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It's not just warptime, it's every single psychic power in the tree. From your comment I'm not sure you understand the change that was made. Warptiming Magnus has nothing to do with it, TS can warptime Magnus themselves, with 9" range to boot, so there's no reason you would want to use the inferior 3" range CSM version anyway unless you're using the auto-casting Word Bearer guy.

What this does is mean that said Word Bearer guy can't buff your Emperor's Children, or vice versa, or anything else that uses two different Legions. It makes those lists much less viable when you can't buff across legions. It's a significant nerf to an already dumpster-tier faction for no real reason.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
TITANIC units now ignore the penalty for moving across Difficult Ground unless it's at least 3 high. Cool. Can't keep a good tank down.

It makes a lot of sense.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Again, they very easily could come up with a change that accomplished that that doesn't also dumpster CSM even more than it already is in the process.

This is a sledgehammer change for a scalpel problem.

The fact that CSM are going to remain dumpster tier for a long period of time makes it worse that they chose this way to deal with what was only actually an issue with Morty if it was an issue at all, not better.

CSM will remain dumpster tier as long as they don't get a new Codex.

The differences in design (not only in power although both are linked together) between 9th Codices and 8th Codices are simply too big. Also, 8th CSM Codex was very poorly designed to begin with.

And as more and more 9th Codices are released, no amount of soup will save CSM from their dumpster tier.

Also, feth soup. The abominations it gave birth during 8th edition justify its death.

 the_scotsman wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
Again, they very easily could come up with a change that accomplished that that doesn't also dumpster CSM even more than it already is in the process.

This is a sledgehammer change for a scalpel problem.

The fact that CSM are going to remain dumpster tier for a long period of time makes it worse that they chose this way to deal with what was only actually an issue with Morty if it was an issue at all, not better.

....Do you really think the inability to cast warptime on souped in allies is really a material benefit to the competitive performance of CSM as a faction? Like if it became the norm to take a CSM sorceror and 1 5-man squad of CSM as allies to a thousand sons list purely to Warptime Magnus, would you actually consider CSM 'more competitive'?

It's of material benefit to casual performance of the faction when you can't roll above a 4 on psychic tests so the only way to make your NL Warp Talons work is to ally a Word Bearer Sorcerer to guarantee a cast so you can whip those bad boys into your enemy.

 Yarium wrote:

 Gene St. Ealer wrote:
Any clarification you could give on the Exocrine nerf? I assume it's something from the BRB FAQ.

Ehhhhhh..... it's not really a nerf.

Previously the ruling on the Exocrine's stratagem from Psychic Awakening was that it could Advance and shoot as if stationary, but couldn't Fall Back and shoot using the same strat. The new wording on "counts as being stationary" definitely allows it to shoot after falling back by using this strat though, but they have modified the strat so that it doesn't work on an Exocrine that advanced. So, it's a sideways change for it. Honestly, I think it's a buff myself.

Thanks. I always thought that was a weird ruling on allowing it to advance and shoot (surprise surprise) and didn't play it that way. But the fall back change is actually quite significant IMO. Much appreciated!

Rihgu wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
Again, they very easily could come up with a change that accomplished that that doesn't also dumpster CSM even more than it already is in the process.

This is a sledgehammer change for a scalpel problem.

The fact that CSM are going to remain dumpster tier for a long period of time makes it worse that they chose this way to deal with what was only actually an issue with Morty if it was an issue at all, not better.

....Do you really think the inability to cast warptime on souped in allies is really a material benefit to the competitive performance of CSM as a faction? Like if it became the norm to take a CSM sorceror and 1 5-man squad of CSM as allies to a thousand sons list purely to Warptime Magnus, would you actually consider CSM 'more competitive'?

It's of material benefit to casual performance of the faction when you can't roll above a 4 on psychic tests so the only way to make your NL Warp Talons work is to ally a Word Bearer Sorcerer to guarantee a cast so you can whip those bad boys into your enemy.

Are you playing your soup-ally warptimed night lord warp talons in a competitive setting, where an opponent would actually insist on nerfing your army using an FAQ?

