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2++ rerollable deathstars were a power creep in 6ed

 CrownAxe wrote:
2++ rerollable deathstars were a power creep in 6ed

Oh, yeah. That.

Im saying this with a grain of salt because I am really enjoying the game for the most part right now. I expect the cheese at tournaments but my local group is pretty friendly.

For me it was double checking every rule I knew when a player said he could assault out of deepstrike with his skyhammer AND have relentless on the devastators.

I just couldnt believe it. I was just dumbfounded. Why cant my warp talons and raptors do that?

Anyways, still enjoying the game but I was shocked at that.

I've been playing since 2nd edition and played all the way through 4th till just a few days before the release of 5th as I had far less time to dedicate to the game. Came back into the game mid 6th ed and noticed a dramatic shift in the power level of certain armies and the whole supeheavies and titans in everyday games and flyers everywhere all kinda threw me off dramatically. Now I'm back in the game after another 2 year hiatus and am still shocked at what a dramatic power shift has happened but I am more in it for hobby and casual fun games now so it doesn't quite bother me THAT much anymore.

 sfshilo wrote:
I think most of you are mistaking mismatches with power creep.

Just because your special snowflake army can't beat "insert bs army I don't like here" you claim power creep.

The last time there was a major power creep was 5th ed Grey Knights, why? If 40+% of the armies at a GT with 80+ people are playing that one army......that's probably a problem.

At the moment, for example, there are two major armies from, a power standpoint (Eldar and Marines), but those armies are not necessarily winning it all from tourney to tourney.

5th ed GK were unbeatable, it was dumb, and there was nothing you could do other then lose your first game and hope not to play them the rest of the tourney.

It may not occur so much within a single edition...but editions from 2nd to 7th? Massively different game, and FAR more shooty/killy by comparison.

2nd ed. - Space Wolf Wolfguard Terminators I recall being pretty broken. Ork Pulsa Rokkit armies tabling people before turn 2.

3rd ed. - Blood Angels' 42" assault range and similar rules before the Great Rhino Nerf that meant choppy Marines could look most of the opponents' army in combat at the top of turn and sweep from combat to combat with the opponent not firing a shot in the entire game.

4th ed. - Relatively balanced in my opinion.

5th/6th ed. - Was out of the game for a time.

7th ed. - Familiar to everyone, but there's a strong tendency for new to trump old (e.g. the Wraithknight competing with the Avatar of Khaine in the LoW slot, Deathwing Knights vs. old Deathwing Terminators, etc.).

I pretty much only play casually, so it really only comes up when my casual Eldar army wipes the floor with Orks because the imbalances are so extreme.

My second game ever in 5-th. I got a bunch of csm, raptors with lord, a crazed dread and probably some other random stuff.

Played against IG. Lost turn 2 without killing a single model. My raptors mishaped and died, csm got killed with leman russes and artillery, dread got killed 2-d turn.

Had to accept the game being not like in starter boxes like black reach.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
CSM did have some major issues with it's 3.5 codex however, but in general if you want power creep you look to the Eldar as they've NEVER been a low tier army if they've been updated.

Nope. Nope nope nope.

At the time 3.5 CSM existed and roamed about you also got the following....

Build Your Own 4th Ed SM Chapter. The birth of the Bikestar.
Black Templars.
Craftworld Eldar. Saim-Hann Starcannon Spam, Alaitoc Ranger Tables, Black Guardians Galore with Seer Councils.
Build Your Own Imperial Guard Regiment. Reroll those 1s.
Tau Fish of Fury.
4th ed. Tyranids. With T7, 2+ Carnifexes and Eternal Warrior on everyone.

The whole era had silly shenanigans. That's why I loved it. Because not only was everything ridiculous...it was varied. My local area had 4 different Eldar armies, 5-6 different CSM armies, 3-4 different SM armies...no one was fielding the same mono-lists we see today.

It was probably the best time to be playing to be honest.

With 6th edition. With it came the flyers, then came the superheavies / Lords of War and D weapons. It was the first time I felt like each Codex seemed to be more powerful than the previous.

