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 Sim-Life wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.

Nah. Don't have the energy for thinking up something off the top of my head you can nitpick to death.

TBF Shock Prows was an insanely random change, it went from bonus strength on the charge to hurt high Toughness units (Like you are ramming a vehicles to open it up so you can jump out of the raider attacking the hole, very pirate themed) Now it is Tokyo Drift anti-horde weapon that needs a stratagem to even work. Extremally random and pointless change.

Vatsetis wrote:

Boosykes wrote:
If anything orks should be far stronger and tougher than humans and nobs should be larger stronger an d tougher than primaris. It's litteraly the races whole thing the more they fight the more they win the bigger and stronger they are. If anything orks need a major up sizing and massive state boost. And then they can give us the beast an ork the size of a hab block.

Yep I want Boyz to be T5 and 3W but cheap enough so I can organise a Green Tide, lets say 8 points per model.

No? No one asked for that-if Orks are T5 W3, they should cost a hell of a lot more than now.

I ask for it... In lore Boyz attack in big mobs.

Balance is an obsolete concept.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.

Nah. Don't have the energy for thinking up something off the top of my head you can nitpick to death.

Am I nitpicking things to death by saying Gretchin should not be 4W T10? Would the shock prow change be a good example of what you meant? How about changing tesla's exploding hits from 6+ to unmodified 6s? How about Drukhari getting an extra AP in melee on wound rolls of 6? Drukhari Kabalites getting an extra attack? Making PFP into a Combat Doctrine? It can't be that hard to give me an example if it is GW's main design paradigm.

 vict0988 wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.

Nah. Don't have the energy for thinking up something off the top of my head you can nitpick to death.

Am I nitpicking things to death by saying Gretchin should not be 4W T10? Would the shock prow change be a good example of what you meant? How about changing tesla's exploding hits from 6+ to unmodified 6s? How about Drukhari getting an extra AP in melee on wound rolls of 6? Drukhari Kabalites getting an extra attack? Making PFP into a Combat Doctrine? It can't be that hard to give me an example if it is GW's main design paradigm.

It probably wouldn't, but I can't be arsed having a big back and forth about it right now so I'm not going to engage with you about it.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.

Nah. Don't have the energy for thinking up something off the top of my head you can nitpick to death.

Am I nitpicking things to death by saying Gretchin should not be 4W T10? Would the shock prow change be a good example of what you meant? How about changing tesla's exploding hits from 6+ to unmodified 6s? How about Drukhari getting an extra AP in melee on wound rolls of 6? Drukhari Kabalites getting an extra attack? Making PFP into a Combat Doctrine? It can't be that hard to give me an example if it is GW's main design paradigm.

It probably wouldn't, but I can't be arsed having a big back and forth about it right now so I'm not going to engage with you about it.

Why do you respond with "something off the top of my head you can nitpick to death" instead of waiting to respond (maybe forever)? It seems unnecessarily rude, if you want to mutually block each other we can do that but you must be posting either to have your posts read and understood or to be challenged on your beliefs, it's fine if you don't want to be challenged but how is not being understood a good outcome for you?

Mate, stop getting so upset about someone not wanting to internet debate you. You just want me to provide examples so you can draw me into a big quote-reply discussion that I'm not in the mood for it. It's not the end of the world.

 vict0988 wrote:
I think me and Jidmah can agree that weapon profiles can be abstract and Heavy 1 does not necessarily mean fewer shots fired than RF 1 every 10 seconds in the 40k universe, it might just be an abstraction and if the math checks out then it is fine. The problem with Jidmah's Gretchin example is that the math does not check out, it would create unintuitive incentives, like wasting Blasts against a unit that looks like it should be weak to them and should probably (I don't know the lore on Gretchin) be effective against in the lore.

I agree, though you pretty much took the gretchin example and ran away with it
It was brought up by another poster as an example of why lore is hard-wired to stats, and I was picking that example because 30 T3 wounds are actually harder to kill than 6 T10 wounds, you just need to be more lucky. Sure, the interaction with blasts and high damage weapons is weird, but you could probably find lore justifications for that as well, or add a rule that it counts as 11+ models for blast. But let's not get into details on this. As I said, the army as a whole needs to be presented properly by the tabletop rules and I doubt that T10 gretchin could actually archive that in any meaningful way.

