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With an albeit cursory glance over the leaked faction books is it me or do they seem a bit bland, lacking in detailed options and some with questionable points values.

Yes, we'll need them to start initial games and get up and running but could GW not have pushed 8ths release until say Xmas and got all the current codicies written up and tested.
Why is a requirement to purchase these initial books (with a certain level of blandness) and then get a whole rake of codexes which may or my not be released concurrently (more power creep?).

Im confused and a little frustrated

And yes Im aware theres a huge amount of info still to assimilate but.....

Well, it's not necessarily a requirement because you *could* wait until your actual Codex is released, which would have the same effect for you.

The Index books are really just a hasty stop-gap measure, and it does show. But it's a stop-gap that lets us start playing the game sooner, so in that way I think it's nice.

Also, at the rate these leaks are going you won't really *have* to buy any of them. They're going to be all over the Internet.

They are meant to be. They are the stop-gap measure so that everyone can at least play in the new version. Same thing happened in 2nd and 3rd. When the core rules change so much that everyone needs new lists to play, you get a stop-gap. Codexes will come out and diversify the flavor.

Fair enough argument I suppose.
Better to have everyone with the chance of getting up and running than some armies in total limbo.

I'm guessing it also gives a nice testing baseline to move forward from. Some codexes will already be complete, or close to. A few tweaks from observations would still be possible, as I doubt they are printed yet.

Less bland then when they did the stopgap for 3rd edition that's for sure.

These are closer to the get you by lists when AOS launched and the "black codex" of days gone by than the grand alliance books; and codexes will update the information in them as they are released.

I was under the impression these were the Points and Power Level books which cam be amended and updated on the fly while the codexes with contain extra rules for the specific factions with extra Stratagems and FOCs.

These things are like 2nd Edition's black codex (but significantly larger because everything has umpteen-bazillion additional units these days). Everything is pre-emptively keyworded to allow it to get future-proofed, but the swathe of additional units and special rules will be absent because the indexes are meant to simply give us lists to get by on until the codex comes. They are the baseline compatibility documents for our armies because the nature of 8th means they couldn't just do a FAQ on the old ones and call it a day without shooting their edition in the head.

And these are a damn sight better than the terrible 3rd Edition stopgap lists in the back of the book.

In either case, I like the simplicity because it affects everyone. For the first time in nearly 20 years all armies are kind of on the same page. None of them are victims of GW's old pendulum method of design. You wont have ultra-simplistic lists running alongside uber complex ones. No one is running a list that is behind an edition. There is just complete parity. So sure, they're simple, but for once everyone else is to.

C.Straken wrote:
I was under the impression these were the Points and Power Level books which cam be amended and updated on the fly while the codexes with contain extra rules for the specific factions with extra Stratagems and FOCs.

They said that there won't be faction specific FOCs (backtracking since they originally DID say that). These are literally "stopgap" rules to let you use your armies while they redo all the codexes to add back special rules and such, basically like the new crop of AOS books that add different faction-specific things


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ronin_eX wrote:
These things are like 2nd Edition's black codex (but significantly larger because everything has umpteen-bazillion additional units these days). Everything is pre-emptively keyworded to allow it to get future-proofed, but the swathe of additional units and special rules will be absent because the indexes are meant to simply give us lists to get by on until the codex comes. They are the baseline compatibility documents for our armies because the nature of 8th means they couldn't just do a FAQ on the old ones and call it a day without shooting their edition in the head.

And these are a damn sight better than the terrible 3rd Edition stopgap lists in the back of the book.

In either case, I like the simplicity because it affects everyone. For the first time in nearly 20 years all armies are kind of on the same page. None of them are victims of GW's old pendulum method of design. You wont have ultra-simplistic lists running alongside uber complex ones. No one is running a list that is behind an edition. There is just complete parity. So sure, they're simple, but for once everyone else is to.

Yeah for like a month until the first codexes drop (Primaris Marines probably being first, of course) that will start codex creep again

It was a necessary sacrifice in order to greatly reduce the sheer volume of rules. Sure we lost lots of random pieces of wargear, but how much of it was actually used? If you look at the army lists for 7th, everything is pretty bare-bone.

As for army specific rules, GW did a decent job of ensuring each unit plays like it used to. I don't need pages of If/Then statements to add flavour.