Then came 7th edition, with formations that provide special bonuses to selections of specific units. This was a different kind of power creep, sometimes it adds flavor to an army with a mono-build playstyle, and sometimes it makes bad units playable. It's not entirely unwelcome.

But right now I feel like we hit the zenith of power creep. GW has all the pieces to make the game semi-balanced and create rules that make it where armies can have different playstyles again. The question is can they do it.

 Marmatag wrote:

 BBAP wrote:
January this year. They're not even trying to hide it with this Fall of Cadia crap. Eternally respawning Spess Mehrens in Pods? Sure!

They would not spawn in the pods, as the dedicated transport is (a) not a part of the unit and (b) they enter reserve, not deep strike reserve.

Oh okay, so they don't get to come back in the Pods, they just respawn eternally and walk on from your table edge forever. That's fine, then.

 Asmodai wrote:
3rd ed. - Blood Angels' 42" assault range and similar rules before the Great Rhino Nerf that meant choppy Marines could look most of the opponents' army in combat at the top of turn and sweep from combat to combat with the opponent not firing a shot in the entire game.

4th ed. - Relatively balanced in my opinion.

Units could Consolidate into combat in 4th too, IIRC. Either way it was a stupid idea and I'm glad they ditched it.

 DarkStarSabre wrote:

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
CSM did have some major issues with it's 3.5 codex however, but in general if you want power creep you look to the Eldar as they've NEVER been a low tier army if they've been updated.

Nope. Nope nope nope.

At the time 3.5 CSM existed and roamed about you also got the following....

Build Your Own 4th Ed SM Chapter. The birth of the Bikestar.
Black Templars.
Craftworld Eldar. Saim-Hann Starcannon Spam, Alaitoc Ranger Tables, Black Guardians Galore with Seer Councils.
Build Your Own Imperial Guard Regiment. Reroll those 1s.
Tau Fish of Fury.
4th ed. Tyranids. With T7, 2+ Carnifexes and Eternal Warrior on everyone.

The whole era had silly shenanigans. That's why I loved it. Because not only was everything ridiculous...it was varied. My local area had 4 different Eldar armies, 5-6 different CSM armies, 3-4 different SM armies...no one was fielding the same mono-lists we see today.

It was probably the best time to be playing to be honest.

When I usually discuss a codex, it tends to stay within the edition it was made within so most of those are straight up 4th edition.

3E had more of an issue with BA Rhino Rush (The gods of the tier), Eldar (just.. Eldar forever), 3.5 CSM (in various ways, though I prefer the Siren Prince with Dreadaxe, Daemonic Strength and Daemonic stature), and Imperial Armoured Company (Remember Lucky Glancing hit?)

Units could Consolidate into combat in 4th too, IIRC. Either way it was a stupid idea and I'm glad they ditched it.

It also killed off the Elite Assault unit, and many codex's suffered for it, but as it is I wish they'd just improve those models now.

it always seems like Ive been an edition behind in list building (due to collecting codexes longer than playing the game) so when I was building 5th edition lists, 6th came. I started building 6th edition lists, Maelstrom came in 7th,

Now that I'm building Maelstrom lists, Special Detachment Formation edition is here.

This has been the biggest leap. I still use CAD with my Orks, and a CAD with some formations with my White Scars.

My CSM with the help of Traitor Legions puts me in the Special Detachment Formation lists, but... its still the same CSM early 6th edition book.

40K has never been balanced.

1st edition didn't even try.

2nd edition was all over the place but anyone who could deliver a strong character into assault had a huge advantage over those that couldn't. There was also some crazy stuff (space wolves could take a terminator squad where every model had a. Cyclone and an assault cannon)

3rd edition started somewhat balanced and then the codexes threw that out the window. (blood angels, chaos, eldar all bonkers good)

4th and 6th both saw an attempt to tone down the codexes that was abandoned before they were all done making the disparity worse.

I think that the reason so many people don't notice it initially is that when you're a beginner playing other beginners your armies are so badly optimised that you don't notice the disparity in the codexes.

Power 'creep' in this edition was the Necron codex. Power 'smack you in the face with a sledgehammer then stamp on your head like crushing a rotten watermelon' was the Eldar codex.

