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Let's do something crazy and be pseudo-positive about 8th edition for a change.

What things present in previous editions are you glad are not in 8th?

Personally my favourite change was removing vehicle weapon arcs. Not only did they never bother to define the default arcs, telling you do go by how you physically modelled the model, but since you couldn't split fire it made sponsons a big waste of points. If they were the 90 degree Guard type, you could never fire both against small targets because they were parallel to each other pointing forward, so most likely couldn't draw LOS with both and even if they were the Predator/Land Raider 180 degree type there was still a massive dead-zone in front of you where you couldn't draw line of sight with either gun.

And don't get me started on the number of arguments about whether or not my hull mounted weapon was within 45 degrees or not.

- old AP-System
- vehicle fire arcs
- vehicle armor values as they simply didn't matter since 6th edition when hull points were introduced and every vehicle was more flimsy than a single plague marine
- soulblaze, roll a die to roll a die to then get a S3 hit or something... 7th edition in a nutshell
- look out, Sir! - a lot of unnsecessary roling to wound a character - and you basically could never kill a character from range, as he even dodged sniper rifles. The 8th edition ruling is still not perfect, but at least it's simple and there are ways to hurt characters now.

The old cover system. It usually only helped cheap infantry so it was mostly useless for a lot of units.

I really hated formations in 7th. "Run this very specific list of models to get a powerful and in many instances necessary benefit. What, you don't like tomb blades? feth you, no Decurion for you."

Crazy wound allocation from 5th. 5 nobs take 5 wounds? No one dies because they all have slightly different gear

Gitdakka wrote:
Crazy wound allocation from 5th. 5 nobs take 5 wounds? No one dies because they all have slightly different gear

I remember when Nob Bikers reigned supreme and slaughtered entire enemy armies. Good times!

OH thats easy!

Dying on rolls of 1 moving over terrain
Needing 6's to hit moving vehicles in melee
Instant Death for MW models
No pre-measuring
Scatter dice
Flamers hitting guys inside open top

I really don't miss the old wound table from when I first started playing.

Instant death from double toughness weapons. Its so good for T3 HQ models to not be instajibbed any more. So nice to not have celestine or cannoness die to a stray autocannon shot.

One guy in shiny armour somehow protecting an entire squad from a hail of gunfire. Sadly, that's still a "tactic" in Horus Heresy games. I'm close to breaking and painting my squad sergeants silver. :(

The rather arbitrary distinction between a tank that's simply big and one that's super-heavy.

I played a lot of 2nd, and a decent amount of 3rd and a tiny bit of 4th before leaving the game for a good 10+ years. The game just didn't interest me. I came back with a large 2nd edition army several months before 8th launched. I watched 7th edition games locally for a while, and then partook in several for a couple weeks before ceasing playing again. 7th was some perverse awful version of 3rd, an edition that never appealed to me a ton. It was very much a "Christ this game has gone stupid" moment. I stated in several places, even here on Dakka that unfortunately I thought my 40K time was past and I couldn't fathom a version of 40K from GW that would bring me back.

So...I'm just happy the game is as versatile as it is now. I can say I miss nothing about hte 3rd/4th/7th I played.

EDIT: Sorry for that tangent...but in the few months I witness 7th, I just couldn't fathom

1) Deathstars
2) 2+ re-rollable saves
3) Land Raiders immobilizing on rubble
4) Invisibility spells
5) Free stuff from detachments (in a game 'balanced' by point values)
6) The need to spread out models meticulously to avoid templates...way too much time spent, etc.

Wound allocation
Armour values
Move or fire heavy weapons

That’s pretty much it

4th edition was the best by far, but here's what I don't miss from it:

- lack of official FAQs combined with such poor rules writing clarity that the community-made FAQs were as long as the rulebook
- being absolutely brutal towards transports, even forcing passengers to disembark out of phase on any penetrating hit
- only two codexes a year, each with 2, maaaybe 3 plastic kits
- Orks getting diddly squat in the entire lifespan of the edition

My Orks striking last in combat even though I was charging was not very fun, I like the 8th edition rule way better.
Losing your entire unit for failing a leadership test after combat was not fun as well, although I suppose it did make combat feel deadly.

Having to take a leadership test to shoot at any unit not the closest unit really slowed down the shooting phase, so I'm glad that's gone too!

