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I'm this for a stats project, so help me out here guys. Is Matt ward really the fifth chaos God, wardicus, destroyer of games and changer of plot? Or was his work if more value than he's typically given credit for? Vote 1 for first one, 2 for the latter
One more word of insolence, and I shall rip out your tongue and beat you to death with it. That said, how is your day going?
Thought for the day: Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
30k Ultramarines: 2000 pts
Bolt Action Germans: ~1200 pts
AOS Stormcast: Just starting.
The Empire : ~60-70 models.
1500 pts
: My Salamanders painting blog 16 Infantry and 2 Vehicles done so far!
How, just how do people who's job is to make/test/balance rules do such a horrible job?!
DO:70S++G++M+B++I+Pw40k93/f#++D++++A++++/eWD-R++++T(D)DM+ Note: Records since 2010, lists kept current (W-D-L) Blue DP Crusade 126-11-6 Biel-Tan Aspect Waves 2-0-2 Looted Green Horde smash your face in 32-7-8 Broadside/Shield Drone/Kroot blitz goodness 23-3-4 Grey Hunters galore 17-5-5 Khan Bikes Win 63-1-1 Tanith with Pardus Armor 11-0-0 Crimson Tide 59-4-0 Green/Raven/Deathwing 18-0-0 Jumping GK force with Inq. 4-0-0 BTemplars w LRs 7-1-2 IH Legion with Automata 8-0-0 RG Legion w Adepticon medal 6-0-0 Primaris and Little Buddies 7-0-0
QM Templates here, HH army builder app for both v1 and v2 One Page 40k Ruleset for Game Beginners
Lobukia wrote: How, just how do people who's job is to make/test/balance rules do such a horrible job?!
They dont do the last two things
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2015/10/15 18:52:37
H.B.M.C.- The end hath come! From now on armies will only consist of Astorath, Land Speeder Storms and Soul Grinders!
War Kitten- Vanden, you just taunted the Dank Lord Ezra. Prepare for seven years of fighting reality...
koooaei- Emperor: I envy your nipplehorns. <Magnus goes red. Permanently>
Neronoxx- If our Dreadnought doesn't have sick scuplted abs, we riot.
Frazzled- I don't generally call anyone by a term other than "sir" "maam" "youn g lady" "young man" or " HEY bag!"
Ruin- It's official, we've ran out of things to talk about on Dakka. Close the site. We're done.
mrhappyface- "They're more what you'd call guidlines than actual rules" - Captain Roboute Barbosa
Steve steveson- To be clear, I'd sell you all out for a bottle of scotch and a mid priced hooker.
Don't like his writing style, but that's not saying much, because I don't think I've ever read one paragraph of GW fiction that I thought was written well.
I think the previous Necron codex was pretty decent rules-wise. If they had just printed that book in hardback and called it the 7th edition codex, I wouldn't have been disappointed. On the other hand, the current Tyranid codex is just bad, bad, bad. Those being the only 2 publications I have that he wrote, I'd say he's produced a mixed bag of good and bad rules, with the same amateur writing style that all GW authors seem to share.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2015/10/15 18:59:35
In any other business on the planet that doesnt involve the constant gaking of human beings for profit (Ie politics) Ward and Phil would have been dismembered by the populous or left on an island with thousands of cameras for our entertainment as we watch them fight each other for resources with wood carvings..
Then again, if that were the case, one would surely believe that said wood carvings would be in 40k style and one of them would bring a giant WK shaped log or build a Monolith out of coconuts and they would simply argue who fudged up more until both starved to death..
Life: An incomprehensible, endless circle of involuntary self-destruction.
AtraUnam wrote: He turned a great and varied (if slightly overpowered) army into freaking mono-build gak. Codex ̶T̶y̶r̶a̶n̶i̶d̶s̶ Devourers has never been the same.
Matt Ward had nothing to do with the Tyranid Codex, you can thank Cruddace for that.
Lobukia wrote: How, just how do people who's job is to make/test/balance rules do such a horrible job?!
Because he had to answer to people like Alan Merrett.
"Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds: Fire, walk with me." - Twin Peaks
"You listen to me. While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I am a naysayer and hatchetman in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and I'll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method... is love. I love you Sheriff Truman." - Twin Peaks
Guilliman's blade wrote: I'm this for a stats project, so help me out here guys. Is Matt ward really the fifth chaos God, wardicus, destroyer of games and changer of plot? Or was his work if more value than he's typically given credit for? Vote 1 for first one, 2 for the latter
Are you aware Dakka has a polling feature?
