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Skaorn wrote:
What is good? Most people will say that Eldar are because they usually have some very powerful units each edition. Many of their units are considered worthless to take though. Does a few really powerful units make them a good army? In my opinion, no. A good army would be one where each unit is worth considering for use.

Don't eldar have the highest unit per codex viable in every edition too? Most of their "unplayable" units aren't really unplayable there is just another much superior unit doing the same thing, often for less points.

ERJAK wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
"White Scars Gladius was a top tier list through most of 7th. "

Yeah. A gimmick.

Firstly, you're not the one that decides what 'a gimmick' is. The white scars gladius was no more of a gimmick than wraithknights, or Decurions, or 2++ invuls, or any of the other crazy powerful things that were standard issue, garden variety army construction in 7th.

Secondly, there were MANY other lists that were EXTREMELY good that the marines could play. The droppod list that finished 10th at Adepticon AFTER Magnus came in, or any of the insane number of deathstars marines could run, the other versions of gladius, or centurion star, Librarius conclave daemon batteries, etc, etc, etc.

YOU might have been bad in 7th, marines were OBJECTIVELY great.

When basal marine units are ONLY seen in skyhammer or gladius, they're gimmicks.

I was playing BA. I had literally NONE of those options. BA are what marine units were really capable of without GIMMICKS. So yeah, I think I do get decide what's a gimmick, given that I was playing a list with 90% identical stats and unit selections and getting none of the utility. That makes the actual units BAD.

And despite all that, my success rate was still much higher vs marine gimmicks than Eldar just throwing gak out with no formations. Because Eldar were undercosted and marines weren't. Get real.

Eldar Codexes tend to be love letters to their players. Every edition (even 8th due to the pretty low tier index) sees a grab bag of buffs, special rules to match the fluff and point reductions that may or may not relate to trying to sell the new hotness. You can say "Banshees have never worked" - but every edition they got buffed to try and make it happen. They didn't get chucked on the scrap heap as has been the case for so many other units in different factions.

As a result there has always been something which is top tier or near enough. It is limited though. Some Farseers, Scatbikes, Warp Spiders & Wraithknights were top tier in 7th. Most of the rest wasn't.

By contrast GW clearly fell out of love with Orks somewhere in about 2009~ and their players have waited the best part of a decade for similar codex treatment. The 7th edition codex - like the 7th edition DE codex - was less a letter of love and more "can you just die pls?"

Karol wrote:

Skaorn wrote:
What is good? Most people will say that Eldar are because they usually have some very powerful units each edition. Many of their units are considered worthless to take though. Does a few really powerful units make them a good army? In my opinion, no. A good army would be one where each unit is worth considering for use.

Don't eldar have the highest unit per codex viable in every edition too? Most of their "unplayable" units aren't really unplayable there is just another much superior unit doing the same thing, often for less points.

Not currently at least. There's a whole lot in the Eldar codex that is just hot trash atm. They have a good fast assault unit with Fly, a good heavy fire support unit, and solid psychic powers.

Their troops are bad, luckily they can do the same thing marines do and just opt to not run any in favor of three min-sized scout units so they can have an "i win" button vs running assault deathblobs and an anti-DS screen. Guardians can be OK in a single 20-man blob that deep strikes and tries to shoot things, but at double the cost of a guardsman for something equally durable, theyre rarely going to make their points back and they'e pretty much hardlocked into coming in turn 2 after the FAQ so they're not a good tempo piece anymore either.

And then your options are basically: Feel like paying more points for pretty much the same thing as Guardians? How about committing a 150-point transport for five 12 point dudes?

And for everyone that just hates winning games, there's storm guardians.If you thought Assault Marines were DOA, boy do I have a unit for you.

I think part of the reason Eldar always end up good is because they just have so many fething units. These guys have like 15 HQ choices, 27 different kinds of aspect warriors, half a dozen wraith things, 18 vehicles, 98 different heavy weapon options...something's going to end up good. But you just need to compare a Wraithknight from the Eldar codex with the rules for the new imp knights to see all is not going great in eldar-land.