5th ed Blood Angels. Felt sooooo over the top!!

 timetowaste85 wrote:
5th ed Blood Angels. Felt sooooo over the top!!

Took time out 4th and 5th so not sure if sarcasm or not but BA in 3rd ed were monumentally OP with Rhino Rush and consolidation. DC would utterly rip apart even Genestealers on turn 1 who were supposed to be one of the big nasties of assault in 3rd.

Well I started in the later part of 6th (after Tau was out) so I learned the game in a world where Necron Bakeries, Tau Mobile Suit Gundam, and Wave Serpent car parks was a thing that existed to drain the fun out of everyone's day. The last days of 6th and early 7th looked like a sign of codex balance where everything seemed moderate with these interesting formations and alternatives to CADs with small but interesting benefits. Nids, Guard, Orks, Wolves (the strongest of the bunch but still manageable), Grey Knights, Dark Eldar, and Blood Angels all seemed fairly tame and while maybe a bit underpowered by poor design the intent seemed reasonable. That is until.....

Necrons came out and Decurion took things to a whole new level. Crazy good command benefits, multiple formations in a formation type thing, and all of this was basically "free" benefits on an already well designed army codex which made the Necrons incredibly powerful. Looking at the codex with Decurion it seems fairly in line with the other 7th edition codexes with things like Tesla and the spammed units like Night Scythes, and Annihilation Barges getting nerfed while units like Flayed Ones, Lychguard, and Tomb Blades got a lot better and became actually playable. Maybe GW did some last minute changes by adding the Decurion and didn't really design the faction around the system being there. Maybe they overshot the mark a bit and hopefully more restraint will be used for the next codex.....

If the Trukk of Balance had a few parts fall off with the release of the Necron book, then some of the wheels and the top half of the engine shot off with the release of Codex: Craftworld Eldar. To their credit GW did listen to community feedback and saw that maybe Wave Serpents where a bit too strong and needed to be toned down a bit. But for the rest of the book GW showed that their rules writers where actually no better than the Proposed Rules section of this forum with the amount of OP gak that they threw together for this codex. The initial reaction was shock to say the least and with the benefit of hindsight its safe to say that the initial reaction was well justified as Craftworld Eldar continues to be the most powerful codex in the game (until maybe the new Ya-knead or what ever the feth they are called the "we worship the definitely no a chaos god" god).

After that its hard to feel power creep when you can compare anything to the craftworld codex and go "meh might not be as bad as a Wraithknight"

The jump from the 7th DE codex (October 2014) to Necrons (January 2015) is fairly explicit. Blood Angels were in the middle and they were pretty weak too.

As people have said the Craftworld Codex reads as if they gave every unit an extra special rule and a 10% point reduction for no obvious reason.

I agree though that there is a difference between power creep and power asymmetry.

Way back in third it felt like there was limited asymmetry even if there were clearly good lists and bad lists. You typically didn't feel like your entire army was useless because your opponent had bought a skewed list.

Today if someone turns up with most of their points in a Wraith Knight, Riptides, some ludicrous deathstar or flying sometimes invisible monstrous creatures then you can quite easily have an army where 80% of your non-tournament worthy stuff is worthless. All you can expect it to0 do is clog up objectives and hopefully die slowly. This isn't fun.

Flyers were a foretaste of this because when they got released certain armies had no counter and so again just had to hide and hope for the best. Today while flyers are still quite good for certain factions they are rarely complained about because other things are better.

On the other hand there is power creep. It feels a lot easier to table or be tabled because almost everything does more damage now. Or at least that is true for the good factions.

 BBAP wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

 BBAP wrote:
January this year. They're not even trying to hide it with this Fall of Cadia crap. Eternally respawning Spess Mehrens in Pods? Sure!

They would not spawn in the pods, as the dedicated transport is (a) not a part of the unit and (b) they enter reserve, not deep strike reserve.

Oh okay, so they don't get to come back in the Pods, they just respawn eternally and walk on from your table edge forever. That's fine, then.

