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@JustTony: Said Bloodletters *were* 26 points per model admittedly, and GW had the whole mindset of the time that Daemons couldn't start on the table (and they wouldn't get that ability until 6th).

As for "worst" or most hilarious rule, prior to Codex: Assassins in 2nd ed, you could take an Imperial Assassin in Terminator Armor, with Polymorphine and a Vortex Grenade and Virus Grenade. Imagine what would have happened to Ghazgkull's Waaagh if one of his lowly Ork Boyz turned out to actually be a Terminator with a Vortex and Virus Grenade. You would basically have the 40k equivalent of a briefcase nuke.

Thinking of that, most of the lingering effects (gas, smoke, vortex, etc) grenades in 2nd edition.
"At the start of each turn roll on this chart for each of these markers one at a time. If you are lucky some of them vanish and you get to clear some clutter from the table and save some time. If you are unlucky they drift, start multiplying or get bigger"

 MagicJuggler wrote:
@JustTony: Said Bloodletters *were* 26 points per model admittedly, and GW had the whole mindset of the time that Daemons couldn't start on the table (and they wouldn't get that ability until 6th).

As for "worst" or most hilarious rule, prior to Codex: Assassins in 2nd ed, you could take an Imperial Assassin in Terminator Armor, with Polymorphine and a Vortex Grenade and Virus Grenade. Imagine what would have happened to Ghazgkull's Waaagh if one of his lowly Ork Boyz turned out to actually be a Terminator with a Vortex and Virus Grenade. You would basically have the 40k equivalent of a briefcase nuke.

So at 26 ppm, you have a unit that is immune to fire until it is summoned, can charge from summoning, is armed with power weapons, a 3+ save, a 5++ save, and high Initiative? Yet it is alright because they don't start on the table? What part of your point is disputing that it was a terrible rule?

 Just Tony wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:
@JustTony: Said Bloodletters *were* 26 points per model admittedly, and GW had the whole mindset of the time that Daemons couldn't start on the table (and they wouldn't get that ability until 6th).

As for "worst" or most hilarious rule, prior to Codex: Assassins in 2nd ed, you could take an Imperial Assassin in Terminator Armor, with Polymorphine and a Vortex Grenade and Virus Grenade. Imagine what would have happened to Ghazgkull's Waaagh if one of his lowly Ork Boyz turned out to actually be a Terminator with a Vortex and Virus Grenade. You would basically have the 40k equivalent of a briefcase nuke.

So at 26 ppm, you have a unit that is immune to fire until it is summoned, can charge from summoning, is armed with power weapons, a 3+ save, a 5++ save, and high Initiative? Yet it is alright because they don't start on the table? What part of your point is disputing that it was a terrible rule?

40k doesn't reward overkill, and there's still the issue of keepimg the Icon Bearer alive to bring said Daemons to bear. Your summon vectors weren't exactly cheap to begin with. Sure everyone had horror stories about the Slaaneshi Bikerbomb, but meh.

Far less broken than something like 7e and running 9 units of BS 5 Warp Spiders that drop in wherever they want, shoot their foe up, retreat in one go, get a free move to avoid being shot, and the ability to Hit and Run out of melee, for 9 points less per model.

My biggest pet peeve about eighth is that a Dark Eldar Raider moves 14"

The average speed of an Eldar Skimmer is 16" and the reduced movement makes it tied for the slowest skimmer of all the space elves.

The other 14" skimmer? The Ravager...also a Dark Eldar vehicle.

It's less that those 2" makes a difference, and more that someone had to consciously make the decision to make Dark Eldar vehicles slower than average.

TheBaconPope wrote:
My biggest pet peeve about eighth is that a Dark Eldar Raider moves 14"

The average speed of an Eldar Skimmer is 16" and the reduced movement makes it tied for the slowest skimmer of all the space elves.

The other 14" skimmer? The Ravager...also a Dark Eldar vehicle.

It's less that those 2" makes a difference, and more that someone had to consciously make the decision to make Dark Eldar vehicles slower than average.

