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 MagicJuggler wrote:
GW is a company that in the past had a CEO that said "we don't do market research." There's not much room for them to go from there but upwards.

I'm not a fanboy of 7th by a long shot, but I personally feel it's got a passable compromise between certain problem rules of 5e, and overcorrections of 6th. Patching the system would do more to make the core game more playable rather than gutting sections of it wholesale. Things like random damage, turning vehicles into Prius Bumper Cars, etc aren't exactly promising, and the rabid fanboyism defending it is frankly a bit creepy.

For perspective, I remember at the start of 7th when Orks got nerfed and lost FOC swaps and Wazdakka and people argued that GW was trying to scale back the power level of OP armies...

There are rules in 8th I wish were tweak or just different.

That being said, 7th is a bad game. Not a ok game with some bad turns. It's a bad game. All the core mechanics build towards it being bad. The unit rules are bad. The core USRs are bloated and bad. (For instance why would they make 3 different rules for Bulky instead of 1 Bulky X with x being the number of models they count as towards capacity?) The wording of the rules is poor so as to cause confusion. Core mechanics like tank shocks, the vehicle damage charts (and the accompanying book keeping that needs to be done to pay attention to how each vehicle is now functioning differently based on the random rolls) are bad. Every rule is a pile of exceptions stacked on top of each other. At minimum 7th requires you to reference 2 books to play the most basic game play. Random charge distances and scatter turns what would be tactical decisions into a crap shoot.

It requires 3 templates, a special dice unique to the game, potentially 3 other templates, and depending on the list of missions you are playing either referencing a giant ass chart or decks of cards that were only released in very limited numbers to play.

If 7th was an improvement over earlier editions then my god.... what a fething wreck this game has been for too long.

No. 7th is a mess. Cannot wait for 8th to arrive.

Lance845: The transport capacity one confuses me to this day. Back before AOS, models in Warhammer Fantasy had a relative size/strength value that was used for determining what side outnumbered the other in melee (2 Ogres = 6 Humans, etc). So doing a "size" category could have been a thing for 40k and yet GW didn't do that.

I remember 5th edition. During this edition, there was no "Bulky" USR per se but it was on a "per unit" basis. Rather than not being able to transport Bulky Models, Rhinos simply couldn't "transport models in Terminator Armor."

Which led to one of my favorite YDMC calls where someone wanted to transport Terminator Njal in a Rhino because he wasn't wearing Terminator Armor. He was wearing Runic Terminator Armor. Which, common-sense would dictate would involve saying "no" to, except the Runic Terminator Armor rules were a copy paste of the Terminator Armor rules, rather than "Runic Terminator follows the rules for Terminator armor, with the following exception."

This is how foregoing core rule in favor of copypasting the same rule from one entry to another can lead to system failure.

(Can you tell I do software development for a living?)

I'm coming back to the fold after starting with 2nd and leaving around 4th.

Could have been a poll for this topic.

Frankly I think I played 5(?) games of 40k during 7th. Part of that was schedule problems, the other part was there wasn't anything keeping me engaged with the game play side of things.

I look forward to the new edition and hope GW's promises of fixing any issues as they're raised rings true.

 MagicJuggler wrote:
Lance845: The transport capacity one confuses me to this day. Back before AOS, models in Warhammer Fantasy had a relative size/strength value that was used for determining what side outnumbered the other in melee (2 Ogres = 6 Humans, etc). So doing a "size" category could have been a thing for 40k and yet GW didn't do that.

I remember 5th edition. During this edition, there was no "Bulky" USR per se but it was on a "per unit" basis. Rather than not being able to transport Bulky Models, Rhinos simply couldn't "transport models in Terminator Armor."

Which led to one of my favorite YDMC calls where someone wanted to transport Terminator Njal in a Rhino because he wasn't wearing Terminator Armor. He was wearing Runic Terminator Armor. Which, common-sense would dictate would involve saying "no" to, except the Runic Terminator Armor rules were a copy paste of the Terminator Armor rules, rather than "Runic Terminator follows the rules for Terminator armor, with the following exception."