The point is, there isn't actually any real lore on a guard battalion facing off against a horde of gretchin. Any time gretchin appear in a fight, they either just get gunned down indiscriminately alongside with whatever orks are present or they sneak up on their opponent and try to scratch their eyes out. There is absolutely nothing implying that the strength of the weapon shooting at them matters, so both T2 and T10 would be appropriate going strictly by lore.

T5 vs T6 really just says something about what the unit is weak to, a T4 monster could work, it would be super resilient to poison and relatively resilient to other things, but that might be super appropriate lore-wise.

Toughness does not say what something is weak to - the defensive profile as a whole does. 2W T5 3+ DR plague marines have to be shot by completely different weapons than 1W T5 6+ orks or 3W T5 4+ warbikers or a 3W T5 3+ transhuman gravis unit.
Looking at toughness in isolation makes zero sense, both from a game and from lore perspective. Yet, many people insist on doing so.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sim-Life wrote:
It probably wouldn't, but I can't be arsed having a big back and forth about it right now so I'm not going to engage with you about it.

Not engaging: You're doing it wrong.

 Jidmah wrote:

Not engaging: You're doing it wrong.

I hate engaging. Its why I play 40k exclusively by scooting around 0.5" outside of my opponents ranges.

 Sim-Life wrote:
Mate, stop getting so upset about someone not wanting to internet debate you. You just want me to provide examples so you can draw me into a big quote-reply discussion that I'm not in the mood for it. It's not the end of the world.

Removed - rule #1 please.

Not a fan of stat creep in general but I don't think OP's chosen good examples to argue against it.

Orks have always been supposed to be tough. They can be both because having effectively no armor dramatically reduces survivability. They're still not as remotely tough as Marines, both for lack of a second wound and lack of armor, but they now take advantage of the bigger stat gulf between a Guardsman and a Marine.

Termagants have always been priced comparably to Guardsmen, or a bit more expensive. They're genetically-engineered foot soldiers the size of small horses, often used as cannon fodder but still armed with effective weapons. Having a Guardsman defensive profile but a better gun is both in line with how they used to behave (back when having AP5 vs AP- mattered, and Assault was actually beneficial over Rapid Fire) and the fluff.

Both of these are examples of armies diversifying away from how we started 8th Ed, when troops that weren't Marines were all functionally Guardsman-equivalent. It's the same deal with Eldar getting their saves bumped up to 4+, and prices adjusted to compensate. Having more armies occupy that intermediate space is a minor paradigm shift, not power creep, and it helps to diversify the factions.

 vict0988 wrote:

A randomish change done in a vacuum and a better stat, keyword or special rule that should have been used to balance the unit.

Alright, I'll bite.


Now, I don't know how random the change was, or if it was a change done on purpose to achieve a greater objective, but I'd argue 2-wound marines/3-wound termies, especially Firstborn, *had* to have been done in a vacuum. The ramifications of the change have been so wide-reaching it can't have been done otherwise. In many ways the game is generally balanced around marines. There's a reason we have MEQ and TEQ as terms. They decided, in seeming isolation, to up the wound of both of those units, which made nearly every weapon meant for defeating them moot. Plasma-guns? Meant to erase marines en mass, and to crack terminators? They now risk killing themselves if they want to kill marines now, since they only do 1 wound, which used to be enough, but now only half-kill a marine per shot meaning you need approximately double the shots to kill them. This can then be repeated across all high-strength high-ap low damage weapons.

There's a reason why Melta's and melta-equivilents were one of the best things around early in the edition, as it was basically the only easily-accessible way to reliably kill marines until they got an update. Take the Eldar Starcannons, they used to be S6, ap-3, d3 wounds, but thanks to Marines (and later all other MEQ getting defensive buffs to keep up) gaining boosted wounds they were changed to S7, ap-3, 2 wound weapons, to keep reliability. This increasing lethality is why factions like Daemons, guard or pre-update tau suffer extreme existence failure whenever these new profiles glance their way, and these defensive buffs prevent them from reliable countering. "All your old codexes will be usable!" my buttocks.

and all of this absolute upheaval of the game, and it achieved.... what? Nothing, so they had to give all marines Armor of Contempt and now the cycle starts all over again.

As for a better solution, personally i'd have just left them how they were, but if they must have a defensive buff, I'd say go for Toughness. If Orks can do it, so can marines, and while small-arms will have an even harder time bringing them down, your dedicated anti-MEQ platforms would still be able to kill them, if not quite as hard as before.