Eldar are probably the most consistenly "good" army, at least from a rules standpoint. You could build a strong tournament list with Eldar at pretty much any point in 40k, from 2nd edition through now, with really only the exceptions of 5th edition (when they never got a proper codex) and Index 8th edition. For stretches of that time, they weren't just good, but very good. Even when bad, they weren't terrible.

Orks might be the overall weakest main faction. They had a strong 3rd edition build in Speed Freaks, the late 4th edition codex was super nasty for a while, but other than that they've been mediocre to poor.

Grey knights have swung dramatically, from "barely an army" in 3rd edition (the codex literally said that building pure grey knights was challenging) to the sheer filth of their 5th edition book. Most of the time has been mediocre, with some real down spots.

Karol wrote:

Skaorn wrote:
What is good? Most people will say that Eldar are because they usually have some very powerful units each edition. Many of their units are considered worthless to take though. Does a few really powerful units make them a good army? In my opinion, no. A good army would be one where each unit is worth considering for use.

Don't eldar have the highest unit per codex viable in every edition too? Most of their "unplayable" units aren't really unplayable there is just another much superior unit doing the same thing, often for less points.

Consider for a moment a simplified model where GW tries to make every unit "fair", but the margin for error in their design process makes about a third of the units in any one book too good, a third about right, and a third unplayably bad. In that circumstance a Codex containing twelve units is sort of shafted, because the four too-good units they're given aren't really enough to build a functional army out of so they're left to draw on their mediocre or bad units to fill holes in their list, whereas a Codex containing thirty units is having a fine time, because they can build a number of different functional armies out of their ten good units.

Eldar have the advantage of having more units than most people, so they tend to end up with more good units due to simple design errors. On top of that when writing Eldar more design decisions are limited to a single unit, whereas when writing Space Marines making a decision about the heavy bolter (for instance) ripples through 2/3rds of the book; the result of this is that more single-loadout-specialist books like the Eldar tend to follow the "some good, some fair, some bad" model a lot more closely than the more option-heavy books since the units can be designed in a vacuum rather than needing to compromise one to affect another.

The Eldar are a walking study in the advantages and disadvantages of a different mode of design than a lot of the rest of the game; in most Codexes every knob the designers have to twiddle is strung to a bunch of units so there aren't that many outliers and the power is flat across the army as a whole, but in the Eldar every knob the designers have to twiddle affects just that one unit, so there are hugely more outliers. If you could average out the effectiveness of every unit in a given Eldar book they're not that far off everyone else, but because they have enough units that are notably better than the baseline to build an army out of the armies people build with that book tend to be better.

You could read it as favouritism, or you could read it as "this army's entire shtick makes them tremendously sensitive to unintentional bugs in the design process."

Marines and Eldar have been consistently at least solid. Eldar because of their unit diversity, usually coupled with some fancy rules, and Space Marines for the sheer number of options, even if they're mostly just variations on a theme.

Tyranids and Chaos should have been similarly steady, but sadly have not.

Maybe am biased then, I look at the eldar codex and can't find a single bad unit comparing to the ones in my codex. Plus eldar can always go Inari, something my army can't do.

Martel732 wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
"White Scars Gladius was a top tier list through most of 7th. "

Yeah. A gimmick.

Firstly, you're not the one that decides what 'a gimmick' is. The white scars gladius was no more of a gimmick than wraithknights, or Decurions, or 2++ invuls, or any of the other crazy powerful things that were standard issue, garden variety army construction in 7th.

Secondly, there were MANY other lists that were EXTREMELY good that the marines could play. The droppod list that finished 10th at Adepticon AFTER Magnus came in, or any of the insane number of deathstars marines could run, the other versions of gladius, or centurion star, Librarius conclave daemon batteries, etc, etc, etc.

YOU might have been bad in 7th, marines were OBJECTIVELY great.

When basal marine units are ONLY seen in skyhammer or gladius, they're gimmicks.