This is how foregoing core rule in favor of copypasting the same rule from one entry to another can lead to system failure.

(Can you tell I do software development for a living?)

I went to school for game design which involved some scripting along with the more abstract design philosophies It's pretty easy to see when someone is at least like minded enough to see 1) the gross inefficiency of the terrible way in which the rules were written and 2) all the potential for cascading problems because of that inefficiency.

 Lance845 wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:
GW is a company that in the past had a CEO that said "we don't do market research." There's not much room for them to go from there but upwards.

I'm not a fanboy of 7th by a long shot, but I personally feel it's got a passable compromise between certain problem rules of 5e, and overcorrections of 6th. Patching the system would do more to make the core game more playable rather than gutting sections of it wholesale. Things like random damage, turning vehicles into Prius Bumper Cars, etc aren't exactly promising, and the rabid fanboyism defending it is frankly a bit creepy.

For perspective, I remember at the start of 7th when Orks got nerfed and lost FOC swaps and Wazdakka and people argued that GW was trying to scale back the power level of OP armies...

There are rules in 8th I wish were tweak or just different.

That being said, 7th is a bad game. Not a ok game with some bad turns. It's a bad game. All the core mechanics build towards it being bad. The unit rules are bad. The core USRs are bloated and bad. (For instance why would they make 3 different rules for Bulky instead of 1 Bulky X with x being the number of models they count as towards capacity?) The wording of the rules is poor so as to cause confusion. Core mechanics like tank shocks, the vehicle damage charts (and the accompanying book keeping that needs to be done to pay attention to how each vehicle is now functioning differently based on the random rolls) are bad. Every rule is a pile of exceptions stacked on top of each other. At minimum 7th requires you to reference 2 books to play the most basic game play. Random charge distances and scatter turns what would be tactical decisions into a crap shoot.

It requires 3 templates, a special dice unique to the game, potentially 3 other templates, and depending on the list of missions you are playing either referencing a giant ass chart or decks of cards that were only released in very limited numbers to play.

If 7th was an improvement over earlier editions then my god.... what a fething wreck this game has been for too long.

The basic problem of GW is that they refuse to iterate. If they took a single edition of the game, said "Right, we're sticking with this one until we've updated every army a couple of times, minor tweaks only" and then tried to sit down and fix things over an extended period of time the game might work. But every single edition has to have some grand sweeping swing in the core mechanics of the game that isn't really tested and doesn't have time to become workable before they go hop over to something else.

8e isn't going to fix the underlying problem. They've gone and burned everything down in favour of something new and different they just thought of, that isn't sufficiently tested and doesn't really work. And instead of sitting down and working on it until it does work a year and a half or two years from now they're going to throw 9th edition at us with a whole new pile of bloat stacked on top of 8th. And they're going to keep going until the 8th-derivatives are just as bloated and ineffectual as the 3rd-derivatives have become by 7th, and then burn it down and start again.

The design process is at fault here, but GW doesn't seem to be self-aware enough to notice, or they'd have done something two or three editions ago instead of watching it grow out of control and then burning it all and starting over without touching the actual problem.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:
GW is a company that in the past had a CEO that said "we don't do market research." There's not much room for them to go from there but upwards.

I'm not a fanboy of 7th by a long shot, but I personally feel it's got a passable compromise between certain problem rules of 5e, and overcorrections of 6th. Patching the system would do more to make the core game more playable rather than gutting sections of it wholesale. Things like random damage, turning vehicles into Prius Bumper Cars, etc aren't exactly promising, and the rabid fanboyism defending it is frankly a bit creepy.

For perspective, I remember at the start of 7th when Orks got nerfed and lost FOC swaps and Wazdakka and people argued that GW was trying to scale back the power level of OP armies...

