Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:
No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
Times and dates in your local timezone.
Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.
If you are already a member then feel free to login now.
Vankraken wrote: I wonder how much of the dislike of 7th was due to GW going full on "selling power" mode starting with the Necron codex vs dislike of the core rules at the beginning of 7th when codexes were a lot more restrained or still mostly 6th edition releases. I loved playing 7th (and still do whenever I can find something to play a game with) but even I found the direction GW went with its later 7th edition codex releases to be horrifically bad. It took an active effort to try and coordinate a somewhat level playing field with an opponent before putting models on the table to avoid one sided stomps due to how horrible the codex balance was.
Agreed. I also think the bad reputation of 7th comes more from the Codizes than from changes to the core rules in comparison to 6th.
Let's go through some them (the ones from the top of my head without further research so I might be corrected)
+ change to allies matrix, basically to kill Taudar
+ Change to vehicle damage table, vehicles still suffered from Hull points but got a little more survivable
+ change to Flyers and FMC, they introduced hover mode which enabled firing at Flyers properly after they had their shitshow in 6th
+ change to challenges meant that if you overkilled that lone Sgt. with your beefed up hero damage wouldn't be lost
- Introduction of the terrible psychic phase and invisibility
- Introduction of jink (I think, I didn't play a faction that could use that rule but it was pretty bad)
+- breaking up the FOC, it turned out to be bad because of formations but at the start it was just a different way to enable other army configurations than the Standard one, which in earlier editions would have just been done through Slot changes
So, the two minuses turned out to be real problems in some builds because of Death Stars, but the other changes hit all armies so I would see the base rules of 7th as an improvement over 6th which I'd rate as the worst edition. Both sucked because of a lot of reasons, though.
Vankraken wrote: I wonder how much of the dislike of 7th was due to GW going full on "selling power" mode starting with the Necron codex vs dislike of the core rules at the beginning of 7th when codexes were a lot more restrained or still mostly 6th edition releases. I loved playing 7th (and still do whenever I can find something to play a game with) but even I found the direction GW went with its later 7th edition codex releases to be horrifically bad. It took an active effort to try and coordinate a somewhat level playing field with an opponent before putting models on the table to avoid one sided stomps due to how horrible the codex balance was.
It has been a long time, so I may be misremembering some things, but I vaguely remember 7th actually being seen as a good thing at first. The early codices actually lower power than 6th dexes and it was assumed the rest would follow suit. Instead, the mid edition swing took place starting with Necrons I think, and most codices after that has some wonky broken wombo combos that just sucked the fun out of the game entirely. Necrons got their not dieing thing, Tau got Triptides, Eldar got undercosted units across the board, and Marines and Admech (I think it was the formation that was both Mechanicus + Skitarii but I could be wrong) just got hundreds of points of free gear. It made it excruciatingly difficult for the early 7th codices, and the ones from 6th like Tyranids and Imperial Guard, to do pretty much anything to them.
If memory serves, playing low tier factions against each other was still fun, I remember doing some games with Nids and Orks vs Blood Angels on Vassal and having good enough fun. Its just that playing any of the upper tier books with a lower tier book was such a tedious adventure it was just not worth doing, as you either had a terrible game that was unfun (woo troop Scatbikes just plinking hull points off of everything) or needing to make a list of house rules and ban lists so long that you might as well just play something else/4th or 5th editions.
Also hull points in general sucked, especially since vehicles didn't get armor saves. Bonus points to weapons like Grav, which I think would strip 3 wounds off of a vehicle on 2 successful hits in a period of time when most vehicles had 3 wounds. I completely forget the stupid rules interactions but it was some silly wonkyness of doing a wound, causing a crew shaken, then the second wound if it got crew shaken would instead strip a hull point or the like.
I feel like Hull Points weren't that bad of an idea, as they were clearly put in there to curb the parking lots that 5th edition often produced. One could argue that more Hull points should have been assigned, and that's fine. . . but a much bigger issue in my mind was that at the same time Vehicles were made more vulnerable via Hull Points, the Monstrous Creatures kept getting more and more out of control, becoming bigger, more wounds, invulnerable saves, increasable Cover saves etc. And while there were damage results that could result in multiple Hull Points being lost, Damage vs. Monstrous creatures was still locked at 1! Major, major flaw.
I wonder how many other players dropped 40K during 8th when Index moved to Codex. I remember local players sticking to the Index books for a few months and it seemed like 8th was going to be good times. Then Codex drops and an LCG design mentality ruined everything.