I was playing BA. I had literally NONE of those options. BA are what marine units were really capable of without GIMMICKS. So yeah, I think I do get decide what's a gimmick, given that I was playing a list with 90% identical stats and unit selections and getting none of the utility. That makes the actual units BAD.

And despite all that, my success rate was still much higher vs marine gimmicks than Eldar just throwing gak out with no formations. Because Eldar were undercosted and marines weren't. Get real.

In an edition defined by formations and special rules, formations and special rules can't be discounted when judging the strength of a codex. Marines were solid in 6th and 7th for sure.

But we can look at the actual quality of the printed units by looking at C:BA. Marines had good gimmicks pasted onto terrible units. BA had bad gimmicks pasted onto terrible units. The units were still terrible in both cases.

Martel732 wrote:
But we can look at the actual quality of the printed units by looking at C:BA. Marines had good gimmicks pasted onto terrible units. BA had bad gimmicks pasted onto terrible units. The units were still terrible in both cases.

Doesn't matter. Warp Spiders wouldn't have been nearly as good without Flickerjump and BS 2+, aka, their special rules and formations.

SemperMortis wrote:

Skaorn wrote:

SemperMortis wrote:

Skaorn wrote:

SemperMortis wrote:

Skaorn wrote:
What is good? Most people will say that Eldar are because they usually have some very powerful units each edition. Many of their units are considered worthless to take though. Does a few really powerful units make them a good army? In my opinion, no. A good army would be one where each unit is worth considering for use.

I would guess you play eldar
.

WRONG! Chaos and Tau. I played against Eldar a lot and I think that a lot of Eldar players have a valid complaint that a lot of their units aren't worth taking. Most I have played would rather a solid codex over a few really powerful options. Having played Chaos on both sides of the 3.5 dex, I know what it's like to be called a power gamer because my army got a poorly thought out codex. The point is powerful =/= good.

Last edition you had Warp Spiders, Scat Bikes, Wraith Knights, Farseers, invisible death stars, D-Cannons, Fire Dragons, dark Reapers and the list goes on. So yeah...They had a very powerful codex, and it wasn't mono build LOL. If you are going to say no Army is powerful unless every unit is almost on par with each other then literally ZERO armies have ever been "good".

I didn't have any of these, I have never played Eldar as one of my armies. I never said or implied that an army "...is powerful unless every unit is almost on par with each other...". The point I made was a powerful army does not equal a good army. A good army would have good internal balance and be balanced well against other armies. The Eldar have had a long history of units that aren't worth taking compared to the flavor that currently al the rage. For instance Swooping Hawks and Shining Spears used to be the butts of everyone's jokes about Eldar internal codex balance but now Shining Spears are king and the hawks are now joined by the Striking Scorpions. Wouldn't it be better if Shining Spears weren't as good but Swooping Hawks and Striking Scorpions worth considering to take place along side the spears? To me, the answer is yes.

Didn't mean you specifically, was referring to the community at large. But you just said "I never implied that an army is powerful unless every unit is almost on par with each other" but you also said the post before "Many of their units are considered worthless to take though. Does a few really powerful units make them a good army? In my opinion, no. A good army would be one where each unit is worth considering for use." So you just contradicted yourself

There, I fixed a key portion of my quote that I put in bold that you left out to try so you could try to misrepresent what I was saying. If an army has several choices that are not worth taking because their are other choices that are clearly superior, it is not a well designed army. Even still I have never contradicted myself. The first line you quote is "I never implied that an army is powerful unless every unit is almost on par with each other" and the Eldar are a powerful army despite having a number of worthless units. You don't need to have all your available units to be powerful to have a powerful army (see flyrant SPAM) and I never stated you did. You seem to have trouble understanding that good DOES NOT equal powerful, which I have stated several times. If you have good sportsmanship, it doesn't mean you win all the time. A good army means I could look at its units and find ways to use its entire contents to make an army, rather than take the clearly superior units. A good army is also balanced against the other armies in the game, as an overpowered army can actually damage a game. My original post was to question what the OP meant by "good": a consistently solid army or just one that just wins a lot.