There are rules in 8th I wish were tweak or just different.

That being said, 7th is a bad game. Not a ok game with some bad turns. It's a bad game. All the core mechanics build towards it being bad. The unit rules are bad. The core USRs are bloated and bad. (For instance why would they make 3 different rules for Bulky instead of 1 Bulky X with x being the number of models they count as towards capacity?) The wording of the rules is poor so as to cause confusion. Core mechanics like tank shocks, the vehicle damage charts (and the accompanying book keeping that needs to be done to pay attention to how each vehicle is now functioning differently based on the random rolls) are bad. Every rule is a pile of exceptions stacked on top of each other. At minimum 7th requires you to reference 2 books to play the most basic game play. Random charge distances and scatter turns what would be tactical decisions into a crap shoot.

It requires 3 templates, a special dice unique to the game, potentially 3 other templates, and depending on the list of missions you are playing either referencing a giant ass chart or decks of cards that were only released in very limited numbers to play.

If 7th was an improvement over earlier editions then my god.... what a fething wreck this game has been for too long.

The basic problem of GW is that they refuse to iterate. If they took a single edition of the game, said "Right, we're sticking with this one until we've updated every army a couple of times, minor tweaks only" and then tried to sit down and fix things over an extended period of time the game might work. But every single edition has to have some grand sweeping swing in the core mechanics of the game that isn't really tested and doesn't have time to become workable before they go hop over to something else.

8e isn't going to fix the underlying problem. They've gone and burned everything down in favour of something new and different they just thought of, that isn't sufficiently tested and doesn't really work. And instead of sitting down and working on it until it does work a year and a half or two years from now they're going to throw 9th edition at us with a whole new pile of bloat stacked on top of 8th. And they're going to keep going until the 8th-derivatives are just as bloated and ineffectual as the 3rd-derivatives have become by 7th, and then burn it down and start again.

The design process is at fault here, but GW doesn't seem to be self-aware enough to notice, or they'd have done something two or three editions ago instead of watching it grow out of control and then burning it all and starting over without touching the actual problem.

Arguably most of the core of 8th is based on the testing they have done with AoS. So this isn't exactly something they just came up with. It's something they have been iterating on and tweaking (at least the core mechanics) for over a year now.

Not saying I think GW is good. Just that saying THIS is something they simply pulled out of their ass is disingenuous. Blame GW for what they actually do wrong. Do not blame them for hysterical nonsense. It weakens your position.

AoS has been the Beta-test for 8th edition 40k, thats obvious looking at the rules and how many of the things people don't like about AoS have been "fixed" in 40k. Heck, you can see even how the Kharadron Overlords vehicle rules are exactly ported to 8th edition 40k.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:
GW is a company that in the past had a CEO that said "we don't do market research." There's not much room for them to go from there but upwards.

I'm not a fanboy of 7th by a long shot, but I personally feel it's got a passable compromise between certain problem rules of 5e, and overcorrections of 6th. Patching the system would do more to make the core game more playable rather than gutting sections of it wholesale. Things like random damage, turning vehicles into Prius Bumper Cars, etc aren't exactly promising, and the rabid fanboyism defending it is frankly a bit creepy.

For perspective, I remember at the start of 7th when Orks got nerfed and lost FOC swaps and Wazdakka and people argued that GW was trying to scale back the power level of OP armies...

There are rules in 8th I wish were tweak or just different.

That being said, 7th is a bad game. Not a ok game with some bad turns. It's a bad game. All the core mechanics build towards it being bad. The unit rules are bad. The core USRs are bloated and bad. (For instance why would they make 3 different rules for Bulky instead of 1 Bulky X with x being the number of models they count as towards capacity?) The wording of the rules is poor so as to cause confusion. Core mechanics like tank shocks, the vehicle damage charts (and the accompanying book keeping that needs to be done to pay attention to how each vehicle is now functioning differently based on the random rolls) are bad. Every rule is a pile of exceptions stacked on top of each other. At minimum 7th requires you to reference 2 books to play the most basic game play. Random charge distances and scatter turns what would be tactical decisions into a crap shoot.