Makes perfect sense for close combat armies like Dark Eldar to be slow in comparison to their shootie cousins, it's not like they need the extra speed to run away from anything.
Same thing happened to the Space Wolves TWC, naturally the shootie bikes get a mobility boost of two inches to have a 14' movement stat while the melee oriented TWC has been dropped back from 12' to 10' movement stats - it's not like they have to be anywhere in a hurry.

Clearly you've not seen a wolf try to race a motorbike.

TheBaconPope wrote:
My biggest pet peeve about eighth is that a Dark Eldar Raider moves 14"

The average speed of an Eldar Skimmer is 16" and the reduced movement makes it tied for the slowest skimmer of all the space elves.

The other 14" skimmer? The Ravager...also a Dark Eldar vehicle.

It's less that those 2" makes a difference, and more that someone had to consciously make the decision to make Dark Eldar vehicles slower than average.

You see, the thing is that having almost no armour and amazing engines is actually worse than having heavy (relatively) armour and good engines - you need that armour to provide more speed!

 MagicJuggler wrote:


As for "worst" or most hilarious rule, prior to Codex: Assassins in 2nd ed, you could take an Imperial Assassin in Terminator Armor, with Polymorphine and a Vortex Grenade and Virus Grenade. Imagine what would have happened to Ghazgkull's Waaagh if one of his lowly Ork Boyz turned out to actually be a Terminator with a Vortex and Virus Grenade. You would basically have the 40k equivalent of a briefcase nuke.

I rmeember that well, the assassin could take a bike too.

"Steve what's that under your cloak?"
"Nuttin"
"It looks like a motorcycle and a suit of terminator armor"
"Oh that! Just some old junk I'm looking for a recycling bin."
"Oh OK."

For the record I never ever use an assassin in terminator armor. Mine only had power armor, dodge save and displacer field.

 Corrode wrote:
Clearly you've not seen a wolf try to race a motorbike.

I've never seen a wolf the size of a Rhino that can bite through armour, or space fungus with a hard-on for carnage or fish in Gundam suits either.
Thunderwolves are not Earthly or even Terran wolves, they don't follow the same rules.

 Dakka Wolf wrote:

 Corrode wrote:
Clearly you've not seen a wolf try to race a motorbike.

I've never seen a wolf the size of a Rhino that can bite through armour, or space fungus with a hard-on for carnage or fish in Gundam suits either.
Thunderwolves are not Earthly or even Terran wolves, they don't follow the same rules.

I imagine the motorbikes used by the Marines are also a bit different than our early 21st Century models. You can't say "Wolves should be as fast as motorcycles" and then say "But they're SPECIAL wolves!" when someone calls it BS.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Dakka Wolf wrote:

 Corrode wrote:
Clearly you've not seen a wolf try to race a motorbike.

I've never seen a wolf the size of a Rhino that can bite through armour, or space fungus with a hard-on for carnage or fish in Gundam suits either.
Thunderwolves are not Earthly or even Terran wolves, they don't follow the same rules.

I imagine the motorbikes used by the Marines are also a bit different than our early 21st Century models. You can't say "Wolves should be as fast as motorcycles" and then say "But they're SPECIAL wolves!" when someone calls it BS.

Let's not forget the hilarity of edition-to-edition updates, where you could have different Marine Chapters using different Cyclone Missile Launchers, Power of the Machine Spirit, Storm Shields, Psychic Hoods and Nartheciums. Likewise, let us not forget the spike in Black Templar popularity after a FAQ let them use 5e rules for said equipment (especially since they could slap PoTMS on any vehicle they wanted, or take 2 Heavy Weapons in a Terminator squad).

 MagicJuggler wrote:
As far as the worst two rules in 40k, I would say "No Premeasuring" for every edition before 6th (due to the ways people tried to game it or approximate eyeballing ranges), and how one had to guess exactly how many inches you would fire indirect-fire weapons as if 40k were some derpy land version of Battleship!

That was amazing and I wish they brought it back imo.

-Personally, wolf claws in any edition that allowed them to reroll both hits and wounds due to a rule mix up. (They still had shred.)