I still like the move to W2 marines; I just don't love the way they power crept everything to accommodate it. Making basic marines W2 seemed like a move towards treating marines as the elite, durable fellows they're promoted as rather than making them the "baseline" "Mario" army. It always felt weird when a lucky laspistol took out a marine on its own, and the second wound is a decent way to address that. Boosting Toughness to 5 wouldn't have addressed that issue because the 'problem' with marine durability wasn't with their average performance so much as with how weird it felt for a bad Sv roll to make them feel oddly squishy.

What probably should have happened is GW should have given them a reasonable price increase that accounted for the new wound and the other buffs they got shortly after. Instead, they cancelled out the boost to marine durability (and lethality) by making everything more lethal.

IMHO the real power creep wasn't 2W Marines but the combination of doctrines, super doctrines and multi-meltas.

Multi-meltas bikes and eradicators were the first example of units that could easily get their points back in one round of shooting. Add the fact that all doctrines and super doctrines are all about increasing lethality, Space Marines were insane at the start of 9th.

Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake

Tyran wrote:IMHO the real power creep wasn't 2W Marines but the combination of doctrines, super doctrines and multi-meltas.

Multi-meltas bikes and eradicators were the first example of units that could easily get their points back in one round of shooting. Add the fact that all doctrines and super doctrines are all about increasing lethality, Space Marines were insane at the start of 9th.

VladimirHerzog wrote:Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake

Agree with all that. I'm happy to revert my splinter cannons back to their old profiles. 8th made a big deal about vehicles not dying to a single salvo barring lucky rolls, and eradicators were a notable departure from that philosophy. Being able to one-shot hardy targets is a valid design approach, but eradicators and the changes to melta weapons feel like a very transparent move away from the "things die slowly," philosophy.

artific3r wrote:
9th edition has been all about making the game faster and more compact -- smaller boards, smaller armies, and no more 200-model horde lists. Stat creep is one of the ways they're going about achieving this.

It's true, and I'm sad to see it happen. To me, a small elite army of SM holding off hordes of Orks or Tyranids is the very picture of 40k.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake

But upping weapons to D2 was necessary *because* Marines had been given the extra wound.

It's exactly what happens when you make sweeping changes with 0 thoughts about the impact of making the most common infantry in the game twice as durable.

It also had the effect of making basic weapons all but pointless even against infantry, which is always the hallmark of great design.

 Fluid_Fox wrote:

artific3r wrote:
9th edition has been all about making the game faster and more compact -- smaller boards, smaller armies, and no more 200-model horde lists. Stat creep is one of the ways they're going about achieving this.

It's true, and I'm sad to see it happen. To me, a small elite army of SM holding off hordes of Orks or Tyranids is the very picture of 40k.

Smaller points games can still really have that old 40k feeling. Running 1k games can have one side flooding the board, with only a few units on the other side.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I still like the move to W2 marines; I just don't love the way they power crept everything to accommodate it. Making basic marines W2 seemed like a move towards treating marines as the elite, durable fellows they're promoted as rather than making them the "baseline" "Mario" army. It always felt weird when a lucky laspistol took out a marine on its own, and the second wound is a decent way to address that. Boosting Toughness to 5 wouldn't have addressed that issue because the 'problem' with marine durability wasn't with their average performance so much as with how weird it felt for a bad Sv roll to make them feel oddly squishy.

What probably should have happened is GW should have given them a reasonable price increase that accounted for the new wound and the other buffs they got shortly after. Instead, they cancelled out the boost to marine durability (and lethality) by making everything more lethal.

VladimirHerzog wrote:Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake

Marine players were complaining that their newly W2 Marines were still too squishy long before weapons started getting updated to D2 and bonus AP. Because it's not exactly rocket science: If 60+% of the armies you're going to see on the table are W2/3+ army-wide, you don't take D1 AP0 weapons that are now mostly worthless; you find whatever D2 AP1+ weapons you have in the codex and spam the crap out of them.

So yeah, maybe the Marine players who got upset at the one-in-eighteen chance of a laspistol actually killing one of Their Dudes now don't have to worry about losing models to incidental gunfire like some sort of NPC faction, but the only time they ever feel durable as a whole is when they're brokenly OP (see: SM2.0 Iron Hands). Because otherwise whatever hard-counters them is what you take in a TAC list, and whatever sucks against them gets left at home unless it has a particularly compelling niche.