Every time I look at Wardian fluff, I am sickened. Everything (EVERYTHING) is all about how ooh-soo-good everything in *his* army is, and why you should all love them, and why everyone else sucks and is no threat.
It reads like everyone's first attempt at making "original" ultramarine fluff.
Guilliman's blade wrote: I'm this for a stats project, so help me out here guys. Is Matt ward really the fifth chaos God, wardicus, destroyer of games and changer of plot? Or was his work if more value than he's typically given credit for? Vote 1 for first one, 2 for the latter
Are you aware Dakka has a polling feature?
Every time I look at Wardian fluff, I am sickened. Everything (EVERYTHING) is all about how ooh-soo-good everything in *his* army is, and why you should all love them, and why everyone else sucks and is no threat.
It reads like everyone's first attempt at making "original" ultramarine fluff.
Original Ultramarine fluff you say?
Truly lore worthy of our spiritual liege Master Wardus!
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2015/10/15 20:32:00
Thought for the day: Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
30k Ultramarines: 2000 pts
Bolt Action Germans: ~1200 pts
AOS Stormcast: Just starting.
The Empire : ~60-70 models.
1500 pts
: My Salamanders painting blog 16 Infantry and 2 Vehicles done so far!
AtraUnam wrote: He turned a great and varied (if slightly overpowered) army into freaking mono-build gak. Codex ̶T̶y̶r̶a̶n̶i̶d̶s̶ Devourers has never been the same.
I'm pretty sure that was Cruddance, not Ward.
Abadabadoobaddon wrote:
Phoenix wrote:Well I don't think the battle company would do much to bolster the ranks of my eldar army so no.
Nonsense. The Battle Company box is perfect for filling out your ranks of aspect warriors with a large contingent from the Screaming Baldies shrine.
If anyone from the design studio deserves some flack, it's Jervis "No Force Org, No points, balance is bad" Johnson
I agree. Ward was a good codex designer. Everybody talks gak about him but secretly hoped he would write their book. I would have been interested in how he handled blood angels during the era of formations
Abadabadoobaddon wrote:
Phoenix wrote:Well I don't think the battle company would do much to bolster the ranks of my eldar army so no.
Nonsense. The Battle Company box is perfect for filling out your ranks of aspect warriors with a large contingent from the Screaming Baldies shrine.
If anyone from the design studio deserves some flack, it's Jervis "No Force Org, No points, balance is bad" Johnson
I agree. Ward was a good codex designer. Everybody talks gak about him but secretly hoped he would write their book. I would have been interested in how he handled blood angels during the era of formations
He would have added a formation rule whose description was something like:
"And the enemy knelt down and wept at the perfect beauty of the Sanguinor, his perfectly formed abs glistening..."
-Any enemy within 24" of the Sanguinor is dropped to I1, and may not move or shoot.
If anyone from the design studio deserves some flack, it's Jervis "No Force Org, No points, balance is bad" Johnson
I agree. Ward was a good codex designer. Everybody talks gak about him but secretly hoped he would write their book. I would have been interested in how he handled blood angels during the era of formations
Not even close... No Daemon player except for TFG's wanted Ward anywhere near our 8th edition army book. Instead, he got a chance to "fix' his earlier mistake, and instead turned DoC into the most dysfunctional, OP mono-build book that Fantasy had ever seen.
Then he wrote High Elves and inserted an instant win button that was even more broken & obnoxious than what freaking 5th edition Ward Knights(tm) were, because... "Reasons."
Kelly's Codex Daemons on the other hand is absolutely anything BUT mono-build!
Seriously, outside of perhaps Nurglings, Bloodletters and the Slaany Chariots, (really just the Hellflayer is unusably awful), everything in that book is viable in the right list.
Ward's books would have been good if they were balanced against the other author's books. But even with ward gone, the books remain unbalanced. I didn't usually agree with his work, but it had a lot of work put into them and were usually balanced against each other.
Everyone talks about the fantasy daemons, no-one seems to remember the fantasy dark elves and vampire counts that were just as powerful if not moreso.
The most bizarre thing I took out of that era of 40k when you-knoe-who was the Skub-topic of the year (several years running) was that I never actually came across the 5th ed Grey Knights in normal 40k. There were a good handful people where I lived that used them but through some bizarre string of coincidences I never faced them using their GK army. I never got to see or experience what got everyone so angry about GK other than the fluff that was always discussed.
Odd special characters aside, I did like the crunch for Space Marines in 5th (even though Drop Pod armies were the bane of my existence until IG 2009 rolled out)
Guilliman's blade wrote: I'm this for a stats project, so help me out here guys. Is Matt ward really the fifth chaos God, wardicus, destroyer of games and changer of plot? Or was his work if more value than he's typically given credit for? Vote 1 for first one, 2 for the latter
Are you aware Dakka has a polling feature?