-Overall Game 35 point drop pods that had objective secured and were armor 12

-Armies I've played, 4th ed Epidemius that could buff ANYTHING that was nurgle, and the tally came from ANYTHING that was nurgle. The looks I got when my plague marines were ignoring all saves, both in shooting and melee late game is something I will never regret. EVER. It was gloriously evil in every way to watch 1-2 units of plague marines just wipe the board once the tally was filled late game.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Dakka Wolf wrote:

 Corrode wrote:
Clearly you've not seen a wolf try to race a motorbike.

I've never seen a wolf the size of a Rhino that can bite through armour, or space fungus with a hard-on for carnage or fish in Gundam suits either.
Thunderwolves are not Earthly or even Terran wolves, they don't follow the same rules.

I imagine the motorbikes used by the Marines are also a bit different than our early 21st Century models. You can't say "Wolves should be as fast as motorcycles" and then say "But they're SPECIAL wolves!" when someone calls it BS.

You want to play it like that I'll call BS on those bikes being able to travel that fast to begin with. Did you ever watch Death Race - the extras for the Jason Stratham one in particular? The armour those cars had was foam, not just because foam is cheaper than metal but because if the armour was metal those cars would be lucky to reach the speed of a Mr Usain Bolt 45-ish kmph over a hundred metres, ironically enough, less than average wolf speed of 55-60 kmph. Motorbikes carrying similar weights, not to mention that giant air-brake of a front faring, the all-terrain wheels that would probably be close to 4x4 wheel size and the armoured rider acting as a second air-brake would have similar speed issues and crazy horse-power is not going to help because the tyres would have to be the size of Monster-truck tyres to get enough of that horsepower to the ground to stop it constantly wheel-spinning, no matter what super-advanced compound they're made of.

Dude, that's just like, your Science, Man :-)

Next, it will be the Negative Vibes.

On topic, worst rule has to be Mob Rule (7th)

Not sure who is responsible for this sort of sh1t, but they are obviously on Too Much, Too Fast for Too Long.
Just sayin'

 master of ordinance wrote:

TheBaconPope wrote:
My biggest pet peeve about eighth is that a Dark Eldar Raider moves 14"

The average speed of an Eldar Skimmer is 16" and the reduced movement makes it tied for the slowest skimmer of all the space elves.

The other 14" skimmer? The Ravager...also a Dark Eldar vehicle.

It's less that those 2" makes a difference, and more that someone had to consciously make the decision to make Dark Eldar vehicles slower than average.

You see, the thing is that having almost no armour and amazing engines is actually worse than having heavy (relatively) armour and good engines - you need that armour to provide more speed!

The Dark Eldar vehicles could go faster, but they're open-topped, and they don't want to mess up their hair.

There was a rule in 6th on a FW marine characters sword called Slayer which meant it always wounded MC's on a 2+. Problem was, it also doubled the strength of a S5 character. Meaning it could only ever be used if ALL of the following conditions were met:
-Your opponent was Chaos Deamons
-Your opponent took a GUO
-The GUO rolled Iron Hand successfully on Biomancy table
-The GUO cast Iron Hand successfully
-The GUO rolled a 5 or 6 to increase their toughness by 3
-Your character made combat with the GUO on the turn the above 2 occured

There was literally no other scenario in the entire game in which this rule would take affect.

EVEN THEN, if ALL those conditions had been met, it only increased a roll of a 3+ to wound to a roll of a 2+.

Poly Ranger wrote:
There was a rule in 6th on a FW marine characters sword called Slayer which meant it always wounded MC's on a 2+. Problem was, it also doubled the strength of a S5 character. Meaning it could only ever be used if ALL of the following conditions were met:
-Your opponent was Chaos Deamons
-Your opponent took a GUO
-The GUO rolled Iron Hand successfully on Biomancy table
-The GUO cast Iron Hand successfully
-The GUO rolled a 5 or 6 to increase their toughness by 3
-Your character made combat with the GUO on the turn the above 2 occured

There was literally no other scenario in the entire game in which this rule would take affect.

EVEN THEN, if ALL those conditions had been met, it only increased a roll of a 3+ to wound to a roll of a 2+.