 Daedalus81 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
Really don't like the nerf to chaos soup. It puts CSM even more firmly in the dumpster no for real reason, when I suspect all they actually cared about was Morty being warptimed, which could have been cured easily enough with a specific exclusion for DG or even just for Morty himself, either of which would have worked both ruleswise and fluffwise.

It also changes an editions-long paradigm of Chaos being the superfaction that is most able to field a hodgepodge of remnants of various groups, something that has always fit the lore spectacularly well and helped create its identity as a weird and wild jumble of stuff.

Yea, but at the same time you shouldn't be seeing Magnus, Morty, and likely Be'Lakor together all the time. It's just kind of weird. CSM will find a way.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 the_scotsman wrote:
I gotta say credit where credit is due: this is the closest GW has landed to my personal "in an ideal world" mark with nerfs in a WHILE.

-Raiders hit (slight quibble, I would have also swapped the costs of dl and dissie, as it stands DL will still always be the best and dissie never taken, but at least DL raiders will be a bit less oppressive)

-Blender succubus gone (BRB faq)

-Drazar/Incubi bumped in some way

-Dark Tech basically deleted thank god

-+2cp for no reason gone

Pretty solid, a wee bit restrained, I still think you're going to see Drukhari with a higher than 50% wr personally and a higher playrate than most xenos, but I do not think we'll see a true "Drukhari Meta" develop now. If anything, if they go up from 10% to like 15% playrate, I'm betting their winrate would even out to about 50% as the tools people take to deal with them and admech trickle into the meta, as admech also feature strong light infantry and strong T5-T6 targets.

This is why I am not overly concerned about AdMech ( *cough* Xeno *cough* ). It really feels like that book has a dumpster load full of typos from being rushed. A few quick taps and it should be a respectable book.

You aren't concerned about egregious things because you think they are typos?

Rihgu wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
Again, they very easily could come up with a change that accomplished that that doesn't also dumpster CSM even more than it already is in the process.

This is a sledgehammer change for a scalpel problem.

The fact that CSM are going to remain dumpster tier for a long period of time makes it worse that they chose this way to deal with what was only actually an issue with Morty if it was an issue at all, not better.

....Do you really think the inability to cast warptime on souped in allies is really a material benefit to the competitive performance of CSM as a faction? Like if it became the norm to take a CSM sorceror and 1 5-man squad of CSM as allies to a thousand sons list purely to Warptime Magnus, would you actually consider CSM 'more competitive'?

It's of material benefit to casual performance of the faction when you can't roll above a 4 on psychic tests so the only way to make your NL Warp Talons work is to ally a Word Bearer Sorcerer to guarantee a cast so you can whip those bad boys into your enemy.

Yep, it's something probably 90% of competitive CSM lists utilized in some form or another; almost no competitive CSM lists are mono-legion, and they all take psykers. To say it has no impact just betrays a lack of understanding of how CSM work as a faction.

This is a significant nerf for an already dumpster-tier faction, and there is absolutely no reason for it when they could have easily singled out Mortarion if that was their issue, the same way they singled out liq guns for DT.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 the_scotsman wrote:


Are you playing your soup-ally warptimed night lord warp talons in a competitive setting, where an opponent would actually insist on nerfing your army using an FAQ?

Lol, are you really going to the "the solution to this FAQ is people should just ignore it, and that's why it isn't a problem?"

Again: virtually every competitive CSM list is impacted by this. It is an extremely rare competitive CSM list that isn't multi-legion and doesn't take at least one psyker. You are just objectively wrong here that it doesn't have a competitive impact.

 the_scotsman wrote:

Rihgu wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
Again, they very easily could come up with a change that accomplished that that doesn't also dumpster CSM even more than it already is in the process.

This is a sledgehammer change for a scalpel problem.

The fact that CSM are going to remain dumpster tier for a long period of time makes it worse that they chose this way to deal with what was only actually an issue with Morty if it was an issue at all, not better.

....Do you really think the inability to cast warptime on souped in allies is really a material benefit to the competitive performance of CSM as a faction? Like if it became the norm to take a CSM sorceror and 1 5-man squad of CSM as allies to a thousand sons list purely to Warptime Magnus, would you actually consider CSM 'more competitive'?

