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 Plant wrote:
I think datasheets and a large number of similar profiles aren't the main issue. It's the teirs of special rules that stack that are causing issues:
Faction abilties
Cross faction abilities
Turn based abilities
Unit abilities
Warlord abilities
Auras

And essentially they all boil down to wound more or hit more. The only way we got through a game is by using battlescribe to check we hadn't missed anything.

To be honest, I'm surprised by the desperate state of GWs army books and rule sets.

The nesting of bespoke rules has become absurd. It feels just about as arbitrary and complex and fun as tax law, ffs.

They desperately need to bring back a single, universal set of scalable special rules in the core book, and only add bespoke special rules to units *rarely.* As it is now, the morass of rules just feels bewildering and tedious. They're split across multiple books, errata, FAQs, and now day-1 WarCom patches. It just feels so ... out of control? Amateurish? Unguided? Improvised?


Incredibly, despite all of this, the core rule set is simplistic and far too course to represent the model range. I mean, ffs, the core rule set isn't even capable of representing whole classes of units (flyers are the most egregious example of this).


And then they have the audacity to charge the outrageous prices that they do, for books like this, that have incorrect, imprecise, or broken rules on top of everything else. And the painfully sophomoric flavour text. And re-re-reused artwork. Only the new artwork and model galleries are enjoyable, and there's not nearly enough of that.

 Agamemnon2 wrote:
I wouldn't be looking at the rules for evidence like that, personally. GW has always been unequivocally a miniatures-first company. Rules change on a dime, sometimes wildly, with no more rhyme nor reason other than making people buy new editions.

One day you're a hero, next day you're a clown

When the time comes, I'm reasonably confident the rules will be bent, mutilated and violated sufficiently to make Firstborn first a non-optimal pick and later a non-legal one.

When is the time coming though? When all new marine releases are Primaris? But hasn't that been the past five years?

It'd be really weird for them to ditch them just after releasing a whole new raft of plastic firstborn marines. Yes, they're marketed at a different system, but I'm not sure how much that matters. It seems the least likely time to ditch them right now.

(Cue someone saying "exactly, and GW will always make the worst decision in any given moment and that's why they will be squatted tomorrow")