Hahahah, that is hilarious! Who the heck made that weapons rules, and what were they thinking?

Poly Ranger wrote:
There was a rule in 6th on a FW marine characters sword called Slayer which meant it always wounded MC's on a 2+. Problem was, it also doubled the strength of a S5 character. Meaning it could only ever be used if ALL of the following conditions were met:
-Your opponent was Chaos Deamons
-Your opponent took a GUO
-The GUO rolled Iron Hand successfully on Biomancy table
-The GUO cast Iron Hand successfully
-The GUO rolled a 5 or 6 to increase their toughness by 3
-Your character made combat with the GUO on the turn the above 2 occured

There was literally no other scenario in the entire game in which this rule would take affect.

EVEN THEN, if ALL those conditions had been met, it only increased a roll of a 3+ to wound to a roll of a 2+.

Wasn't it a Thunder Hammer?

 alleus wrote:

Poly Ranger wrote:
There was a rule in 6th on a FW marine characters sword called Slayer which meant it always wounded MC's on a 2+. Problem was, it also doubled the strength of a S5 character. Meaning it could only ever be used if ALL of the following conditions were met:
-Your opponent was Chaos Deamons
-Your opponent took a GUO
-The GUO rolled Iron Hand successfully on Biomancy table
-The GUO cast Iron Hand successfully
-The GUO rolled a 5 or 6 to increase their toughness by 3
-Your character made combat with the GUO on the turn the above 2 occured

There was literally no other scenario in the entire game in which this rule would take affect.

EVEN THEN, if ALL those conditions had been met, it only increased a roll of a 3+ to wound to a roll of a 2+.

Hahahah, that is hilarious! Who the heck made that weapons rules, and what were they thinking?

That's classic forgeworld (but OMG all FW is OP!).

If you want another one - A Lighning Interceptor can take 6x Skystrike missiles or 4x Hellstrike Missiles (for slightly less). The Hellstrike missiles are (slightly) better against aircraft than the specialist AA Skystrike missiles and way better against everything else.

Don't forget the Heltalon Bomber from IA13. It has 8 bombs. You can drop one per turn. The average 40k game lasts around 6 turns. The probable intent was to make it akin to a "Bomber Sternguard" where you could mix and match bomb types. The only problem of course was that 2 of the swaps were already overcosted yet again, and the last one was the Baletalon Shatter Charge.

The Baletalon was basically 3 S8 AP 3 shots that snapfire. The only problem being Bombs cannot be snapfired. Oops.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, and from 7th edition, I would like to advance Siphon Magic for being the worst-designed power of that edition. Yes, even worse than Invisibility or Shifting Worldscape or Veil of Time.

Siphon Magic is a blessing cast on the Psyker. For the remainder of the turn, anytime a friendly Psyker within 18" successfully manifests a power, that Psyker gains a token that may be used as Warp Charge. This power was horrid for several reasons:
-It wasn't actually Warp Charge by RAW. The closest precedent would be the Neurothrope's Spirit Leech granting extra Warp Charge which could only be used by its unit to cast Warp Blast. This led to unresolved RAW about whether it carried over from turn to turn, how it interacted with a Culexus Assassin, etc.
-Assuming it was just in fact regular Warp Charge that could only be used by that Psyker (similar to that provided by Yvraine's Gyrinx), this made the power absolutely useless for ML 1 Psykers, as it was the only power they could cast that turn. Inversely, ML 3+ casters got a lot more mileage from it.
-It wasn't so much a "siphoning" of Warp Charge so much as a warp-expanding duplication of it. Based on the RAW, a Psyker could siphon magic from his own subsequent powers. Likewise, if multiple casters with Siphon Magic were up and running, this meant that each one would get a Warp Charge.

When you combined all of this with Wrath of Magnus adding Heralds Anarchic and Blue Horrors for even more dirt-cheap Warp Charge, and you could have a game where you could throw down the equivalent of 60+ Warp Charge dice per turn!