It's of material benefit to casual performance of the faction when you can't roll above a 4 on psychic tests so the only way to make your NL Warp Talons work is to ally a Word Bearer Sorcerer to guarantee a cast so you can whip those bad boys into your enemy.

Are you playing your soup-ally warptimed night lord warp talons in a competitive setting, where an opponent would actually insist on nerfing your army using an FAQ?

It wasn't until today that anybody in my playgroup came to the realization that they didn't need to play exactly by the rules, even though I'd been seeding the thought for years. So maybe going forward, yes, I could get away with it.
Even though the setting was "mostly" casual (I say mostly because 2 players, despite never attending a tournament in their lives, insist that anything that isn't squeezing every last bit of efficiency out of a unit means it can't be used in a list.)

yukishiro1 wrote:
It's not just warptime, it's every single psychic power in the tree. From your comment I'm not sure you understand the change that was made. Warptiming Magnus has nothing to do with it, TS can warptime Magnus themselves, with 9" range to boot, so there's no reason you would want to use the inferior 3" range CSM version anyway unless you're using the auto-casting Word Bearer guy.

What this does is mean that said Word Bearer guy can't buff your Emperor's Children, or vice versa, or anything else that uses two different Legions. It makes those lists much less viable when you can't buff across legions. It's a significant nerf to an already dumpster-tier faction for no real reason.

I'm pretty sure the reason is Mortarion, who can no longer be warp timed at all since DG doesn't have access to the power. 9th's design being hostile to soup isn't a surprise to anyone, this is what we asked for.

These faqs/errata seem pretty good. Gonna need to read through some more to completely digest. Seems like they could have made the disintegrator cannons free IMO but that’s a very minor thing. A shift in meta could maybe eventually make dissy the choice even at 5 points.

Honestly no real complaints other than it took too long for some of these.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Really don't like the nerf to chaos soup. It puts CSM even more firmly in the dumpster no for real reason, when I suspect all they actually cared about was Morty being warptimed, which could have been cured easily enough with a specific exclusion for DG or even just for Morty himself, either of which would have worked both ruleswise and fluffwise.

It also changes an editions-long paradigm of Chaos being the superfaction that is most able to field a hodgepodge of remnants of various groups, something that has always fit the lore spectacularly well and helped create its identity as a weird and wild jumble of stuff.

Yeah, given that CSM are still working on an 8th dex that isn't great to begin with, they need all the help they can get... But going forward, I think A) the 9th dex will be sweet and B) I think we might get lucky and it might come faster than some folks expect. If they're able to get back up to speed on 2 dexes/ month, it's theoretically possible to get it as early as August (though given AoS 3.0, I fully concede that's a long shot).

On a final note: it's been a while since I took a really hard look at Chaos, but if I'm remembering correctly, Khorne HATES psykers. Like, hates them; in previous editions, Khorne hated them so much his followers got bonuses to resist and gear that was purpose built to be antipsychic. In another thread about this nerf, I saw someone talk about how it also prevents using Warptime on Berserkers.

Now mechanically, I can understand why you would want to warptime berserkers- folks tell me they aren't as awesome as they should be, so like everything else, they need all the help they can get. But am I wrong in thinking that this is a fluff abomination of such magnitude that if you've ever done it, you forfeit your right to whine about things in the dex itself that you think are unfluffy?

If so, this nerf also removes the temptation to shame the Blood God for an advantage that comes from a spineless finger wiggler.

This does not actually prevent you from using psykers on Berserkers; it prevents you from using psykers on World Eaters. If you were running Berserkers in, say, a full Word Bearers list then your Tzeentch sorcerers can cast at those Khorne Berzerkers all they like and all the zerkers can do is grumble about it.

Quasistellar wrote:
These faqs/errata seem pretty good. Gonna need to read through some more to completely digest. Seems like they could have made the disintegrator cannons free IMO but that’s a very minor thing. A shift in meta could maybe eventually make dissy the choice even at 5 points.

Honestly no real complaints other than it took too long for some of these.

"myeeeeh, back in my day GW took so long to fix balance mistakes that the way you got an OP faction down to 55% winrate was to have 40% of players at LVO playing Grey Knights, 30% playing blood angels, 20% playing other space marines and 10% playing everything else combined!"