1/3 respawn. That's hardly respawning eternally. I would definitely rather have objective secured. This is hardly power creep when the gladius, and even just a CAD are stronger.

 coblen wrote:

 BBAP wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

 BBAP wrote:
January this year. They're not even trying to hide it with this Fall of Cadia crap. Eternally respawning Spess Mehrens in Pods? Sure!

They would not spawn in the pods, as the dedicated transport is (a) not a part of the unit and (b) they enter reserve, not deep strike reserve.

Oh okay, so they don't get to come back in the Pods, they just respawn eternally and walk on from your table edge forever. That's fine, then.

1/3 respawn. That's hardly respawning eternally. I would definitely rather have objective secured. This is hardly power creep when the gladius, and even just a CAD are stronger.

Not to mention foot slogging is incredibly slow. Unless your opponent is playing very aggresively a respawn unit is never going to rejoin the fight.

Poly Ranger wrote:

 timetowaste85 wrote:
5th ed Blood Angels. Felt sooooo over the top!!

Took time out 4th and 5th so not sure if sarcasm or not but BA in 3rd ed were monumentally OP with Rhino Rush and consolidation. DC would utterly rip apart even Genestealers on turn 1 who were supposed to be one of the big nasties of assault in 3rd.

Not sarcasm, I started at the tail end of 4th. Everything felt pretty okay (I came from Fantasy), but BA just felt ridiculous.

 Marmatag wrote:

 BBAP wrote:
January this year. They're not even trying to hide it with this Fall of Cadia crap. Eternally respawning Spess Mehrens in Pods? Sure!

They would not spawn in the pods, as the dedicated transport is (a) not a part of the unit and (b) they enter reserve, not deep strike reserve.

wait what?

 thekerrick wrote:
Im saying this with a grain of salt because I am really enjoying the game for the most part right now. I expect the cheese at tournaments but my local group is pretty friendly.

For me it was double checking every rule I knew when a player said he could assault out of deepstrike with his skyhammer AND have relentless on the devastators.

I just couldnt believe it. I was just dumbfounded. Why cant my warp talons and raptors do that?

The way things are right now, you could probably claim that they can, and not be questioned.

When I looked back at the 5th ed Grey Knight's codex and compared it to the current one.
The units are the same (practically identical) but the current book is considered dumpster tier.
How the mighty have fallen.

I felt it most strongly when I looked at the latest Dark Angels codex, and saw that their Decurion gave away models at no pints cost. (As I understand it, the SM codex did this first, but I've never played against he latest SM codex).

IMO, every model you put on the table should have a points cost. I really dislike Maleficent Daemonology for this same reason.

 Ketara wrote:
I started playing back in the days of 4th edition 40K, and the game seemed reasonably well balanced as I got into the game over a few years. Sure, some units were crap, and others were slightly better, but that felt like it was the case for all armies. Felt like I could plonk my DE down, and have a chance no matter what my enemy threw on the table, even as newer codexes were released. Tau battlesuit spam? Challenging, but you could cope. Daemons? You had to play your deployment right, but you could adapt and it was fun.

One day in 5th though, I played a game against the newlyreleased Space Wolves. They seemed to have some combos that were just that little bit...too good. Not unbeatable, mind you, no more so than a particularly hardened Nob Bikerz unit, but they just seemed to be getting similar save levels and firepower for much lower points costs. It felt like the points costs themselves were far more out of whack than any combo or spammable unit available to any other faction at the time. Then the next codex came out, which was Grey Knights. And that one felt in turn like it skewered things horrendously.

I wasn't around for the big reset of 3rd, but starting in mid 4th, I couldn't feel anything intrinsically overly out of whack with the codexes. There was slight codex creep in that some units were better than others (usually the new model release), but as most armies had one or two above par units, which meant that it all kind of balanced out. Not such a rock paper scissors dynamic. But for me, I felt the first inklings it was all going completely out of sync with that Space Wolf codex, followed by a sudden jarring realisation with the Knights.

Now I'm aware that this is subjective. People feel the power creep at different stages. So for you, when was it? Is that point in my head just that? Imagined? Or did you feel it too? I'm curious.