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Poly Ranger wrote:
There was a rule in 6th on a FW marine characters sword called Slayer which meant it always wounded MC's on a 2+. Problem was, it also doubled the strength of a S5 character. Meaning it could only ever be used if ALL of the following conditions were met:
-Your opponent was Chaos Deamons
-Your opponent took a GUO
-The GUO rolled Iron Hand successfully on Biomancy table
-The GUO cast Iron Hand successfully
-The GUO rolled a 5 or 6 to increase their toughness by 3
-Your character made combat with the GUO on the turn the above 2 occured

There was literally no other scenario in the entire game in which this rule would take affect.

EVEN THEN, if ALL those conditions had been met, it only increased a roll of a 3+ to wound to a roll of a 2+.

Wasn't it a Thunder Hammer?

I think it was a sword with just x2 strength and ap2 with the slayer rule. Not 100% what the base weapon was though tbf as he was a Badab Character and all my pre-8th FW books are back in England. Don't remember the initiative 1 rule being on it, but I could be wrong about that bit.

This isn't a rule, per say, but a unit:
7th edition Inquisitorial Warbands. (Pre-Imperial Agents.)

4ppm per acolyte was fine, but you could also bring a 1w Imperial Psyker for 10pts. Add in that you needed 2 acolytes to get to the three-man minimum squad size, and you have the cheapest Warp Charge in the game at only 18pts for effectively a 3w Psyker.
Plus, this could be spammed infinitely as long as you brought one (also psychic) Inquisitor per 3 units.
And they all could learn Summoning.

You could start a 2k game with 77 Warp Charges and bootstrap up to having 9-10 Greater Daemons by the end of the turn.

Waaaghpower wrote:
This isn't a rule, per say, but a unit:
7th edition Inquisitorial Warbands. (Pre-Imperial Agents.)

4ppm per acolyte was fine, but you could also bring a 1w Imperial Psyker for 10pts. Add in that you needed 2 acolytes to get to the three-man minimum squad size, and you have the cheapest Warp Charge in the game at only 18pts for effectively a 3w Psyker.
Plus, this could be spammed infinitely as long as you brought one (also psychic) Inquisitor per 3 units.
And they all could learn Summoning.

You could start a 2k game with 77 Warp Charges and bootstrap up to having 9-10 Greater Daemons by the end of the turn.

Ok so, yes, while this specific setup was a bit on the broken side, you have to admit - Inquisitorial Warbands were actually generally a good idea, and far FAR better than what inquisitors have now.

In fact, I would vote for the current Inquisitorial Warband as being the worst change to a unit ever. Turned them from being a fun fluffy unit you could customise how you liked, into... a boring waste of points.

Inquisitorial Warbands were awesome but also undercosted in some ways. 5pts for Acolytes with Bolters was one. 3 4pt Acolytes unlocking the absurdly cheap Psycannon Razorback was another. A load of DCA assassins just hanging around with a couple of meat shields each for a total of 18pts per unit meant there were units the opponent did not want to dedicate firepower to, but if 2 or 3 of those units charged in, they would do damage far above their points cost in a single turn.

Poly Ranger wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Poly Ranger wrote:
There was a rule in 6th on a FW marine characters sword called Slayer which meant it always wounded MC's on a 2+. Problem was, it also doubled the strength of a S5 character. Meaning it could only ever be used if ALL of the following conditions were met:
-Your opponent was Chaos Deamons
-Your opponent took a GUO
-The GUO rolled Iron Hand successfully on Biomancy table
-The GUO cast Iron Hand successfully
-The GUO rolled a 5 or 6 to increase their toughness by 3
-Your character made combat with the GUO on the turn the above 2 occured

There was literally no other scenario in the entire game in which this rule would take affect.

EVEN THEN, if ALL those conditions had been met, it only increased a roll of a 3+ to wound to a roll of a 2+.

Wasn't it a Thunder Hammer?

I think it was a sword with just x2 strength and ap2 with the slayer rule. Not 100% what the base weapon was though tbf as he was a Badab Character and all my pre-8th FW books are back in England. Don't remember the initiative 1 rule being on it, but I could be wrong about that bit.

I think the weapon had Concussive. I could be wrong though.