I am done trying to explain this to you. Your first reply to me was wrong and you've been digging downward ever since. If you wish to argue about the specifics of the validity of Eldar units in 6th and 7th, there seems to be a few people happy enough to take up that argument with you who are probably more knowledgeable about the internal workings of the army than I do, being an outsider. Peace out.

It does matter when analyzing the actual efficacy of the marine statline.

Warp spiders were great from the codex entry, not from formations.

Martel732 wrote:
It does matter when analyzing the actual efficacy of the marine statline.

Warp spiders were great from the codex entry, not from formations.

But Martel, we're not discussing the MEQ statline. The thread is about armies, and armies are their statlines plus whatever special rules shenanigans they bring.

As for specifically MEQ, my basic set up didn't even shift much going from 6th to 7th. Basic marines were still fieldable, even encouraged. I just made some Grav cannons and bought a few more Rhinos to meet the meta.

Always good: I was inclined to say Eldar, as they've dominated several different editions, but they were quite weak between like 2009-2013 in mid-to late 5th and early 6th before they got that very strong 6E codex.

The main Space Marines codex has pretty much always had at least one competitive build. Can't say the same for most other armies.

Honestly none of the main armies have always been bad. Best example I can think of is Harlequins, they just don't really work as a pure army. They are better now than they were in 7th, but they still need support from other Aeldari.

 Imateria wrote:

SemperMortis wrote:

Skaorn wrote:

SemperMortis wrote:

Skaorn wrote:
What is good? Most people will say that Eldar are because they usually have some very powerful units each edition. Many of their units are considered worthless to take though. Does a few really powerful units make them a good army? In my opinion, no. A good army would be one where each unit is worth considering for use.

I would guess you play eldar
.

WRONG! Chaos and Tau. I played against Eldar a lot and I think that a lot of Eldar players have a valid complaint that a lot of their units aren't worth taking. Most I have played would rather a solid codex over a few really powerful options. Having played Chaos on both sides of the 3.5 dex, I know what it's like to be called a power gamer because my army got a poorly thought out codex. The point is powerful =/= good.

Last edition you had Warp Spiders, Scat Bikes, Wraith Knights, Farseers, invisible death stars, D-Cannons, Fire Dragons, dark Reapers and the list goes on. So yeah...They had a very powerful codex, and it wasn't mono build LOL. If you are going to say no Army is powerful unless every unit is almost on par with each other then literally ZERO armies have ever been "good".

Invisible Deathstars was an Imperial thing last edition, not Eldar, Fire Dragons and Dark Reapers were decent but not amazing and don't use D Cannons as a catch all since Wraithguard weren't that great, and Support Batteries were very short ranged for artillery. In a competetive setting it largely was very mono build (Scattpacks, a few Farseers and a Wraithknight was pretty much universally most of the army unless you went FW and felt like adding in Warp Hunters) but in a more friendly setting it was pretty easy to lower the power level. This edition the internal balance is even worse, 2/3rds of the codex is pure trash whilst the other 3rd is very competitive, since I don't run or have large Guardian blobs or Dark Reapers I've shelved the army as the rest of it is very unfun to play and not very strong.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Unknown_Lifeform wrote:

Skaorn wrote:
What is good? Most people will say that Eldar are because they usually have some very powerful units each edition. Many of their units are considered worthless to take though. Does a few really powerful units make them a good army? In my opinion, no. A good army would be one where each unit is worth considering for use.

I think the Eldar's strength has always been the specialised nature of their units and the wide range of units they have access too, with multiple unit options for each role. Regardless of how the game changes and codexes shift they've always had access to at least one solid build that works with the current meta, even if what works changes wildly between editions.

I would actually say that was their weakness, most of the times those specialisations don't work (Banshees can't kill elites, Scorpions can't kill hordes, Dire Avengers are terrible troops), instead it's the units that by accident or design end up being a great jack of all trades that are the go to choices. Last edition it was Windriders with Scatterlasers that had mid strength, high rate of fire and a low enough cost to take excessive amounts of them that they could and did kill everything better than the specialists. This edition it's the Guardian blob who with the right buffs will drop pretty much anything, or Dark Reapers who can be useful at taking out any type of target.