 Arachnofiend wrote:
This does not actually prevent you from using psykers on Berserkers; it prevents you from using psykers on World Eaters. If you were running Berserkers in, say, a full Word Bearers list then your Tzeentch sorcerers can cast at those Khorne Berzerkers all they like and all the zerkers can do is grumble about it.

Yep, and meanwhile your Slaanesh Word Bearers Sorceror can't buff your Slaanesh Emperor's Children with Delightful Agonies, because GW didn't like Mortarion being Warptimed by Ahriman. So a dumpster-tier book that contains neither Mortarion nor Ahriman got nerfed the hardest of any faction in this FAQ aside from DE. Great work there, G-dubs!

Cant believe noone is mentioning the change to fight last abilities.

Nice change in my opinion too.

If you charged and someone hits you with a cant be chosen until all eligable units ability, you can now interrupt with a strat.

Pretty potent change tbh.


Also glad to see that I was correct that RAI on charge distance for deep strikers has always been 9" no matter where they are at.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
Cant believe noone is mentioning the change to fight last abilities.

Nice change in my opinion too.

If you charged and someone hits you with a cant be chosen until all eligable units ability, you can now interrupt with a strat.

edit: It's even bigger than that, actually: you don't even need to spend CP to interrupt. Charging now counts as fights first, and fights first negates fights last. So you resolve according to normal rules, meaning your opponent gets the first activation, then you get to activate normally, no 2CP required.

This is a massive change that makes fights last far less valuable as a defensive anti-charge ability - all it now does is let you activate one unit before your opponent activates their charger, not all your units.

yukishiro1 wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
This does not actually prevent you from using psykers on Berserkers; it prevents you from using psykers on World Eaters. If you were running Berserkers in, say, a full Word Bearers list then your Tzeentch sorcerers can cast at those Khorne Berzerkers all they like and all the zerkers can do is grumble about it.

Yep, and meanwhile your Slaanesh Word Bearers Sorceror can't buff your Slaanesh Emperor's Children with Delightful Agonies, because GW didn't like Mortarion being Warptimed by Ahriman. So a dumpster-tier book that contains neither Mortarion nor Ahriman got nerfed the hardest of any faction in this FAQ aside from DE. Great work there, G-dubs!

If you want to mix Slaanesh this, and Khorne that, and a little bit of Tzeentch for good measure, play Black Legion. Mixing marks and Cult Marines willy-nilly was always their thing. The only reason everyone thinks it's a "Chaos Space Marines" thing is because we've had three straight codexes of EVERYBODY'S BLACK LEGION NOW, only broken up by the brief reign of Traitor Legions. If gw keeps up their "armies on the table should look like they do in the fluff" approach for the new CSM codex, expect the same approach as they had in 3.5 and Traitor Legions: no god specific marks for Night Lords, Alpha Legion, or Iron Warriors, Word Bearers get marks, but none of them get Cult Marines. Consider this their first salvo.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
This does not actually prevent you from using psykers on Berserkers; it prevents you from using psykers on World Eaters. If you were running Berserkers in, say, a full Word Bearers list then your Tzeentch sorcerers can cast at those Khorne Berzerkers all they like and all the zerkers can do is grumble about it.

Yep, and meanwhile your Slaanesh Word Bearers Sorceror can't buff your Slaanesh Emperor's Children with Delightful Agonies, because GW didn't like Mortarion being Warptimed by Ahriman. So a dumpster-tier book that contains neither Mortarion nor Ahriman got nerfed the hardest of any faction in this FAQ aside from DE. Great work there, G-dubs!

If you want to mix Slaanesh this, and Khorne that, and a little bit of Tzeentch for good measure, play Black Legion. Mixing marks and Cult Marines willy-nilly was always their thing. The only reason everyone thinks it's a "Chaos Space Marines" thing is because we've had three straight codexes of EVERYBODY'S BLACK LEGION NOW, only broken up by the brief reign of Traitor Legions. If gw keeps up their "armies on the table should look like they do in the fluff" approach for the new CSM codex, expect the same approach as they had in 3.5 and Traitor Legions: no god specific marks for Night Lords, Alpha Legion, or Iron Warriors, Word Bearers get marks, but none of them get Cult Marines. Consider this their first salvo.

