MWHistorian wrote:How is this even defensible? I know they have a need to be creative and try new things, but when they flat out ignore what their customers want, that's a dumb thing to do. It's a good way to lose fans in the long run.
I didn't say it was the right way to go about things, I was just objecting to the notion that the book we have is already 'Codex Black Legion'. The black legion is present yes, but it's not not the primary focus, not of the fluff or of the rules. Especially when it comes to the new stuff, with the warpsmith being overtly aimed at iron warriors fans, the apostle at word bearers, and the warp talons at night lords.
It's not Codex: Black Legion, it's Codex: Chaos Space Marines. Not the one we wanted, but still. These accusations are as groundless as when bitter fans called the 4e book 'codex: renegades', and somehow convinced themselves that there would be a 'codex: legions' forthcoming. The book had six Chaos Legion special characters, had cult marines, daemon engines, heresy era wargear, and a total lack of the post heresy tech one would associate with more recent renegades, it was always meant to cover the chaos legions, just as this book was meant to cover more than black legion. It just didn't do so as well as we wanted.
I share your hope that these supplements will address some of the concerns, but there are a lot of problems built into this book that a supplement adding a couple minor rules or options, or pushing some existing options around, isn't going to help much.
CadianXV wrote:I'm confused- I thought the most recent CSM codex was well received?
Not particularly, at least not in the circles I travel in. There are a lot of additions that aren't fully thought out or just don't work so well, there's a lot of stuff that needed fixing that didn't get it, and there are a lot of rather reasonable options people have been begging for that did not appear, and the internal balance is still painfully off kilter. Running into off topic whining rant zone, but as long as we're waiting for new info on the supplement anyway, here's a list of some of the specific complaints I either have or hear frequently:
1) no cult terminators or
HQs (outside of special characters). There's really no excuse for this, such options are pretty key to representing some fundamental chaos subfaction concepts. I can understand leaving other specialized cult offshoots for
FW to do eventually (skullcrushers, noise marine dreads, etc), but these should have been there.
2) Cult units ported over largely unaltered, without apparent care to how they functioned or didn't function in the previous book, or how they might have changed given the new rules. Berzerkers, as a high cost melee infantry unit relying on rhinos to get to combat, suffered heavily - what was good about them before largely no longer works. Plague marines were and remain
CSMs++, largely trumping basic chaos marines as an option, despite all the marks and flags available to the latter. Thousand Sons, already the worst of the cult units and largely unplayed last time, were changed only to nerf them.
3) Speaking of units that were bad before that are still bad now - Chaos Dreads & Possessed. Yeah, they were tweaked, but they needed more than that, they needed to be largely rebuilt from the ground up. Especially possessed, which have never been good, and which, like 'zerkers, were hit hard by the 6e changes which just don't support near-terminator-cost-but-only-marine-durability infantry speed melee units without assault transports. The damage is even more painful for possessed, who lack assault grenades and can't be made scoring, either.
4) Points values are all over the map. Plasma Pistols costing more than objectively better meltaguns on raptors. Raptors only three points less than basically-the-same-but-way-better bikes. Melee upgrades priced more heavily on melee leaning units than on 'shooty' units, resulting in supposedly shooty units doing both jobs better and cheaper. Overpriced Land Raiders and Defilers. The too-strong-to-be-reasonable-at-any-price Heldrake priced shockingly low. etc.
5) No legion rules. People didn't want much (that's a lie, people wanted tons, but I didn't want much), but a nod wouldn't have been hard. Loyalists seem to be getting this. Wouldn't had been an issue if there had been options for cult termies and
HQs, and some more options for
HQs in general instead of so many ideas getting sucked into the random rewards table.
6) no new transports. I can't emphasize this enough - in 6e the rhino does not cut it for melee units. As a melee-leaning marine faction, several
CSM units are in dire need of a new delivery system to account for this, whether a new daemonic assault tank or just slapping a chaos spikey bits sprue in a storm raven. Likewise, chaos players have been begging for drop pods for years. It's supported by the fluff, doesn't need a new model (again, just toss a chaos vehicle sprue in the loyalist box), and would hardly take any page space. They don't even need the 'drop pod assault' arrive on the first turn rules, just let them roll reserves as normal, so long as the option is there.
Adding a mid price assault transport and drop pods would push several units from 'bad' or at best 'sub par' to 'good' or at worst 'decent': dreadnoughts, possessed, chosen, berzerkers, thousand sons. It would do a lot for chaos marines and melee armed noise marines as well, which aren't terrible now but wouldn't be broken with such options either. It would have allowed a lot more variety among effective
CSM lists, and much better representation of their fluff and supposed fighting style on the table in 6e. Rules-wise,
CSMs were
crying out for new transport options, and yet instead we get...
7) The dinozords. Well, that's not fair, I like the fiend model more in person, if with a bit of conversion work. And they're not awful in the game. They aren't bad, but they do make me bitter, because they're a pair of AV12 walkers, in a faction that already had two AV12 walkers we didn't use to begin with and still don't use now. Again, the fiends aren't bad, they're redundant. A waste of design space that might be forgiven as an indulgence if the faction didn't have such gaping holes that remain unfilled.