Every edition has had its issues. 4E was awful for many Imperial armies like Imperial Guard and the Inquisition factions for instance.

That said, power ramp up became more noticeable every edition, 2E got so bad it needed a complete reboot, 3E leveled a lot out but wasn't perfect and had some issues, 4E a little more, 5E ticked the power level up higher (but had a largely "ok" overall average power level amongst most factions by the end, with some exceptions), and then 6E started to kick the power curve into overdrive, 7E started to tone that back down for the first 6 months or so in some ways, then just decided to say "feth it" with Necrons and started actively intending to push power level as a sales mechanism resulting in the quagmire of unplayability (from a balanced game viewpoint) we have today.

 sfshilo wrote:


5th ed GK were unbeatable, it was dumb, and there was nothing you could do other then lose your first game and hope not to play them the rest of the tourney.

5E GK's were hardly worse than anything out now, they definitely had some issues but were easily matched by most other 5E armies (5E Necrons, IG, Space Wolves, Blood Angels and Vanilla SM's all were pretty solid contenders even if not with every build), the big difference is that there's just much more broken stuff spread out over many more armies. 5E didn't have 2++ rerollable invul saves, Titans, D weapons, armies with 400-700 points worth of free units and upgrades, single troops units able to relocate across the table in a single turn or unleash more long range mid strength firepower than a 5E IG gunline could and take on-demand cover with them while sporting 3+ armor (scatterbikes), etc. The "bad" of 5E was primarily a handful of units being undercosted and a couple things taking unfair advantage of wound allocation and transport rules, not wholesale escalation of firepower and abilities to Apocalypse levels and beyond.

I don't feel any power creep at all.
I play with my friends, everything is fine, every game.
Some lists are better than other, that's it.
Ofc if I play my armored guard list against my friend's Iron Warriors tankhunter lascannons heavy list, I am going to loose.
But otherwise ? It is fairly balanced.

But I wish the vehicle's rules were better.

 godardc wrote:
I don't feel any power creep at all.
I play with my friend, everything is fine, every game.
Some lists are better than other, that's it.
Ofc if I play my armored guard list against my friend's Iron Warriors tankhunter lascannons heavy list, I am going to loose.
But otherwise ? It is fairly balanced.

But I wish the vehicle's rules were better.

My metal boxes and nuns strapped to chicken walkers' would very much appreciate an update to vehicles...and sister's vehicles at least get a invuln save.

From my memory:

Third wasn't too bad, there were strong armies and weak ones, but I don't remember any "why are we bothering to play?" matchups.

Fourth was a bit better, even though some armies just didn't get updated. Probably my favorite ruleset with a few caveats.

Fifth started really getting silly, and we started seeing some polarization with good and bad armies (leafblower and GK vs Blood Angels and Orks come to mind).

Sixth...Flyers, Super Heavies, Allies, and D weapons all make the jump to standard rules. 40K is now Calvinball.

I only started playing actual games in 6th, so I really had no feel for the meta yet. However, when my friend got his new 7th ed Necrons book with the Reclamation Legion + Canoptek Harvest formations, I quickly noticed how things had been shifting.

KayTwo wrote:
I feel it when I get table before the start of my first turn.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 malamis wrote:
Started mid 4th as well - some time around the end of fifth with Tau's first ascendency was when it became tangible that something was changing, with the introduction of 'you never get to kill anything' thanks to multiple profiles and high value individual models.

It was compounded when plastic drop pods became a thing, and every army and his dog was built around either alpha strike or counter alpha strike. The two together prompted my first break from the hobby until I started IG.

How do you cope with Alpha Strike as IG?

Bubble wrap. Lots of bubble wrap, always bubble wrap. A "good" list for IG needs at least one or two pretty big platoons. Space them out as much as you can when you deploy, then the marines disembarking from drop pods will never manage to get within melta range. I typically protect my Pask squadron with Bullgryns in front and a 40 man blob deployed with the maximum 2" spacing to protecting the flanks and rear. It also helps to keep vehicles with long range weapons along the back edge of the board so their rear armor cannot be shot at, period.