And that's fine if they really want to do that in a new codex. There is no reason to do it now, 1 year into the new edition but before the faction gets a new book, especially when the faction is trash anyway.

This change has nothing to do with anything except GW deciding that Morty shouldn't be able to warptimed; there is no other possible reason to make this change now. Everything else is just collateral damage.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
This does not actually prevent you from using psykers on Berserkers; it prevents you from using psykers on World Eaters. If you were running Berserkers in, say, a full Word Bearers list then your Tzeentch sorcerers can cast at those Khorne Berzerkers all they like and all the zerkers can do is grumble about it.

Yep, and meanwhile your Slaanesh Word Bearers Sorceror can't buff your Slaanesh Emperor's Children with Delightful Agonies, because GW didn't like Mortarion being Warptimed by Ahriman. So a dumpster-tier book that contains neither Mortarion nor Ahriman got nerfed the hardest of any faction in this FAQ aside from DE. Great work there, G-dubs!

If you want to mix Slaanesh this, and Khorne that, and a little bit of Tzeentch for good measure, play Black Legion. Mixing marks and Cult Marines willy-nilly was always their thing. The only reason everyone thinks it's a "Chaos Space Marines" thing is because we've had three straight codexes of EVERYBODY'S BLACK LEGION NOW, only broken up by the brief reign of Traitor Legions. If gw keeps up their "armies on the table should look like they do in the fluff" approach for the new CSM codex, expect the same approach as they had in 3.5 and Traitor Legions: no god specific marks for Night Lords, Alpha Legion, or Iron Warriors, Word Bearers get marks, but none of them get Cult Marines. Consider this their first salvo.

I'll be pretty sad if NL lose their option to be marked tbh. In the fluff there is NL warbands that do follow the Chaos gods.

yukishiro1 wrote:

edit: It's even bigger than that, actually: you don't even need to spend CP to interrupt. Charging now counts as fights first, and fights first negates fights last. So you resolve according to normal rules, meaning your opponent gets the first activation, then you get to activate normally, no 2CP required.

This is a massive change that makes fights last far less valuable as a defensive anti-charge ability - all it now does is let you activate one unit before your opponent activates their charger, not all your units.

Huh, does this mean the new ruling for fight first/last is an indirect buff for the Death Guards Foul blightspawn? Since he has both a fight last ability and a relic to negate charge bonuses he's now better than ever! Not that it will change much, he was already an auto include for any serious DG list.

yukishiro1 wrote:

Spoiler:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
This does not actually prevent you from using psykers on Berserkers; it prevents you from using psykers on World Eaters. If you were running Berserkers in, say, a full Word Bearers list then your Tzeentch sorcerers can cast at those Khorne Berzerkers all they like and all the zerkers can do is grumble about it.

Yep, and meanwhile your Slaanesh Word Bearers Sorceror can't buff your Slaanesh Emperor's Children with Delightful Agonies, because GW didn't like Mortarion being Warptimed by Ahriman. So a dumpster-tier book that contains neither Mortarion nor Ahriman got nerfed the hardest of any faction in this FAQ aside from DE. Great work there, G-dubs!

If you want to mix Slaanesh this, and Khorne that, and a little bit of Tzeentch for good measure, play Black Legion. Mixing marks and Cult Marines willy-nilly was always their thing. The only reason everyone thinks it's a "Chaos Space Marines" thing is because we've had three straight codexes of EVERYBODY'S BLACK LEGION NOW, only broken up by the brief reign of Traitor Legions. If gw keeps up their "armies on the table should look like they do in the fluff" approach for the new CSM codex, expect the same approach as they had in 3.5 and Traitor Legions: no god specific marks for Night Lords, Alpha Legion, or Iron Warriors, Word Bearers get marks, but none of them get Cult Marines. Consider this their first salvo.

And that's fine if they really want to do that in a new codex. There is no reason to do it now, 1 year into the new edition but before the faction gets a new book, especially when the faction is trash anyway.

This change has nothing to do with anything except GW deciding that Morty shouldn't be able to warptimed; there is no other possible reason to make this change now. Everything else is just collateral damage.