They are the de facto baseline, 'Mario' army, and they'll always be that way so long as Marines are the factions marketed to newbies, about half the factions in the game, and a majority of armies on the tabletop. They're the baseline, the norm, the yardstick against which everything else is judged. Making more weapons viable against Marines just made more units and wargear actually playable under those realities instead of left on the shelf.

 catbarf wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I still like the move to W2 marines; I just don't love the way they power crept everything to accommodate it. Making basic marines W2 seemed like a move towards treating marines as the elite, durable fellows they're promoted as rather than making them the "baseline" "Mario" army. It always felt weird when a lucky laspistol took out a marine on its own, and the second wound is a decent way to address that. Boosting Toughness to 5 wouldn't have addressed that issue because the 'problem' with marine durability wasn't with their average performance so much as with how weird it felt for a bad Sv roll to make them feel oddly squishy.

What probably should have happened is GW should have given them a reasonable price increase that accounted for the new wound and the other buffs they got shortly after. Instead, they cancelled out the boost to marine durability (and lethality) by making everything more lethal.

VladimirHerzog wrote:Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake

Marine players were complaining that their newly W2 Marines were still too squishy long before weapons started getting updated to D2 and bonus AP. Because it's not exactly rocket science: If 60+% of the armies you're going to see on the table are W2/3+ army-wide, you don't take D1 AP0 weapons that are now mostly worthless; you find whatever D2 AP1+ weapons you have in the codex and spam the crap out of them.

Revisionism as its finest.

The issue is that 40k doesn't really have a counter system - it has an "efficiency for the points system".

Initial 8th edition Primaris were not priced that aggressively - and so were not that great. They would then become a liability when GW started throwing out lots of cheap damage 2 options backed by rerolls. Arguably the whole meta became about these 2 damage weapons - not because of Marines, but because they were too cheap and so superior to other choices.

When the meta *did* become about Marines, because they were stupidly overpowered, other factions had to go all in on their anti-Marine options to have a chance. (And Marines still stomped over this supposedly anti-Marine meta, because they were broken.)

I think this is sort of the problem with saying greater design space should make for a better game. Because it comes down to what are you trying to balance. Am I looking to see players A and B have a good game? Or am I looking to see players A and B, going to a major tournament of 5-6 games, and if one bring's all scissors, they may run into rock?

In the former you probably need restrictions on what people can bring - or you will have mismatches. In the 2nd you can hopefully rely on a more varied meta to keep people honest.

The problem with the 2nd is that usually that the meta evolves into "take the good stuff". And faction A will tend to counter faction B, and be countered by faction C, due to the interactions of said "good stuff" in each codex. You could build a very different list, which might help a bit into certain matchup - but it likely means being much less efficient against everyone else, which isn't usually desirable because no single faction is that dominant.

Problem start when your local enviroment doesn't consists of one person of the A, B, C and D kind playing games vs each other. But something like A1, A+, A2, A-, the super anti A B, and someone who plays C but never comes to the store because his army gets beaten hard by A.

I think in past edition, just from looking at the lists, balance was easier to achive, because the armies were smaller. Some 2ed armies were 20-25 man strong. Now I am not saying that GW was trying to achive balance back then, I highly doubt they changed since then, but with how stuff scales in w40k it was easier to do.

Right now the armies are more or less pre build for people, very few armies can actualy carry the "bad" units and often those that can't don't really have "bad" units, just less efficient ones.

Karol wrote:
Problem start when your local enviroment doesn't consists of one person of the A, B, C and D kind playing games vs each other. But something like A1, A+, A2, A-, the super anti A B, and someone who plays C but never comes to the store because his army gets beaten hard by A.

I think in past edition, just from looking at the lists, balance was easier to achive, because the armies were smaller. Some 2ed armies were 20-25 man strong. Now I am not saying that GW was trying to achive balance back then, I highly doubt they changed since then, but with how stuff scales in w40k it was easier to do.

Right now the armies are more or less pre build for people, very few armies can actualy carry the "bad" units and often those that can't don't really have "bad" units, just less efficient ones.