It requires 3 templates, a special dice unique to the game, potentially 3 other templates, and depending on the list of missions you are playing either referencing a giant ass chart or decks of cards that were only released in very limited numbers to play.

If 7th was an improvement over earlier editions then my god.... what a fething wreck this game has been for too long.

The basic problem of GW is that they refuse to iterate. If they took a single edition of the game, said "Right, we're sticking with this one until we've updated every army a couple of times, minor tweaks only" and then tried to sit down and fix things over an extended period of time the game might work. But every single edition has to have some grand sweeping swing in the core mechanics of the game that isn't really tested and doesn't have time to become workable before they go hop over to something else.

8e isn't going to fix the underlying problem. They've gone and burned everything down in favour of something new and different they just thought of, that isn't sufficiently tested and doesn't really work. And instead of sitting down and working on it until it does work a year and a half or two years from now they're going to throw 9th edition at us with a whole new pile of bloat stacked on top of 8th. And they're going to keep going until the 8th-derivatives are just as bloated and ineffectual as the 3rd-derivatives have become by 7th, and then burn it down and start again.

The design process is at fault here, but GW doesn't seem to be self-aware enough to notice, or they'd have done something two or three editions ago instead of watching it grow out of control and then burning it all and starting over without touching the actual problem.

In total agreement of this and I do also question two other things, so ok we know GW does plan ahead and both the miniature and edition range is known internally to those who will be part of that/are part of those sections of each game.

There probably is some factor into certain op things due to selling new kits, but the other question is considering so much already exists would it not make more sense to make most units all desirable to spread out the sales of the entire range, people would still most likely buy new kits for the "its new its cool and I gotz ta have it" mentality.

I would really really love for an edition of 40k to last say 10 years and have hardcover books and the art to be high production I would be totally on board for that but I doubt we will ever see it, the closest we ever got I think was RT and 2nd ed.

If I was going to stick with an edition, it would have been 5th. I'm still cautiously optimistic about 8th though. I look forward toward being able to potentially get in two 2000 point games in an evening after work again.

I am very new to the game so don't have any other edition to yearn for, hell I don't even know the rules for 7th all the way yet. But so far I have had a lot of fun with it, and 8th sounds pretty great to me thus far. and perhaps quicker games will get my roommates to stop being salty about my wolves gnawing on their formations, thus leading to more fun and more games.

Side note the formations and detachments did sound ridicules on paper and gave some silly rules, but my unbound Space wolves were still able to break em, so I don't think they were broken.

That's because sw didn't rely on broken formations. They have broken units.

Have ye no wolves?!

7th is convoluted and broken. I stopped playing months ago after 15+ years and moved on to The 9th Age. For me this is GWs last chance. Fuk this up and I'm done.

That said I think the new approach looks fantastic. Liking it more more more.

Ap, cover, AV and the old toughness chart made such a toxic design space it's ridiculous.

Ap was responsible for every bullgak invul/fnp thing that came up which in turn created D weapons and stomp.

Cover was just bad, there were more times when it didn't benefit you, completely shut your army down (ravenwing), or was just flat out ignored than there were times it was a meaningful tactical consideration.

The vehicle rules made vehicles inherently weaker than pretty much anything with a toughness value. The different facings having different armor thing was neat but created practical issues like 'where the gak does the side of a wave serpent or triarch stalker start' and 'nuh uh that's side arc! NO it's FRONT arc!'

The old toughness chart sucked for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest was that it wasn't actually a 1-10 system. It was 3-8 because less than 3 was largely irrelevant and more than 8 was totally overpowering. Then you had the weird breakpoint issues with ID where going up +1 in strength only ever mattered if you were going odd to even, which is a big part of why HB, plasma, and lascannons sucked as much as they did.