Gw doesn't usually wait around for stuff. Why do you think everyone without a 9th edition codex points are screwed up? Or they're totally fine with CSM having dreadnoughts that don't get Legion traits because they forgot to give them the HELLBRUTES keyword? Because they'll fix it later. Didn't fix it this time, did they? Gw are master procrastinators. Helps with the whole "manufactured discontent". Collateral damage is what I was told CSM getting hit with the same Martial Legacy hammer that loyalists got hit with was too. Didn't fix that either.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
I'll be pretty sad if NL lose their option to be marked tbh. In the fluff there is NL warbands that do follow the Chaos gods.

Who? Besides Krieg Acerbus and his lot?

 Fergie0044 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

edit: It's even bigger than that, actually: you don't even need to spend CP to interrupt. Charging now counts as fights first, and fights first negates fights last. So you resolve according to normal rules, meaning your opponent gets the first activation, then you get to activate normally, no 2CP required.

This is a massive change that makes fights last far less valuable as a defensive anti-charge ability - all it now does is let you activate one unit before your opponent activates their charger, not all your units.

Huh, does this mean the new ruling for fight first/last is an indirect buff for the Death Guards Foul blightspawn? Since he has both a fight last ability and a relic to negate charge bonuses he's now better than ever! Not that it will change much, he was already an auto include for any serious DG list.

Who knows, GW evidently forgot about that guy and it's unclear how he's supposed to interact with their new system. I mean RAW yes he becomes even more powerful, but I am not at all sure that's what they intended to do, especially given all that language about how "it doesn't matter how many times you stack a fights last or fights first effect, they always cancel each other out." It's admittedly not technically a fights last effect, but given that it manipulates fight priority in a similar way, I'd be kind-of surprised if they were thinking about him when they wrote this and intending to have him be the single, unmentioned exception to an otherwise comprehensive FAQ.

So seems like another case of a FAQ that needs a FAQ. Sigh.

yukishiro1 wrote:
It's not just warptime, it's every single psychic power in the tree. From your comment I'm not sure you understand the change that was made. Warptiming Magnus has nothing to do with it, TS can warptime Magnus themselves, with 9" range to boot, so there's no reason you would want to use the inferior 3" range CSM version anyway unless you're using the auto-casting Word Bearer guy.

What this does is mean that said Word Bearer guy can't buff your Emperor's Children, or vice versa, or anything else that uses two different Legions. It makes those lists much less viable when you can't buff across legions. It's a significant nerf to an already dumpster-tier faction for no real reason.

Good. I hate how so many armies are balanced around them souping multiple sub-factions to cheery-pick and exploit the best things from each, it masks real problems with the army by making the Codex seem effective on paper because it is winning games. I had a friend tell me the other day that Tyranids are well-rounded with lots of options, naming 1 recent tourney win as an example to boot. Nevermind that a huge swathe of unit options are only viable in a specific hive fleet and when you need to mix those units to make a functional army they better go in a different detachment or suck. It would be great if there was more nuance applied to the balancing but broadly if an army is successful via exploiting multiple sub-faction benefits the army takes that much longer to get fixed, if at all.

They addressed the intention of rules which have a move x" or more than x", so no more Ravenwing going in circles to score easy VPs on their secondaries. Don't think it really affects anything else off the top of my head though.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
It's not just warptime, it's every single psychic power in the tree. From your comment I'm not sure you understand the change that was made. Warptiming Magnus has nothing to do with it, TS can warptime Magnus themselves, with 9" range to boot, so there's no reason you would want to use the inferior 3" range CSM version anyway unless you're using the auto-casting Word Bearer guy.

What this does is mean that said Word Bearer guy can't buff your Emperor's Children, or vice versa, or anything else that uses two different Legions. It makes those lists much less viable when you can't buff across legions. It's a significant nerf to an already dumpster-tier faction for no real reason.

Good. I hate how so many armies are balanced around them souping multiple sub-factions to cheery-pick and exploit the best things from each, it masks real problems with the army by making the Codex seem effective on paper because it is winning games. I had a friend tell me the other day that Tyranids are well-rounded with lots of options, naming 1 recent tourney win as an example to boot. Nevermind that a huge swathe of unit options are only viable in a specific hive fleet and when you need to mix those units to make a functional army they better go in a different detachment or suck. It would be great if there was more nuance applied to the balancing but broadly if an army is successful via exploiting multiple sub-faction benefits the army takes that much longer to get fixed, if at all.

