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Hi Dakka

I played from 1st to 5th ed. and quit when I started college as the hobby was simply too expensive. Recently a friend was talking about how prices have gotten a little better, or have at least not risen as much, and that the scene is still thriving. Before I dare walking into a gaming store (I'm in Knoxville, TN) and get sucked back into the warp, I wanted to ask Dakka a few questions.

First, I understand that there is a new edition coming, which I guess this will be 8th ed. Do we know when this will come out, if it's relatively soon then I might not even bother learning the current edition.

Secondly, if I do get back into the game I'd like to use one of my existing armies to learn the rules before purchasing a lot of stuff. Of my armies, I have blood angels (use to be 6-8k pts), tyranids (4-5k pts), and maybe 2k pts of orks. I have been reading about different armies and it appears that none of mine are not in a very good state regarding diversity of army lists. Am I wrong in my interpretation about any of these armies? Right now I'm leaning towards running vanilla marines or off-meta blood angels.

As a third point, I"d be happy to hear any other general advice that you might have to share with a returning player in my situation.

Cheers

From what I understand from the rumours that are flying around is that a new edition is right around the corner and that with this new edition there will be considerable changes to the rules. Apparently a lot of the rule bloat is being addressed.

That being said take that with a grain of salt.

5th edition was one of the best for rules. They are a nightmare of over bloated crap right now, but we all hope that 8th corrects it.

I just started too, last edition I played was 5th and I originally bought Rogue Trader in 1985. Our group plays 7th edition and we get by, but honestly we skip a lot of the current rules.

You will be fine starting with any of the 3, but I'd be willing to bet that you will look for a new army soon after. :-)

 Da-Rock wrote:
...5th edition was one of the best for rules...

Mostly. A lot of the psyker stuff that got implemented as special rules in the GK book did need to get ported into the general population (there were a lot of special-case mechanics that did similar things beforehand), but it'd have worked better if they'd done that without introducing the WHFB psychic mechanics we've got now.

so I am waiting for 8th edition to come out. Just read most of 7th ed ruleset and its a mess.

Makes 2nd edition nice and clean by comparison.

I have high hopes for 8th or I will be a 2nd edition player forever I suppose. (3rd was fun but at least it kept to its vision statement of keeping a simple dumbed down game)

the later stuff seems to have added complexity for complexity sake

wes

TC: I'd wait for 8th. If it shifts things as much as rumored, the entire meta is going to change, and how armies function may very well change, meaning what units are any good will likely change.

You can do okay with the armies you have(especially BA), you may just have to buy some new stuff, and realize you're not top of the meta. Well, currently you're not. After the next edition perhaps those armies will gain prominence, who knows.

If you just play 7th ed without all the formations, all armies using Combined Arms Detachment (old FoC), then it is not really any more bloated or complicated than 5th.

It's still kinda bloated. Gargantuan Creatures and Superheavies are much more prevailant. Same with fortifications. Flyers have completely different rules than their 5th counterparts. Melee Weapons no longer have just a handful of effect, but full on gun-style profiles. Charges are no longer set and are determined by 2D6, Overwatch and Snapshots exists, multiple detachments are now the norm, Psychic Powers are no longer on a leadership test but rather done Fantasy style with a whole phase dedicated to them, etc

Oh yeah can't forget about hull points. That rule alone singlehandedly made vehicles do a 180 from "awesome" to "yuck".

The game has changed a lot since 5th.

GW has said they are prioritizing much tighter rules and better balance in 8th, so having an army in hand means you should be ok in the new edition. The new edition should land in June by all official/unofficial leaks. So I would suggest you go get battle scribe, and read up on 1d4 chan, instead of buying the 4+ rule books you would need to play currently. Because any rules and codexes you buy right now are going to be very short lived.

The current edition is a little tough on blood angels, they are currently duking it out with grey knights for the title of the worst army in the game. Orks are mid-tier (with the right formations), and Nids are sure glad that the grey knights and Blood angels are there to stop them from hitting the bottom.

Wait we're worse than the space bugs?

Huh.

 Grimgold wrote:
GW has said they are prioritizing much tighter rules and better balance in 8th, so having an army in hand means you should be ok in the new edition. The new edition should land in June by all official/unofficial leaks. So I would suggest you go get battle scribe, and read up on 1d4 chan, instead of buying the 4+ rule books you would need to play currently. Because any rules and codexes you buy right now are going to be very short lived.

The current edition is a little tough on blood angels, they are currently duking it out with grey knights for the title of the worst army in the game. Orks are mid-tier (with the right formations), and Nids are sure glad that the grey knights and Blood angels are there to stop them from hitting the bottom.