ITT- Several people disliked some of the more nuanced tactical elements of 40k and were glad they were removed.

 Grimtuff wrote:
ITT- Several people disliked some of the more nuanced tactical elements of 40k and were glad they were removed.

except a lot of this wasn't nuanced. Let's use vehicle turrets as an example here, this might be "nuanced" if GW had carefully designed and balanced each tank around it's field of fire but well... it seems pretty clear to me they didn't

BrianDavion wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:
ITT- Several people disliked some of the more nuanced tactical elements of 40k and were glad they were removed.

except a lot of this wasn't nuanced. Let's use vehicle turrets as an example here, this might be "nuanced" if GW had carefully designed and balanced each tank around it's field of fire but well... it seems pretty clear to me they didn't

Nuanced for 40k.

Let me preface this by saying I love 8th, so let's not have any of the knights of a certain hue jump down my throat....


Vehicle firing arcs, target priority, things that were impossible to wound/hit for some things, wound allocation, no premeasuring. And those are just the ones mentioned ITT. All were nice tactical elements to the game that made you think about things like board positioning and LOS denial. Removing them is not a good thing. Just because GW poorly implemented some of them does not make the underlying concept a bad idea.

Wound allocation tactical? Woubd allocation as it was before was a travesty. It was a bug not a feature.

I agree vehicle firing arcs and armor values were tactical, butthey wherent suited for warhammer. Those things work on skirmish games with 1-2 vehicles per side, or games about armored combat.
Also, they are better for historical games, where every vehicle is a box. In warhammer, with eldar, necron and tau vehicles, it didnt worked priperly.

 Grimtuff wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:
ITT- Several people disliked some of the more nuanced tactical elements of 40k and were glad they were removed.

except a lot of this wasn't nuanced. Let's use vehicle turrets as an example here, this might be "nuanced" if GW had carefully designed and balanced each tank around it's field of fire but well... it seems pretty clear to me they didn't

Nuanced for 40k.

Let me preface this by saying I love 8th, so let's not have any of the knights of a certain hue jump down my throat....


Vehicle firing arcs, target priority, things that were impossible to wound/hit for some things, wound allocation, no premeasuring. And those are just the ones mentioned ITT. All were nice tactical elements to the game that made you think about things like board positioning and LOS denial. Removing them is not a good thing. Just because GW poorly implemented some of them does not make the underlying concept a bad idea.

A lack of premeasuring doesn't add anything meaningful tactically IMO. With premeasuring and how things work in 8th you can check the odds of getting into charge range, whether advancing is worth it, if you can get your aura close enough, etc. Whereas without premeasuring if you're 1/8" out it doesn't matter what your reasoning for doing something was.

CHALLENGES !!

Whoever thought it was a cool idea should rot in Nurgle's garden. I hated everything about them, so much that it heavily contributed to my 3 years break of Warhammer.

If they'd only think of bringing them back, I'd quit again without a second thought.

Personally my favourite change was removing vehicle weapon arcs. Not only did they never bother to define the default arcs, telling you do go by how you physically modelled the model, but since you couldn't split fire it made sponsons a big waste of points. If they were the 90 degree Guard type, you could never fire both against small targets because they were parallel to each other pointing forward, so most likely couldn't draw LOS with both and even if they were the Predator/Land Raider 180 degree type there was still a massive dead-zone in front of you where you couldn't draw line of sight with either gun.

No more maneuvering of the vehicles.
I can see your tank chain from my tank chain and so I can shoot you.
This gives the game more the flavor of a board game.

 wuestenfux wrote:

Personally my favourite change was removing vehicle weapon arcs. Not only did they never bother to define the default arcs, telling you do go by how you physically modelled the model, but since you couldn't split fire it made sponsons a big waste of points. If they were the 90 degree Guard type, you could never fire both against small targets because they were parallel to each other pointing forward, so most likely couldn't draw LOS with both and even if they were the Predator/Land Raider 180 degree type there was still a massive dead-zone in front of you where you couldn't draw line of sight with either gun.

No more maneuvering of the vehicles.
I can see your tank chain from my tank chain and so I can shoot you.
This gives the game more the flavor of a board game.

Including facings and firing arcs when a rhino could be driving up the field spinning like a beyblade without any impact on their movement speed was always silly.