Ironically it's the Drukhari who are better at the specialisation thing since the nature of our weapons and units means we've never had anything that could be used as a jack of all trades unit (at least not with the same load out).

Scat bikes or not, Eldar dominated last edition with only Tau and the odd Gladius lists being able to stop them some of the time. Every edition I have played in Eldar have been a top tourney army.

Martel732 wrote:
It does matter when analyzing the actual efficacy of the marine statline.

Warp spiders were great from the codex entry, not from formations.

We're not analyzing the efficiency of the Marine statline. We're analyzing how various Codexes stack up against each other across the spread of editions. You could always start another thread if you want to argue that the Marine statline has never been very good but I don't think you'll find that much disagreement there.

Broadly speaking, Eldar have always been at or near the top of the power level, except for 5E where they didn't get a codex during that edition. Everywhere else, they've been the guys to beat. They've never had anything less but an absolutely stellar codex release, at lest in terms of power level.

Space Marines have usually hovered around the "decent-to-above-average" mark, often starting out a new phase of powercreep only to be overshadowed, often by another flavor of marines.

Chaos Marines have been...awkward, they've had some powerful builds, but through most of the history of the game, especially the last decade, they've been very much a gimmickry army (Lash in 5E, Heldrake spam in 6E, etc) with lots of subfactions that languish and then may tend to be super powerful for a year at the end of an edition before getting knocked off again.

Guard are usually on the garbage-to-maybe-mediocre tier with the exceptions of 5E and 8E, where they have been pretty strong.

Orks are much like Guard, being usually garbage-to-maybe-mediocre tier, with a couple of exceptions.

Tyranids tend to bounce around quite a bit, especially within the span of a single edition.

Necrons usually tend to be stupidly overpowered (3E/6E/7E) or garbage (5E/early 8E), their current 8E paradigm being a relatively pleasant change.

Tau have generally tracked pretty well with Eldar, but usually being a bit lower.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Consider for a moment a simplified model where GW tries to make every unit "fair", but the margin for error in their design process makes about a third of the units in any one book too good, a third about right, and a third unplayably bad. In that circumstance a Codex containing twelve units is sort of shafted, because the four too-good units they're given aren't really enough to build a functional army out of so they're left to draw on their mediocre or bad units to fill holes in their list, whereas a Codex containing thirty units is having a fine time, because they can build a number of different functional armies out of their ten good units.

The Ork codex last edition and this edition have as many units as the Eldar.....I think the problem is that whomever wrote both codexs had different opinions on what army should be good

Dark Eldar had a bit of limelight back in 5th I think where they were pretty darn good.

Then they had a character cull and became serious hard mode.

Now they seem fine as their kabalite troops are cheap as chips.

SemperMortis wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Consider for a moment a simplified model where GW tries to make every unit "fair", but the margin for error in their design process makes about a third of the units in any one book too good, a third about right, and a third unplayably bad. In that circumstance a Codex containing twelve units is sort of shafted, because the four too-good units they're given aren't really enough to build a functional army out of so they're left to draw on their mediocre or bad units to fill holes in their list, whereas a Codex containing thirty units is having a fine time, because they can build a number of different functional armies out of their ten good units.

The Ork codex last edition and this edition have as many units as the Eldar.....I think the problem is that whomever wrote both codexs had different opinions on what army should be good

Yes and no. The Orks are an army wherein a "unit" tends to have not many unique special rules and weapons that exist on other units; not to the same extent as Space Marines, but definitely to a lesser extent than Eldar, so the "some good/some mediocre/some bad" estimate is also governed by the general shift to the middle produced by having more army-wide mechanics as opposed to the Eldar's many-unique-abilities format that lets them have more really good/really bad outliers, as is explained more thoroughly if you read the rest of my post instead of just the first paragraph.

