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It was massively better in every regard than 7th was.

Big winners: AP System, quicker reaction to OP abilities, Flexible Army construction, codex's had more flavor for non-marine armies.

Losers: Terrain and the Ironhands kerfluffle.

That's about it. Everything else was either fine or meh.


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 AnomanderRake wrote:

Vehicle fire arcs: Antenna-to-antenna line of sight and vehicles shooting out their butts are "easier" to write rules for, but it's also very silly-looking and makes the game much more stressful since you now need to make sure that every single tiny little fiddly bit on your vehicle is hidden or the enemy can still shoot it. I think vehicle fire arcs could have been handled much better by defining four overlapping 180-degree arcs (front, left, right, and rear) and then defining which weapons can fire in which arc; it's much easier to eyeball 180-degree arcs than 90-degree arcs and much easier to eyeball which way is forwards than it is to eyeball where your corners are. I'd also have preferred LOS to be measured to/from the center of a model rather than any protruding fiddly bits.

Vehicle armor facings: Similar to fire arcs the old system was fuzzy and hard to eyeball, but the new system doesn't have a way to reward you for moving your guns up the table. Things like Land Speeders and Vypers that used to be fast gun platforms that could seek side-arc shots more easily than stationary gun platforms now longer have a purpose, you just spend more points on your stationary big guns. I'd have preferred it if they'd gone to something like Flames of War's 180-degree front/180-degree back arc that's easier to eyeball, defined universally on every vehicle, and didn't take elements away from gameplay.

The first part seems like a waste of time. You could just bump up the cost of all vehicles with sponsons/etc 25% and accomplish the same level of nerf for these vehicles. Measuring from the center of the model sounds fine but in practice just makes vehicles really, really small. Especially models like heldrakes and nightscythes that have a lot of...not center to em.

The old system didn't reward moving guns up the table either. Vehicle facings were lipservice at best. Land Speeders and Vypers never saw ANY play in 7th but even if they did they never actually went out of their way to get to the side arcs of vehicles, they just blew them up.

Streamlining of the core rule book was fantastic

Caveat- the streamlining of the rules was largely good (except for the things they missed, like terrain).
But the layout of the Big Rule Book? Awful. Background for hundreds of pages, then rules, then play types (with associated missions) and then the rest of the rules (with how to make an army lost in multiple places)? That was just a nightmare.


Bad:
so many dice. and rerolls. and more dice. The dice rolling got to be an egregious waste of time- just give a resolution chart to look up when unit X attacks unit Y.

Absurd pace of releases. The indexes should have stuck around a lot longer, at least 18 months to shake all the bugs out. Then a sane and measured codex release cycle could have started without changing direction (or the complete waste of time that was PA)

I find that in every edition GW , in-spite of themselves gets something right


THE GOOD:

.upon initial release the streamlining of the edition made it an excellent template for playing epic 40K and mostly everything was there at the same time in the form of the indexes
.monsterous creatures suffering effects from damage
.removal of hull points. the system could work if you implemented it right, DUST did, 40K did not.
.removal of that stupid dice pool WHFB magic phase

THE BAD

where to begin...as a casual player it is mostly things that gave the game more lore based flavor that were removed-

.the AP system, if i wanted that i would have played WHFB
.removing AV
.removing vehicle facing and damage chart
.re-roll auras
.changes to AA weapon platforms (rermoving the point of really having them since everything is good at shooting down planes)
.removing initiative (a vital lore component in my book)
.increases lethality/number of shots-twin weapons instead of twin linked etc..
.almost no interaction with terrain(like i said- epic scale works its to complicated for divisions of leman russ's using complex rules but not great for 28mm play)
.removing teleport scatter/mishap
.removing templates
.points scoring system combined with lethality leading to 2 turn games where there was no point in continuing
.mortal wounds
.primaris back story -love the models, hate the lore, i am with arch they should not exist as explained.
.stratagems-seriously an army should have intrinsic traits that don't go away when you run out of CP leading to my next problem
.CP farming.....the dreaded soup

It wasn't the worst edition by far (that is reserved for 6th) but it wasn't great outside certain game types(epic).

Voss wrote:


Absurd pace of releases. The indexes should have stuck around a lot longer, at least 18 months to shake all the bugs out.

Well, I played with indexes for 15-18 months because my armies were the unlucky ones. I wouldn't recommend it to my worst enemy, index 8th edition was by far the worst edition I've ever played (I play since 3rd).

 Blackie wrote:

Voss wrote:


Absurd pace of releases. The indexes should have stuck around a lot longer, at least 18 months to shake all the bugs out.

Well, I played with indexes for 15-18 months because my armies were the unlucky ones. I wouldn't recommend it to my worst enemy, index 8th edition was by far the worst edition I've ever played (I play since 3rd).

getting a codex fast wasn't fun either, if you got a book that was writen with something else then 8th ended up as. In the end it probably just means that it is better to have good rules for your army then bad rules, no matter from where they come from. But that is kind of a duh.