Again, if they want to do that in a new codex, fine - I disagree, the mixing and matching is what makes Chaos cool - but if that's what they want to do when they design a new book, that's up to them. The old codex is built around it, though, and peoples' armies have been built around it too. There is no reason to change it via a FAQ years after the codex's release, a year after a new edition, but before a new codex. Especially when the faction is way underpowered already. If Mortarion was the problem, fix that.

CSM aren't successful. They are an underpowered army currently. There was no reason to nerf a fundamental part of how their codex used to work out of the blue.

It's also not a consistent change across the whole game. Every other faction (except space marines, who already couldn't, but that's because they have different books with different powers) can still cast psychic powers across subfactions - an Ulthwe farseer can still buff Altaioc rangers, a Rusted Cog Patriarch can still buff Four Armed Emperor Acolytes, etc etc. So it's not even like they made a uniform decision. They just got hit with collateral damage from GW trying to nerf Morty.

Pretty good changes overall. I play black legion, and I can't say I'm too terribly worried about the changes to souping chaos. I *think* this is just positioning and laying the groundwork for future books.

I also agree with not allowing mortarion to be warp timed. The book was, designed from my view, to be played as an independent book, and not built around those capabilities. Warp timed mortarion is obnoxious (yeah, I've played against him) and doesn't feel like it's part of the design philosophy of nurgle.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
This does not actually prevent you from using psykers on Berserkers; it prevents you from using psykers on World Eaters. If you were running Berserkers in, say, a full Word Bearers list then your Tzeentch sorcerers can cast at those Khorne Berzerkers all they like and all the zerkers can do is grumble about it.

Yep, and meanwhile your Slaanesh Word Bearers Sorceror can't buff your Slaanesh Emperor's Children with Delightful Agonies, because GW didn't like Mortarion being Warptimed by Ahriman. So a dumpster-tier book that contains neither Mortarion nor Ahriman got nerfed the hardest of any faction in this FAQ aside from DE. Great work there, G-dubs!

If you want to mix Slaanesh this, and Khorne that, and a little bit of Tzeentch for good measure, play Black Legion. Mixing marks and Cult Marines willy-nilly was always their thing. The only reason everyone thinks it's a "Chaos Space Marines" thing is because we've had three straight codexes of EVERYBODY'S BLACK LEGION NOW, only broken up by the brief reign of Traitor Legions. If gw keeps up their "armies on the table should look like they do in the fluff" approach for the new CSM codex, expect the same approach as they had in 3.5 and Traitor Legions: no god specific marks for Night Lords, Alpha Legion, or Iron Warriors, Word Bearers get marks, but none of them get Cult Marines. Consider this their first salvo.

I'll be pretty sad if NL lose their option to be marked tbh. In the fluff there is NL warbands that do follow the Chaos gods.

Agreed. Same with Iron Warriors.
And they weren't ever shy about Alpha Legion warbands 'losing their way' (or just plain admitting) that they follow chaos now.

Word Bearers not getting nice things because they're more devoted is just... odd.

I think almost everybody is fine with DG not being able to be effected by CSM powers. It's the random nerf to CSM because of it that rankles. They didn't need to nerf a bad faction in a way inconsistent with how the rest of the game works in order to nerf Mortarion, a model that isn't even in that faction. All they had to do was make CSM powers only work on other CSM, not on DG (and TSons if they really wanted to throw that in too).

Now Orks from two different Klans, or GSC from two different Cults, are more psychically compatible than CSM from two different Legions. That's just silly. In one random FAQ Chaos went from being the best at soup to being worse at soup than everyone else.

Eldenfirefly wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
TITANIC units now ignore the penalty for moving across Difficult Ground unless it's at least 3 high. Cool. Can't keep a good tank down.

It makes a lot of sense.

They still need to move up, across, and down to move over a barricade, like any other unit. And they cant end their movement on top of a barricade, because of unstable position. A barricade is still scary for TITANIC units.