty armies and when combined with outflank, assault based armies just seem to have the definitive edge.

Of course, I may be wrong, but this is what I am seeing.

5th is by far better than 4th.

Mech armies can have some confidence riding in their transports again.

TLOS is good.

I prefer 5th edition to 4th edition, though it killed my crons. I think Run is a huge improvement, while the combat res takes alot of the edge off of fearless units (necessary once everyone got it).

Kill Points and the lower of the defensive weapon to S4 are the only things I dislike. And the defensive weapon one would be solved by bumping it up to S5 and making Heavy Bolters useful again.

Kill Points are stupid. It's not a gamebreaker.

I dislike the Troops Only rule -- clearly introduced to sell more Troops boxes.

Dislike the S4 rule on vehicles because all Tau weapons are S5.

I dislike TLoS because they just fudged it and make it a bit stupid. It could have been done better.

Nothing else is a big deal. Overall the rules are an improvement. They still lack good, clear writing and explanation but are much less worse than before and they can cover a lot of stuff by supporting a proper FAQ programme.

5th Ed doesn't suck compared to the 4th. It's a lot better than 4th.

Doesn't make it good though. Everything Janthkin and Hellfury said is bang on the money.

BYE

Kilkrazy wrote:Overall the rules are an improvement.

Agreed. They're much better than 4th.

That said, I don't entirely like TLOS. But to my credit, I showed no shame in adapting by threading Ordnance through windows in my most recent Apocalypse game. Imperial Basilisks in battery are a fearsome thing!

One question...why is true line of sight such a hard thing for people to deal with? It isn't a change from 4th edition. Read page 20 of the 4th editon rule book, first and second paragraph under "line of sight". To sum it up, you used true line of sight in 4th for anything that didn't involve area terrain. Did everyone just play with area terrain and not use any normal terrain? I just don't get the level of shock that people are expressing over this. And area terrain was the only thing with levels so again, why the shock?

Now, the big terrain change is the fact that area terrain no longer blocks line of sight. I'm still not sure how I feel about this one.

I think the scoring unit rules could have been done a bit better. I'm ok with troops being scoring down to the last man, but with everything else being able to contest there are a lot of draws in 5th. Still though, I'm fond of the trend towards it being all about what you have were rather than how much you can kill.

I like the removal of range sniping but I'm still a little fuzzy on the whole "if I can kill 1 guy, I can kill them all" method of dealing with it.

All in all though, 5th is a step in the righ direction. Now if only they would update all the codexes and release more than 2 a year, that would be great.

Phoenix wrote:One question...why is true line of sight such a hard thing for people to deal with?

Many of us liked to play 40k as an "eye in the sky" game with fancy 3-D counters.

JohnHwangDD wrote:

Phoenix wrote:One question...why is true line of sight such a hard thing for people to deal with?

Many of us liked to play 40k as an "eye in the sky" game with fancy 3-D counters.

This has a lot of merit to it. Its probably why I prefer to play real time strategy games instead of first person shooters on the PC.

Generally speaking people are mistaking 5e rules for 5e lists.

5e is substansdard because of a plethora of imbalanced and warped army lists. The rules havev by and large improved, the Codex have not.

Generally speaking people are mistaking 5e rules for 5e lists.

5e is substansdard because of a plethora of imbalanced and warped army lists. The rules havev by and large improved, the Codex have not.

My biggest gripes:

1) Partial True Line of Sight. I'd be ok with it if it was really TLOS. I'd be ok with it if it was conceptualized terrain, like 4th ed. What I cannot understand is how you can call it True Line of Sight if I can hide 9-of-10 men behind a building, and you can still kill all 10 of them because you can see one. Surely those guys aren't that dumb.

1a) Not so much a problem with 5th ed, but, rather, with the terrain available at most stores and tournaments and how it interacts with TLOS. Line up your men and shoot, cause there's little that blocks line-of-sight anymore, and certainly not in a way that you can reliably hide a vital asset from enemy fire until it is needed. May s/he who rolls the most 4+ saves win.

2) The irrelevance of initiative in the face of numbers. A group of 10 Chaos Marines charging an ork horde are, on average going to kill 7 or 8 orks. And, somehow, all those dead orks are being pulled from models that weren't engaged and wouldn't have swung back anyway, while none of the engaged models took a hit. Having a higher initiative really is a kick in the pants now, because you're paying points for something that does very little for you.

3) The static nature of tanks, especially skimmers. I agree that the skimmer-moving-fast rule was too good. But, a leman russ should be able to move and fire all three of it's heavy bolters (they have three gunners according to the fluff), a hammerhead should be able to move and fire its secondary guns, and a falcon should be able to engage with its weapons too while flying. Modern attack helicopters do not present static targets to their opponents, they move. Same with modern tanks. And, even taking into account the the twisted future that is the imperium of man, surely the xenos wouldn't rely on backwards plodding stationary targets.

Come to think of it, the slowness of tanks in general, compared to men on foot too. You have 'slow and purposeful' guys who can, with a good roll, move just as fast as a tank that is moving so fast that it cannot fire a machine gun, nor can any passengers can fire out the side. How does that work?

4) The nature of scoring and kill points in missions. If one boy out of thirty manages to survive, you get nothing for your effort, and he can hold an objective still.

Sure, we can all "adapt" to 5th ed. If adapt means playing 180 model ork armies all the time, so be it. But I prefered the variety of viable concepts that 4th ed allowed.

Things I like:
Run: Makes things like melee carnifexes and berserkers better.
New Combat resolution: Makes for tougher broadscale tactical decisions and makes it much harder for one uber until to bowl over an army. I much much much prefer this to the 4th edition way.
More survivable vehicles: About bloody time.
Changes to transports: Mech is good now!
Screening: A very good idea.
Changes to certain USRs: Slow and Purposeful comes to mind.
Things I don't like:
Troops scoring: Bleh. Makes absolutely no sense.
Kill points: Unfair until codices are balanced for it.
TLOS: I prefered abstract LOS which allowed for soldiers ducking and taking cover, and not all waddling about with their arms in the air screaming all the time. I also liked abstractly modelled terrain that was easy to move models in and around but still had the "correct" effect on line of sight. I'll give TLOS a try, but I think it's silly.
S4 Defensive: Eh, what? So, like, just marines then?
Less mobile vehicles: I understand why from a game balance perspective, but it isn't nearly as cool.

I also wish they'd just get rid of the instant death rule. It's stupid and makes costing 2 wound T4 things a pain in the arse.

Thanks to TLOS and wound allocation, 40K went from an actual unit-based game to a slow, fiddly skirmish battle game. It makes playing apocalypse battles impossible unless both sides are made up of teams, and then it's just lots of little battles that happen to be crammed onto the same table.

Actually, the change to the rules for frag grenades (and things that "count as" frag grenades) does give you at least one reason to have a higher initiative.

Genestealers w/ fleshooks are truly ugly in 5th.