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Why cant dark angels have ironclad dreagnouts? Like there are no ironclad dreagnouts in their codex, makes no sence!

Why can't Ultramarines have vengence land speeders?

GW gives the different colors of marines different toys to help distinguish them and justify their separate codex. From a fluff POV, there is not a lot of reason why they don't have them. Just the way the book was written.

It's pretty stupid, no question about that.

But if you had everything in the basic codex, plus all the special DA stuff, why bother to have vanilla marines? There needs to be trade offs, or just just end up with codex++ and power creep.

Nevelon summed it up best. Codex's are balanced by giving some better gear here and weaker gear there, not just points. Often one codex can buy a better (fill in the blank) for the same cost as another codex's mediocre (fill in the blank). It is balanced by another weak point. That is the theory behind the whole game (although it isn't perfect that is for sure). Tau are good at this, not at that. Etc. If you want a DA Ironclad for fluff reasons, talk to your regular opponents and tell them the backstory (Say, this guy was abandoned on a space hulk with a techmarine...tyranids about, it was armor up or die!). They might say "Cool!" and let it on the table. If you just play I want the most powerful unit in each category...re-think the point of the game. (Not that I think an ironclad is really that much more powerful than a reg dread...)

Allies basically negates this anyway, it's definitely easier today than it ever has been to take units from other codexes.

Because arbitrary differences have to exist in order to justify different colours of Marine having different codexes.


The irony is that if GW was to roll all the different colours together into a single list so that everyone could take everything, people would scream blue murder that their particular Marines weren't special enough anymore.

this question is redundant, its like asking why do the Dark Angels get Corvex (Sammael's Jet Bike) and nobody else does?

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Because arbitrary differences have to exist in order to justify different colours of Marine having different codexes.


The irony is that if GW was to roll all the different colours together into a single list so that everyone could take everything, people would scream blue murder that their particular Marines weren't special enough anymore.

I think the only reason they DON'T do this is that it would sell fewer Codexes. I don't think they really care how the players feel.