MagicJuggler wrote:

BlaxicanX wrote:Addressing a problem that didn't exist. Psykers were fine in 5th edition.

The last 5e Nova tournament ended with Draigo dying to Jaws of the World Wolf, and Njal single-handedly destroyed most of Dash of Dashofpepper's Venom spam army with a single Chain Lightning. So...yeah.

Not to forget No Retreat rules from that edition, or 50% cover allowing for absurd conga-lines. Thanks for actually making me take off the rose-tinted 5e glasses.

So because Draigo rolled a 6 and the same probably happened for how many shots the RP got with living lightning both are broken to the extreme? Kay.

Ruin wrote:

MagicJuggler wrote:

BlaxicanX wrote:Addressing a problem that didn't exist. Psykers were fine in 5th edition.

The last 5e Nova tournament ended with Draigo dying to Jaws of the World Wolf, and Njal single-handedly destroyed most of Dash of Dashofpepper's Venom spam army with a single Chain Lightning. So...yeah.

Not to forget No Retreat rules from that edition, or 50% cover allowing for absurd conga-lines. Thanks for actually making me take off the rose-tinted 5e glasses.

So because Draigo rolled a 6 and the same probably happened for how many shots the RP got with living lightning both are broken to the extreme? Kay.

Not Living Lightning, Chain Lightning; you know, as part of Njal's Stormcaller special chart. The one where every unit within 12 or 24 or whatever it was took a variable number of S8 hits. (Imagine a S8 Nova that couldn't be denied). Plus Jaws was a beam, in an era before Look Out Sir, and the moment Kopach was able to flank Blackmoor's Draigostar and force multiple Initiative checks at once to negate the wound allocation mechanics of 5th...

It was a counter to the argument that Psykers "were fine" in 5th edition, because certain matchups were so lopsided (Jaws vs Tyranids) that it's disingenuous to ignore those while saying the 7th psychic system is a broken mess.

A single psyker that was universally acknowledged to be broken does not a strong argument make against the general statement 'psykers were fine in 5th'.

The other issue to 7th ed psykers is how ridiculous the mechanics are. Fifth was simple; roll a Ld check, and on a 2 or 12 you lose a wound to perils. That's it. Out of the gate, 7th was broken, complicated, and had way too much dice rolling. The powers were random and horribly balanced, and the perils chart was an unnecessary addition to the game.

If the worst part of 5th psykers was Njal, I think its pretty safe to say that Psykers were fine in 5th.

 ChazSexington wrote:
God, no.

And don't the Word Bearers have the worst rules of all the Legions to boot?

the word bearers rules are summoning based right now, summoning is being nerfed, that said I suspect word bearers will get new rules for 8th

 Blacksails wrote:
A single psyker that was universally acknowledged to be broken does not a strong argument make against the general statement 'psykers were fine in 5th'.

The other issue to 7th ed psykers is how ridiculous the mechanics are. Fifth was simple; roll a Ld check, and on a 2 or 12 you lose a wound to perils. That's it. Out of the gate, 7th was broken, complicated, and had way too much dice rolling. The powers were random and horribly balanced, and the perils chart was an unnecessary addition to the game.

If the worst part of 5th psykers was Njal, I think its pretty safe to say that Psykers were fine in 5th.

Sure it does. How many other Psykers have the raw potential to destroy half a 2000-point army in one turn?

Plus for every good Psyker, there were the Psyker-dependent armies that only worked if the opponent didn't have any psychic defense or rolled poorly. Tyranids and Eldar were both overcosted based on the "but they have synergy with their Psykers (read: are dependent on their Psykers)." While I'm for Power selection over random powers, the discrepancy in powers was still the same there (I never saw anyone take Smite versus Null Zone for example), and individual powers had individual "when to cast" qualifiers, with Grey Knights having the most "out of sequence" powers ("Champion: Cast when you die").