Though the single-author problem was definitely a massive hurdle for GW in the 5e-7e days when the Codex writers didn't really talk to each other.

Most players use space marine armies.

Eldar are anti-space marine.

Do the math!

Also, Orks. Always the most fun fluff wise to own, but worst to play. Sigh.

Karol wrote:
Maybe am biased then, I look at the eldar codex and can't find a single bad unit comparing to the ones in my codex. Plus eldar can always go Inari, something my army can't do.

But you can go and play whatever army is top tier in your area.

pm713 wrote:

Karol wrote:
Maybe am biased then, I look at the eldar codex and can't find a single bad unit comparing to the ones in my codex. Plus eldar can always go Inari, something my army can't do.

But you can go and play whatever army is top tier in your area.

Not with the models I own, or is this some sort of sarcasm thing? I often miss those. Plus am sure it is not just my army feels that way, I have looked through lists that are being played and the eldar ones, depending on scenarios or missions, seem to use the largest number of different units. While some armies have this one army where the same units and characters are taken over and over again. Now am not saying I have seen all the lists in the world, but I did talk with people that play longer then me and they said it was always the case, and became and even bigger thing when ally systems were added .

I have no problems with eldar having a lot good units, now or through history. I would like my codex to have the same number of valid army choices .

Tyel wrote:
By contrast GW clearly fell out of love with Orks somewhere in about 2009~

The 2008 4e ork book was decent enough and a 5-6 year wait was typical for the time.

Unfortunately that timing put them in the class of 2014 at the low end of GWs balance sine-wave.

This is so the THEE question that's plagued GW for 25 years. Way back in the early days GW used to say that new codexes and game editions were to fix glaring issues with the rules. The haven't tried to make that claim in years.

Instead of creating a fair and balanced game set they just shuffle broken rules around and jacking up the prices. That's how Fantasy died. Plenty of thought and money went into it, but instead of concentrating on a good game GW concentrated on profits. And that's how we got sigmarine. 40k did better making cash so instead of fixes the the rules they just turned Fantasy in to 40k with less guns.

My fear is that's what they'll do to 40k. The game designers will shuffle the crown of most powerful army around to push sales from one army to the next. And as people lose the desire to be relentlessly plagued by bad game design and priced out of the hobby we'll watch 40k die. GW will turn it all into Hero Clicks with CCG cards and pimp the fluff as just another old Intellectual Property fit only for cell phone video game fodder.

So this got long and pessimistic. Anywho my votes for Eldar at the top, marines in the middle and orks at the bottom. Just like everyone else.

Anyone remember that small period at the start of 5th when orks were awesome... I member

 Formosa wrote:
Anyone remember that small period at the start of 5th when orks were awesome... I member

Nob bikers, man. I was blown away the first time I ran against them. Very nearly started a biker army with the FW models.

 Blacksails wrote:

 Formosa wrote:
Anyone remember that small period at the start of 5th when orks were awesome... I member

Nob bikers, man. I was blown away the first time I ran against them. Very nearly started a biker army with the FW models.

....They weren't even good. It was simply wound shenanigans that let them maintain a HIGH level of killiness longer then similar units. They were a T5, 2 Wound model with a 4+ save, they weren't exactly fearsome, they just took a lot of killing

Just want to add a point on the Eldar discussion.

While they've always been competitive (since 3rd), it wasn't until 6th that they actually got a super amazing codex.

3rd only worked at the competitive level if you took as many star-cannons as you could.

4th was better balanced across the codex, but wave serpent spam dominated.

5th, Wave Serpent Spam was the only thing that worked, as the codex didn't fit the edition very well anymore.

6th. Everything got ramped up. Multiple builds were viable, from WSS, to foot aspect, to Guardian Horde. Most competitive lists focused on the super-powered WSS, or wraithknights however.

7th: 6th, but on steroids. Scat-Bikes everywhere.

8th: Good builds are possible, but large parts of the codex are unusable. The competitive lists are made by spamming a few units.