That indeed is the big issue of meta balancing. That only really works on the very highest level of income where people can easily bring new armies. It doesn't work for the vast majority of players who just have an army or two and even for those armies don't have enough of all the units (and options) to bring whatever is good in a specific meta.

None of the previous editions were anywhere nearly as balanced as the current one is, with no room to argue otherwise. They might have been more fun (which is subjective), but definitely not more balanced.

 vipoid wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Marines at 2wounds made sense, it's the buffing of so many weapons to D2 after that was a mistake

But upping weapons to D2 was necessary *because* Marines had been given the extra wound.

It's exactly what happens when you make sweeping changes with 0 thoughts about the impact of making the most common infantry in the game twice as durable.

It also had the effect of making basic weapons all but pointless even against infantry, which is always the hallmark of great design.

it's not tho, if marines were too squishy before (they were), then doubling their wounds while leaving the weapons roster the same means that they wouldve been tanky enough.

 Jidmah wrote:
None of the previous editions were anywhere nearly as balanced as the current one is, with no room to argue otherwise. They might have been more fun (which is subjective), but definitely not more balanced.

I think 9th has been some of the worst balance over all though, no other edition has there been so much tabling T1-T2 armies, or insane stated units like 90pt Voidweavers. I'd rather go back to TauDar and HIs 8th than first version of 9ths Orks, Admech, DE, Tau, Quins, etc..., not counting how strong Custodes and Nids where too. At least in 8th you can ignore silly ITC rules and play Maelstrom where HI were bad at, and for 7th at leat every army but 2 had broken stuff (and it was really only Daemons and 1 Corsairs formation with the real broken stuff).

Ok, so when it comes to balance, should we start moving to Tournies where the Armies from each faction have 2 or 3 prebuild lists that you can choose from? I mean if the complaint is that armies are won or lost in the list building stage, then why not remove that variable? It's one of the reason i think the 8th index armies were so successful, if unflavorful. Besides, everyone LOVES a net list right? Why not embrace it?

SaganGree wrote:
Ok, so when it comes to balance, should we start moving to Tournies where the Armies from each faction have 2 or 3 prebuild lists that you can choose from? I mean if the complaint is that armies are won or lost in the list building stage, then why not remove that variable? It's one of the reason i think the 8th index armies were so successful, if unflavorful. Besides, everyone LOVES a net list right? Why not embrace it?

The problem is, a lot of the power is just easy to see and players gravitate to power anyways. Look at DT Liquifiers for example, within 10min of the leaks most the DE community saw how strong it was without seeing any lists as well as Comp Edge Razorflails. "Oh supercharge flamers with no draw back? lol ok thanks" DE community asked "Why did GW change DT for the better?" If it would have stayed like 8th no one would have done Wrack LG spam. GW changed it on purpose and I am 100% sure they knew it would sell Wracks. Wracks is one of the best money makers for GW DE units, highest cost unit per point that can be spam, its why they are still 8pts, its why AoR was wrack spam. GW is making things unbalanced on purpose from my PoV.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

SaganGree wrote:
Ok, so when it comes to balance, should we start moving to Tournies where the Armies from each faction have 2 or 3 prebuild lists that you can choose from? I mean if the complaint is that armies are won or lost in the list building stage, then why not remove that variable? It's one of the reason i think the 8th index armies were so successful, if unflavorful. Besides, everyone LOVES a net list right? Why not embrace it?

The problem is, a lot of the power is just easy to see and players gravitate to power anyways. Look at DT Liquifiers for example, within 10min of the leaks most the DE community saw how strong it was without seeing any lists as well as Comp Edge Razorflails. "Oh supercharge flamers with no draw back? lol ok thanks" DE community asked "Why did GW change DT for the better?" If it would have stayed like 8th no one would have done Wrack LG spam. GW changed it on purpose and I am 100% sure they knew it would sell Wracks. Wracks is one of the best money makers for GW DE units, highest cost unit per point that can be spam, its why they are still 8pts, its why AoR was wrack spam. GW is making things unbalanced on purpose from my PoV.

Of that I have no doubt... the last year of Codex releases can support that theory...

Hence the prebuild idea.

If you have a "Council" making the lists for a tournament season, updating as Codexes release and are FAQd, then you should be able to mitigate a lot of that power Skew. Will the problems still persist? Oh yeah, and GW will have to address them but at least we, as a community, can mitigate the stupid, and make the games more fun for 90% of tournament goers.