Nothing that can battle brother with tigurius/loth can be considered "the worst army in the game" given that invisibility or veil of time & near unkillable deathstars are a thing.

BA may not have the best options for this, but they have options.

I'd put GK up quite high due to Draigo + Stern with allied Cent Star + Tigurius.

Orks are poor and nids have really suffered with bad codex for several editions now.

BA are probably your best bet depending on what you have, or run them as vanilla marines of some description, and pull some superfriends librarius conclave shenanigans.

BA's only bottom rung because there's not much point in playing them; anything that's not the death company is either obsolete or available in a better form in Codex: Space Marines, and the Death Company is only marginally more useful due to this being a shooty edition with a focus on large numbers (two things Death Company are very much not).

BAs, on paper, is not a bad army, but right now is more of a pointless army since, again, most of the stuff you want to do with them the vanilla marines can do better.

Grey Knights are up there because their more useful units are all susceptible to the massive amount of AP2 running around, moreso than other armies because they don't have cheap cannon fodder to balance it out without allying with someone. Their only saving grace is the Dreadknight and Librarian, but that is only good when your opponent don't know how to counter them.

Nids aren't exactly bad, but rather in the position where CSM use to be (in that there's ONE good build and that's it.). For an army with a hilarious amount of supplementary material and extra stuff you need to buy to use, it's surprisingly lacking in diversity. Compounded by the fact that a lot of the unit choices absolutely suck at what they're suppose to do (Maleceptor, Haruspex, the infamous Pyrovore) but also don't have any other uses.

Orks and Guard are a tossup; there are people who insist they're good, insist they're bad, insist they have good builds but lacks diversity, and so forth. People have used them to success, but they are inconsistent.

DrummerBoy:
You havent been gone that long. Yes your armies have had the power creep pass them but I would recommend buying the models you like, maybe find a used or cheap mini-rule book, and down loading BattleScribe to your phone. Tinker with lists and formations you have the models for without "re-uping" into the GW line on precipice of a new rules overhaul.

I was in a similar situation, having stopped GW and all war gaming for undergrad, grad, post doc etc. I have had some great years since. The conventions are fun as hell and the LVO gives you the opportunity to be a grown up and play. I suspect the other modern conventions are the same.

So, I recommend starting with minimal time and money investment. See if you like it. If not well there's always... shudder... doing something productive.

Everything will depend entirely on who you game with.

If you have good friends who play and aren't curb-stomping asshats...you can have a good time regardless of how atrocious the current rules are (the worst they've ever been, arguably).

If you're looking for pick-up games, I'd stay away till 8th for sure...and even that's not a promise of getting much better.

I've had success running ba assault termie formation + a cad with dreads and marines in drop pods. Orks can do fine in non-top-end 1 on 1 tourney meta. I'm not a fan of nids but they've won a couple large tourneys last year.

All this armies can work. But not in a way that eldar, sm or necron armies can. You don't just pick random stuff and call it a day - you need a carefully thought through list that supports your best possible tactical approach.

Or just find people with the same power-level lists. Or use some restricted rule settings to cut on the most broken (usually new) stuff. And you'll be a happy guy.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:


Orks and Guard are a tossup; there are people who insist they're good, insist they're bad, insist they have good builds but lacks diversity, and so forth. People have used them to success, but they are inconsistent.

Orks are good (mid tiers) only with the right lists, which are composed by a spam of their 6-7 best units. You need a lot of bikes, trukks, mek gunz, meganobz, tankbustas, etc to assemble some competitive ork lists. A typical casual ork list is among the worst armies available in a competitive meta.

I'd say wait til 8th. Most of the rumors put it coming out sometime june/july. And the changes we have heard about are pretty drastic (total overhaul of morale system, armor pen system going back to something akin to 2nd edition -sv stuff, vehicles having wounds and no damage table) which indicate that codexes will be invalidated in favor of an AOS style Generals Handbook release (All the rules and datasheets for all existing models in a single book)

 Blackie wrote:

Orks are good (mid tiers) only with the right lists, which are composed by a spam of their 6-7 best units.

Isn't it like this for most codexes though?

Tyranid problem right now, is everyone else has had 2 codex updates since theirs was written. As a result, their rules require you actually print out the FAQ to go with them. Otherwise, you won't actually have your psychic rules.

And the fact everyone and his neighbor carries a grav gun that effect them.


Current rumor for release is June 7th (pre-release) and June 17th (release).

Thanks for all the feedback! One thing that is funny is how much everyone is agreeing about the 8th ed. rules..I'm not sure I've ever seen this much of a consensus in the 40k community about anything.

I think I've been convinced to just get back into the modelling aspect and hold off on any big purchases until the new rules drop.