8) The Heldrake - often touted as the book's saving grace, the heldrake is, in my mind, among the worst of its sins. Stupidly overpowered is still
stupid. It invalidates several other options in the book, whether by crowding other fast attack units out of their slots, or by handling medium infantry so well and so cheaply that overpriced, overspecialized AP3 options like raptors and thousand sons - units that were bad to begin with - serve no purpose what-so-ever, being as they are so badly outperformed even at their sole area of expertise. Worse is the impact on the game at large, as the mere existance of the heldrake, especially in an edition that allows several factions to ally one in at minimal cost, by itself invalidates several army builds. I know players who refuse to take the field against me if I'm running even one of the damn things - which is fine, except for the fact that these are a crutch propping up the entire book, and going to battle without them on a regular basis really highlights the weaknesses of a lot of the other options.
9) Much as
CSMs were crying out for new transport options in terms of rules - transports that could have been provided without even having to make new models - they were crying out for new marine infantry in terms of models. The basic
CSM models have held up far less well than their loyalist tactical equivalents, the cult units - key units to the faction, thematically - are in an especially sorry state. Havocs are still a plastic/finecast hybrid kit. The bikes are and look ancient. We did get new raptors - which are great models, but we need our basic infantry marine models re-hashed badly. The
DV chosen show just what's possible now, but in the process highlight just how dated the rest of the chaos line is by comparison. So it's not that what they added in models or rules is so awful, but there were things we needed that we still need that the new stuff has done nothing to address.
10) And then there's all the little things: minor stuff that's just like,
wtf? Like, no teleport homers, when all our units had them before and deep striking terminators is supposed to be such an iconic thing for chaos? Or the warp talon's blinding deep strike, which is more likely to get them killed by a deep strike mishap than it is to actually blind anything at all? Or the ultimate chaos reward of becoming a daemon prince being a downgrade for most of our
HQs, since the model loses all of its gear and options - even if they were options a prince would normally have access to like artifacts or psychic powers - before getting booted out of combat for the opponent to have a free turn shooting at you? Or the champions of chaos rule to begin with - forced challenges being a check on power of fantasy chaos characters - which are otherwise much stronger than their peers in other factions - while in
40k its a drawback with no advantage, since for the most part
CSM champions and
HQs are no more potent in melee than any other flavor of marine
HQ? With the exception of daemon princes, which don't have the CoC rule anyway? Or we might consider the apostle - a rather pricey melee-only 2w
HQ with few real options, who exists to hand out buffs that our units mostly already come with or can buy cheaper in other ways or get from taking a cheaper, 3w lord with more & better options. Or the deliberate refusal of synergy with our only battle brothers, the chaos daemons. Our characters cannot join their units or vice versa, special rules and items from both books are mostly written such that the other book can't use them, etc. Might as well have been 'allies of convenience'.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the 6e book is worse than the 4e book. It's much better than that. But the 4e book was so bland, skeletal, boring, and unbalanced internally that there's plenty of room to be much better and still not be great. And again, it's not about overall power levels. The 4e book wasn't lacking in overall power, if you spammed daemon princes, obliterators, and plague marines. The new book likewise can field perfectly functional lists - just leaning on drakes instead of princes, but still with oblits and plagues, likely minimizing other selections to free up points for allies. It's not about 'geeze I can't win', its frustration that the book seems to be working against me at every turn. That it only wants to run one sort of list, and throws a petulant fit every time I try to write any other sort of list. I'd gladly give up the heldrake and take a slight downgrade or points increase to other currently top units like plagues and bikes if we could have brought the remaining 2/3 of the codex up to functionality instead, and I'd gladly sacrifice the new daemon engine models if we could have gotten new plastic chaos marine infantry kits and stormraven & drop pod kits with spikey bits sprues in them. Again, not that what they added is terrible in and of itself, but it was done so blindly and arbitrarily and with such seeming disinterest and so little consideration for what the faction needed or its players wanted.
And again, I'm super excited for the Black Legion supplement, and
CSM supplements in general, but I don't expect them to fix the complaints I have about the book. A supplement book isn't going to bring us new chaos marine infantry models (though I suppose the cult legion supplements could coincide with the release of new plastic cult units, if such were in the works already - but I haven't heard any indication that new cult models are on the way any time soon); it won't bring us re-considered rules for possessed or cults (though new cult rules in
WD could coincide with new cult unit model releases if such ever saw the light of day - heck, they'd need revised
WD rules if they actually wanted to sell a new thousand sons kit); and it won't bring us new transports, although
GW could slap spikey bits in the marine drop pod box and add it to our book via
WD whenever they felt like it.
So it's not like a lot of this stuff necessarily
needs to wait for a new codex to be addressed. I just don't [i]expect[i] it to be addressed before then.
Good job at that, I guess. You could try reading what I wrote, instead of being, you know.. a mutt?
Enclave Tau army 4000 points (with Shadowsun side lined :( ) Red Corsairs (CSM/SM)
Black Legion 8th Grand Company
Cadian XV Airborne "Flying Fifteens"
Order of the Ebon Chalice
Relictors 3rd Company 