Every time I look at Wardian fluff, I am sickened. Everything (EVERYTHING) is all about how ooh-soo-good everything in *his* army is, and why you should all love them, and why everyone else sucks and is no threat.
It reads like everyone's first attempt at making "original" ultramarine fluff.
Original Ultramarine fluff you say?
Truly lore worthy of our spiritual liege Master Wardus!
That's adorable
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2015/10/16 06:15:58
As a rules designer, too enthusiastic. Which in the context of current GW publications, where "testing" is some unknown concept, obviously lead to disaster several times. His 7th edition Daemons fantasy book was perhaps not the most extreme case, but it's usually brought as the most significative, as it became the last straw to completely break that Fantasy edition (to be completely fair, several armybooks before that one had already made a dent).
As a fluff writer he's just terrible. He writes with the maturity of a 13 yeared old boy just arrived to the game. You don't even need to go to Draigo, just pick the Wood Elves 8th ed. armybook. Most of the fluff is a copy/paste from previous armybooks, including the 6th edition one Ward co-wrote alongside Reynolds. That's perhaps where the huge difference is shown: if checked by a more seasoned and competent writer, Ward can produce valuable fluff. If left unchecked, disaster is the only outcome. In the 8th Wood Elves book, the copy/pasted sections are mostly ok, but the newer pieces added by Ward alone (and unsupervised) simply stink. That part about Malekith's wife, and then Ariel subduing Morathi... it's pure garbage. It's the kind of gak that would have made a competent editor to roll his/her eyes in disbelief and tell the writer to redo the whole thing, or delete it outright. Didn't happen.
Progress is like a herd of pigs: everybody is interested in the produced benefits, but nobody wants to deal with all the resulting gak.
GW customers deserve every bit of outrageous princing they get.
Rules-wise, his 40k books from 5th edition were some of the best ever written IMO. They had so many options and very few truly bad units. If every book in the game had that kind of balance/flexibility, the game would have been near perfect. Yes, seriously, I do think that highly of his rules.
So much I can even endure his truly awful fluff writing. Because, I mean, damn.
Sad thing is, he showed some genuine interest in actually coming up with new ideas, but was a failure at actually putting them to paper. Most GW codex fluff has senseless glorification of the given faction that adds little to the narrative, but Ward really took to maximum fanboy.
Rules wise, he was the best. He didn't make anything super-eldar over powered like Kelly, or grind anything into the dirt (AM, any tyranid build other than a very select few) lime Cruddace,
Fluff wise, well... Draigo carved his name into a Daemon Pri arches heart, and all Space Marines secretly wish they were Ultramarines.
warboss wrote: Is there a permanent stickied thread for Chaos players to complain every time someone/anyone gets models or rules besides them? If not, there should be.
Crazyterran wrote: Rules wise, he was the best. He didn't make anything super-eldar over powered like Kelly, or grind anything into the dirt (AM, any tyranid build other than a very select few) lime Cruddace.
I highly suggest you go ask every Orc player just how "amazing" their 7th edition army book was...
Ward only wrote super powered rules if he liked the faction he was working on. He loves Space Marines, so Vanillas, BA's & Durp Knights especially became god tier. He believed that, "they're Daemons - they should be over powered!" and foisted that massive pile of rank garbage on us.
On the other hand, he came right out and stated in WD no less, that he doesn't like greenskins & wasn't really enthused about having to work on that project, and he made Orcs the worst Fantasy army GW has ever produced. (the only thing that's come close to it has been his 8th edition DoC book.)
Orcs were so woefully under powered & over costed, coupled with the atrocious Animosity rule, that most Orc players shelved their armies entirely!!
It takes a special level of incompetence to actually make Orc/Ork players give-up on their armies.
The Empire 
1500 pts
: 
Blue DP Crusade 126-11-6 
Biel-Tan Aspect Waves 2-0-2 
Looted Green Horde smash your face in 32-7-8 
Broadside/Shield Drone/Kroot blitz goodness 23-3-4 
Grey Hunters galore 17-5-5 
Khan Bikes Win 63-1-1 
Tanith with Pardus Armor 11-0-0 
Crimson Tide 59-4-0 
Green/Raven/Deathwing 18-0-0 
Jumping GK force with Inq. 4-0-0 
BTemplars w LRs 7-1-2 
IH Legion with Automata 8-0-0 
RG Legion w Adepticon medal 6-0-0 
bag!"
12,000
14,000
11,000
so no.