Yeah, this close to an edition drop and from the sounds of what you have in your inventory already. Your pretty safe just borrowing books from friends/using battescribe to build a 7th edition army. Then get back into basic playing.

Assuming the June rumor is true for 8th. It should shake up the forces by quite a bit. There was alot of power creep in 6th and 7th edition codex/books. Which means things like the Gathering storm books would overpower older codexes like the orc and tyranid codexes.

Hopefully, they go with the current theory of releasing everything at the beginning on warscrolls. This would seriously balance out the armies at the start. Of course that doesn't mean their won't be power creep as new items come out but at least you wouldn't be playing with a nearly 2 editions out of date codex.

Mike712 wrote:

 Grimgold wrote:
GW has said they are prioritizing much tighter rules and better balance in 8th, so having an army in hand means you should be ok in the new edition. The new edition should land in June by all official/unofficial leaks. So I would suggest you go get battle scribe, and read up on 1d4 chan, instead of buying the 4+ rule books you would need to play currently. Because any rules and codexes you buy right now are going to be very short lived.

The current edition is a little tough on blood angels, they are currently duking it out with grey knights for the title of the worst army in the game. Orks are mid-tier (with the right formations), and Nids are sure glad that the grey knights and Blood angels are there to stop them from hitting the bottom.

Nothing that can battle brother with tigurius/loth can be considered "the worst army in the game" given that invisibility or veil of time & near unkillable deathstars are a thing.

BA may not have the best options for this, but they have options.

I'd put GK up quite high due to Draigo + Stern with allied Cent Star + Tigurius.

Orks are poor and nids have really suffered with bad codex for several editions now.

BA are probably your best bet depending on what you have, or run them as vanilla marines of some description, and pull some superfriends librarius conclave shenanigans.

So, what your saying is that grey Knights are fine if more than 50% of your army is normal space marines.

Draigo is grey Knights best unit and grey Knights have no units that use him extremely well. Even paladins are obsolete because they're 1:1 worse than custodians. (Custodies have 5 pointless less cost, and a straight up better stat live in every stat.) literally everything grey Knights do someone else does better for less points.

 koooaei wrote:

 Blackie wrote:

Orks are good (mid tiers) only with the right lists, which are composed by a spam of their 6-7 best units.

Isn't it like this for most codexes though?

You're right, but competitive orks lists are quite expensive and many players see them as a fun army and only want to field those units that they like most. Even at their best they can be mid tiers at most and like many other mid tiers they're not immediate to be played with success like tau, eldar, SM, necrons, SW or dark angels. That's why you don't see orks placed in tournaments quite often.

My advice would be to play Shadow War Armageddon for the next two month while you wait for 8th ed.
It's picking up quite a lot of momentum at my shop, people really enjoy it. You probably have all the models you need for it too, and it's based on the Necromunda ruleset, so close to the 2nd ed. ruleset you seem to like.

Youn wrote:
Tyranid problem right now, is everyone else has had 2 codex updates since theirs was written. As a result, their rules require you actually print out the FAQ to go with them. Otherwise, you won't actually have your psychic rules.

And the fact everyone and his neighbor carries a grav gun that effect them.


Current rumor for release is June 7th (pre-release) and June 17th (release).

One thing I do miss about 3rd was the seemingly endless ways that people use to build army lists. Lots of different armies were represented in friendly games and even competitive events that I attended such as Rogue Trader tournaments. I really hope GW will bring back some of those elements to army building.

Out of curiousity, are there any good armies that can be competitive with low model count? I was thinking GK, as the models are awesome and the lore is cool, but there is a lot of new stuff I don't know much about.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

fresus wrote:
My advice would be to play Shadow War Armageddon for the next two month while you wait for 8th ed.
It's picking up quite a lot of momentum at my shop, people really enjoy it. You probably have all the models you need for it too, and it's based on the Necromunda ruleset, so close to the 2nd ed. ruleset you seem to like.

Yea I saw this at the store the other day, it definitely looks interesting. I'll start looking more into that as that would be good to play while I wait for 8th.

Wait for an 8E and make a decision, 7E is bloated to the point where literally nobody is going to be playing it without at least some level of house ruling, implicit or otherwise. Obtaining and making sense of all the rules and options 7E has is not possible for most people, and thats not even getting into the massive balance issues with stuff like formations and detachments and allies and whatnot.

Let 7E die, then take a look at what pops up.

Drummerboy wrote:
One thing I do miss about 3rd was the seemingly endless ways that people use to build army lists. Lots of different armies were represented in friendly games and even competitive events that I attended such as Rogue Trader tournaments. I really hope GW will bring back some of those elements to army building.

In a lot of ways there are far more ways to build army lists now than in 3rd. They may not be very competitive lists, but if you're interested mainly in friendly games and you have a fun idea it's way easier to make it work within the rules.