Having a single phase cleaned it up. Making it "roll a dice pool" let you do resource allocation and added some risk/reward (more dice=better success rate but higher Perils rate). Could it be fixed? Of course. Pyromancy is obviously inferior to Telepathy and Telekinesis is questionable but most every other discipline has practical use, and compared to a game where the "aura" powers and Jaws were the most pronounced, I personally consider that a net improvement.

 MagicJuggler wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
A single psyker that was universally acknowledged to be broken does not a strong argument make against the general statement 'psykers were fine in 5th'.

The other issue to 7th ed psykers is how ridiculous the mechanics are. Fifth was simple; roll a Ld check, and on a 2 or 12 you lose a wound to perils. That's it. Out of the gate, 7th was broken, complicated, and had way too much dice rolling. The powers were random and horribly balanced, and the perils chart was an unnecessary addition to the game.

If the worst part of 5th psykers was Njal, I think its pretty safe to say that Psykers were fine in 5th.

Sure it does. How many other Psykers have the raw potential to destroy half a 2000-point army in one turn?

Plus for every good Psyker, there were the Psyker-dependent armies that only worked if the opponent didn't have any psychic defense or rolled poorly. Tyranids and Eldar were both overcosted based on the "but they have synergy with their Psykers (read: are dependent on their Psykers)." While I'm for Power selection over random powers, the discrepancy in powers was still the same there (I never saw anyone take Smite versus Null Zone for example), and individual powers had individual "when to cast" qualifiers, with Grey Knights having the most "out of sequence" powers ("Champion: Cast when you die").

Having a single phase cleaned it up. Making it "roll a dice pool" let you do resource allocation and added some risk/reward (more dice=better success rate but higher Perils rate). Could it be fixed? Of course. Pyromancy is obviously inferior to Telepathy and Telekinesis is questionable but most every other discipline has practical use, and compared to a game where the "aura" powers and Jaws were the most pronounced, I personally consider that a net improvement.

Still had the 'all or nothing' issue to contend with though. With the dice pools working the way they did spicing up your list with a psyker or two was completely useless for the most part. Farseers and Tigurius being the main exceptions even then an army with just tiggy or just a farseer would still have to throw every single dice at a power to even have a shot at getting it off against any chaos, gk, or tyranid army.

Dropped out of the game long before 7th.

Very much looking forward to 8th. The previews have me giddy like a child.

So two things come up: 3rd to 7th was pretty much the same, except for shaking the bag at random times.

GWs main issue was not core rules being bad, but codexes being bad. E.g. Njal and Jaws being over the top, while daemons were horribly bad - solution was to alter the ruleset. But why? Re-write the codexes instead. GW could still make new models to put in them. (Also folks could agree to not use Njall).

Will I stay with 7th, maybe. I don't like anything I am see from 8th so far, and GW has a record of hating IG (except that one time where they messed up and accidentally made guard OP), so when 8th comes out I will give it a try and if it is as bad as it seems then I will either play 7th or just never play 40k again.

Not sticking with 7th, saw more than enough teasers to know I will hate 8th, but LOVING SW:A so keeping with that.

 thekingofkings wrote:
Not sticking with 7th, saw more than enough teasers to know I will hate 8th, but LOVING SW:A so keeping with that.

I'm genuinely curious, what is 8th doing that you aren't a fan of?

 Cannuck wrote:

 thekingofkings wrote:
Not sticking with 7th, saw more than enough teasers to know I will hate 8th, but LOVING SW:A so keeping with that.

I'm genuinely curious, what is 8th doing that you aren't a fan of?

It looks like Age of SIgmar.

Lord Kragan wrote:


It looks like Age of SIgmar.

If that's supposed to be a self-evidently compelling argument, you might want to take it back to the drawing board.

 Luciferian wrote:

Lord Kragan wrote:


It looks like Age of SIgmar.

If that's supposed to be a self-evidently compelling argument, you might want to take it back to the drawing board.

Agreed.