Now that I am playing the full versions of One Page Rules and Firefight the changes that need to happen to get me back are really just two little things:
Primary: Command Point driven Stratagem system relegated to optional rules so longer central to design and balance
Secondary: No more IGOUGO
Paradigm for a happy relationship with Games Workshop: Burn the books and take the models to a different game.
JNAProductions wrote:Jink wasn't inherently bad. 4+ Cover on demand, but you have to snap shoot next turn? That's a fair trade, on a shooting unit.
The issue was melee units who could Jink, and suffered basically no penalty from doing so.
Insectum7 wrote:I also feel like an early version of Jink was a 5+. Kinda like how Cover was once a 5+ and then became a 4+ later on.
IMO the problems with Jink really just stem from the fact that 40K has always had a to-hit system that doesn't actually take into account how hard something is to hit, and so we got these clunky retrofit solutions like aircraft only being hit on 6s and fast things getting special invulnerable saves. The more prevalent those mechanics got, the worse it felt, because they really weren't an optimal way of conveying that concept through mechanics. I don't think any edition got that concept particularly well, because speed-as-an-invuln is still around- and it's gotten weirder, with weapons that produce mortal wounds ignoring it outright.
I feel it would be much cleaner to make to-hit a comparison check like S-vs-T, allowing both size and speed to be taken into account by a single stat and allowing more scope for things to affect shooter accuracy, but I recognize that this isn't the thread for wishlisting.
Insectum7 wrote:I feel like Hull Points weren't that bad of an idea, as they were clearly put in there to curb the parking lots that 5th edition often produced. One could argue that more Hull points should have been assigned, and that's fine. . . but a much bigger issue in my mind was that at the same time Vehicles were made more vulnerable via Hull Points, the Monstrous Creatures kept getting more and more out of control, becoming bigger, more wounds, invulnerable saves, increasable Cover saves etc. And while there were damage results that could result in multiple Hull Points being lost, Damage vs. Monstrous creatures was still locked at 1! Major, major flaw.
GW basically went from one extreme, where whether a tank has been damaged ten times so far or not at all has no impact on further results, to another extreme where a tank spontaneously combusts the instant it takes a third damaging effect, regardless of what that effect actually was (even glances that didn't actually do anything besides rattle the crew). So I find that people tend to have strong opinions about which system was better based on which extreme they dislike more.
The underlying problem of the 5th Ed system was that tanks could either die instantly on the first hit or stick around forever. The problem of the hull point system was that it allowed weapons that shouldn't really be all that effective to still chip off hull points and knock out a heavier vehicle, and existed somewhat independently from the effects model represented by the damage table.
So spitballing again, you could take the 5th Ed system (no hull points), but do something like have each penetrating hit cause a cumulative +1 on the damage table for all successive glancing/penetrating hits (marked by some damage token on the vehicle). No glancing a tank to death from full health, but a tank that'd already eaten two penetrating hits would be in real danger of getting knocked out by even a glancing hit, and be very unlikely to survive a third penetrating hit.
Again, to me it's an area where no edition really got it right. I honestly think that the move to just giving vehicles wounds and degrading profiles was an improvement from a design standpoint, and better suited to a mass-battle game, but I feel the smaller scale of 2nd-5th warranted a bit more crunch.
Insectum7 wrote:I feel like Hull Points weren't that bad of an idea, as they were clearly put in there to curb the parking lots that 5th edition often produced. One could argue that more Hull points should have been assigned, and that's fine. . . but a much bigger issue in my mind was that at the same time Vehicles were made more vulnerable via Hull Points, the Monstrous Creatures kept getting more and more out of control, becoming bigger, more wounds, invulnerable saves, increasable Cover saves etc. And while there were damage results that could result in multiple Hull Points being lost, Damage vs. Monstrous creatures was still locked at 1! Major, major flaw.
I had blocked out the Monstrous Creature issue, which was somehow a problem for every faction BUT the one that was most famous for its Monstrous Creatures (poor tyranids). Even GW knew how bad their vehicle rules were in 6th and 7th and just kept throwing stuff that was clearly a vehicle and went "nah though, its a beast". My favorite is the Stormsurge, which has an exposed pilot, being marked as a giant Monstrous Creature. Like I get that "open topped walker" would be complete garbage rules, and can even handwave away the exposed pilot since you can build say a Leman Russ with the commander sticking out, but just using the bandaid fix of "this vehicle is not a vehicle" is tiring.