I remember the early 3rd edition codexes being fairly restrictive when it came to list building. This improved with the supplements that were released and the 3.5 books.

On the other hand it seemed like "counts as" stuff was much more acceptable back then, I'm guessing partly because they had simplified things so a lot of 2nd Ed. models no longer had rules and they also had come up with a lot of thing that had rules but no models.

I never attended a tournament, this was just my impression from garagehammer, gaming clubs and the FLGS. My experience might not be very representative of the way things were during 3rd and I might even be remembering a lot of things wrong.

Drummerboy wrote:

Out of curiousity, are there any good armies that can be competitive with low model count? I was thinking GK, as the models are awesome and the lore is cool, but there is a lot of new stuff I don't know much about.

Sure, technically. This is a competitive army:

++ Formation Detachment (Chaos Space Marines: Codex (2012)) [1830pts] ++
Force Options (Supplement options here): Thousand Sons
Rehati War Sect [1830pts]
. Daemon Prince: Close Combat Weapon, Mastery Level 3, Power Armour, Tzeentch, Wings
. Daemon Prince: Close Combat Weapon, Mastery Level 3, Power Armour, Tzeentch, Wings
. Daemon Prince: Close Combat Weapon, Mastery Level 3, Power Armour, Tzeentch, Wings
. Daemon Prince: Close Combat Weapon, Mastery Level 3, Power Armour, Tzeentch, Wings
. Magnus the Red: Warlord
++ Total: [1830pts] ++

Youn wrote:

Drummerboy wrote:

Out of curiousity, are there any good armies that can be competitive with low model count? I was thinking GK, as the models are awesome and the lore is cool, but there is a lot of new stuff I don't know much about.

Sure, technically. This is a competitive army:

++ Formation Detachment (Chaos Space Marines: Codex (2012)) [1830pts] ++
Force Options (Supplement options here): Thousand Sons
Rehati War Sect [1830pts]
. Daemon Prince: Close Combat Weapon, Mastery Level 3, Power Armour, Tzeentch, Wings
. Daemon Prince: Close Combat Weapon, Mastery Level 3, Power Armour, Tzeentch, Wings
. Daemon Prince: Close Combat Weapon, Mastery Level 3, Power Armour, Tzeentch, Wings
. Daemon Prince: Close Combat Weapon, Mastery Level 3, Power Armour, Tzeentch, Wings
. Magnus the Red: Warlord
++ Total: [1830pts] ++

To make this work though you need loads of pink horrors, blue horrors, and brimstone's and maybe 2 chariots. So this would not technically be correct for low model count. Although if you want to play it non summoning it can still work but not as effectively.

 Jaxler wrote:

Mike712 wrote:

 Grimgold wrote:
GW has said they are prioritizing much tighter rules and better balance in 8th, so having an army in hand means you should be ok in the new edition. The new edition should land in June by all official/unofficial leaks. So I would suggest you go get battle scribe, and read up on 1d4 chan, instead of buying the 4+ rule books you would need to play currently. Because any rules and codexes you buy right now are going to be very short lived.

The current edition is a little tough on blood angels, they are currently duking it out with grey knights for the title of the worst army in the game. Orks are mid-tier (with the right formations), and Nids are sure glad that the grey knights and Blood angels are there to stop them from hitting the bottom.

Nothing that can battle brother with tigurius/loth can be considered "the worst army in the game" given that invisibility or veil of time & near unkillable deathstars are a thing.

BA may not have the best options for this, but they have options.

I'd put GK up quite high due to Draigo + Stern with allied Cent Star + Tigurius.

Orks are poor and nids have really suffered with bad codex for several editions now.

BA are probably your best bet depending on what you have, or run them as vanilla marines of some description, and pull some superfriends librarius conclave shenanigans.

So, what your saying is that grey Knights are fine if more than 50% of your army is normal space marines.

Draigo is grey Knights best unit and grey Knights have no units that use him extremely well. Even paladins are obsolete because they're 1:1 worse than custodians. (Custodies have 5 pointless less cost, and a straight up better stat live in every stat.) literally everything grey Knights do someone else does better for less points.

You only need to pay a 5 scout tax to get Tigurius.

10 paladins + Draigo + Stern + Tiggy.

Guaranteed gate for mobility, guaranteed sanctuary for 2++, high likelihood of veil of time for reroll-able 2+++ or invisibility and FNP.

Stupidly tough unit, with a large footprint for multi assaulting, plus quite a bit of killing power with S5 or S8 and force.

Pad the rest out with MSU strike squads for deep striking objective secure units and even more psychic dice.

Maybe not the best unkillable deathstar, but it's still an unkillable deathstar.