Yeah, I feel that Hull Points would have been an easier pill to swallow if vehicles actually had saves, would have really helped with the spam of medium strength weapons if a save was actually allowed. More hull points as well. Basically the closest way to salvage Hull Points is to just jump straight into what we got in 8th/9th, which I like far more than 6th/7th rendition of vehicles, but a bit less than say 4th and 5th.
catbarf wrote:
GW basically went from one extreme, where whether a tank has been damaged ten times so far or not at all has no impact on further results, to another extreme where a tank spontaneously combusts the instant it takes a third damaging effect, regardless of what that effect actually was (even glances that didn't actually do anything besides rattle the crew). So I find that people tend to have strong opinions about which system was better based on which extreme they dislike more.
The underlying problem of the 5th Ed system was that tanks could either die instantly on the first hit or stick around forever. The problem of the hull point system was that it allowed weapons that shouldn't really be all that effective to still chip off hull points and knock out a heavier vehicle, and existed somewhat independently from the effects model represented by the damage table.
One big problem with the hull point system was that it existed *in addition* to the damage table. Essentially you were having weapons damaged, crew shaken, etc, while also losing wounds immediately. It made it so vehicles were fairly squishy, as even marines just swinging their fists could glance AV10 on a lucky roll.
JNAProductions wrote:Jink wasn't inherently bad. 4+ Cover on demand, but you have to snap shoot next turn? That's a fair trade, on a shooting unit.
The issue was melee units who could Jink, and suffered basically no penalty from doing so.
Insectum7 wrote:I also feel like an early version of Jink was a 5+. Kinda like how Cover was once a 5+ and then became a 4+ later on.
IMO the problems with Jink really just stem from the fact that 40K has always had a to-hit system that doesn't actually take into account how hard something is to hit, and so we got these clunky retrofit solutions like aircraft only being hit on 6s and fast things getting special invulnerable saves. The more prevalent those mechanics got, the worse it felt, because they really weren't an optimal way of conveying that concept through mechanics. I don't think any edition got that concept particularly well, because speed-as-an-invuln is still around- and it's gotten weirder, with weapons that produce mortal wounds ignoring it outright.
I feel it would be much cleaner to make to-hit a comparison check like S-vs-T, allowing both size and speed to be taken into account by a single stat and allowing more scope for things to affect shooter accuracy, but I recognize that this isn't the thread for wishlisting.
Insectum7 wrote:I feel like Hull Points weren't that bad of an idea, as they were clearly put in there to curb the parking lots that 5th edition often produced. One could argue that more Hull points should have been assigned, and that's fine. . . but a much bigger issue in my mind was that at the same time Vehicles were made more vulnerable via Hull Points, the Monstrous Creatures kept getting more and more out of control, becoming bigger, more wounds, invulnerable saves, increasable Cover saves etc. And while there were damage results that could result in multiple Hull Points being lost, Damage vs. Monstrous creatures was still locked at 1! Major, major flaw.
GW basically went from one extreme, where whether a tank has been damaged ten times so far or not at all has no impact on further results, to another extreme where a tank spontaneously combusts the instant it takes a third damaging effect, regardless of what that effect actually was (even glances that didn't actually do anything besides rattle the crew). So I find that people tend to have strong opinions about which system was better based on which extreme they dislike more.
The underlying problem of the 5th Ed system was that tanks could either die instantly on the first hit or stick around forever. The problem of the hull point system was that it allowed weapons that shouldn't really be all that effective to still chip off hull points and knock out a heavier vehicle, and existed somewhat independently from the effects model represented by the damage table.
So spitballing again, you could take the 5th Ed system (no hull points), but do something like have each penetrating hit cause a cumulative +1 on the damage table for all successive glancing/penetrating hits (marked by some damage token on the vehicle). No glancing a tank to death from full health, but a tank that'd already eaten two penetrating hits would be in real danger of getting knocked out by even a glancing hit, and be very unlikely to survive a third penetrating hit.
Again, to me it's an area where no edition really got it right. I honestly think that the move to just giving vehicles wounds and degrading profiles was an improvement from a design standpoint, and better suited to a mass-battle game, but I feel the smaller scale of 2nd-5th warranted a bit more crunch.
^I think I agree with all of that.
I do believe that there's an ideal combination of 2nd, 4-5th and 8th that takes the best elements of all of those.