Wound allocation from the direction of the attacking unit. That created so much argument, micromanaging, and headaches, and was one of the major contributors for why assault sucked in 6th/7th. You could even lose out on that unot's assault turn, since you could be knocked out of btb and fail to get back in with your pile in. It was such a bad rule.

Similarly, having to move the shortest distance during the assault move. being able to move your guys how you want adds a very welcome element of involvement into the assault phase and adds some new tactics (and kinda necessary if you need to lock a unit down to keep them from Falling Back)

Also challanges. Just anything about 7th, honestly.

Whilst 8th still has some roll a dice to see if you roll some dice sillyness the removal of random powers, warlord traits and wotnot is good

Removal of templates and scatter, yep the new dice based shots thing isn't perfect its less fractious

Formations, again Stratagems are a shaky replacement but every step away from Skyhammer is a good move

Off the top of my head:
- Flamers hitting units inside open-topped vehicles.
- Having to fire all of a unit's weapons at the same target.
- Formations.
- Invisibility.
- The entire 7th edition psychic phase.
- Instant Death.
- The rules for super heavies and gargantuan monstrous creatures.
- Dark Lances and Blasters being complete garbage against vehicles.
- Only being able to snapshot against fliers.
- Torrent Flamers
- Not a rule as such, but I certainly don't miss how so many weapons in the game were all but useless towards the end of 7th. There were so many undercosted super heavies, gargantuans and vehicles rolling around that basic infantry weapons were almost entirely worthless. Even the stuff they could theoretically hurt tended to be so durable that they simply couldn't inflict any meaningful damage.

Gitdakka wrote:
Crazy wound allocation from 5th. 5 nobs take 5 wounds? No one dies because they all have slightly different gear

See, for all the complaints, I actually didn't mind 5th's wound allocation system all that much. In the example you mentioned, is it really so unreasonably that 5 different Nobs were wounded, rather than just two taking all the fire and being killed outright?

What's more, there were only a few units in the entire game that could abuse the rule in any meaningful way (Nobz being one of them).

Compare that to 6th and 7th - where you can have an HQ stand at the front of a unit using a 2+ save to absorb small-arms fire, whilst casually designating other members of the unit to be hit by more powerful weapons. It was much more abusable and could be done by far more units.

Oh god, I'd already managed to completely forget about Look Out Sir. What a load of nonsense that was. Don't miss it in the slightest.

- Vehicle damage chart
- Vehicle firing arcs
- Drawing LOS from weapon mounts
- Emergency disembarking
- Tank shock
- Limit on how many weapons a vehicle could shoot
- No split fire
- Scoring wave serpents (would be equivalent to wave serpents with objective secured today)
- Psychic phase
- Rolling for psychic powers
- Psychic disciplines
- Rolling for warlord traits
- Falling back
- Scattering
- Removing casualties from the front
- Challenges
- Independent Characters conferring rules
- USR list in the BRB
- Unit types that changed how units moved: Beasts, cavalry, bikes, jet bikes, skimmers, fast skimmers, flyers, jump infantry, flying monstrous creatures, jumping monstrous creatures...
- Monstrous creatures acting like planes
- T4(5) for bikers
- Instant death
- Old toughness chart
- Comparing weapon skill
- Initiative
- Sweeping advances (aka auto-lose any ork unit if you roll below average)
- 7th edition ork codex
- 7th edition ork supplement
- 7th edition "improved" version of ork supplement


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

Gitdakka wrote:
Crazy wound allocation from 5th. 5 nobs take 5 wounds? No one dies because they all have slightly different gear

I remember when Nob Bikers reigned supreme and slaughtered entire enemy armies. Good times!

Somehow everyone remembers nob bikers but not TWC, who did the very same thing, except they had storm shields, and the all around better stat-line of space marines.

Also GK Paladins.

I definatly think instant death was a problem. How many otherwise pretty good to great characters where effectively dismissed with "lacks eternal warrior, will die to a single power first strike, avoid"?

The awfully written 5th ed Tyranid codex springs straight to mind.....

example. Mawlocs eat people by swallowing them from underneath, fine in theory buuuttt.....

1. Deepstrike rules prevented you from placing the template actually on an enemy unit...

2 If you did get lucky and scatter on to some foes, you then mishapped and died or went back underground.

(yes i know it was eventually faqed, but still...no one noticed this????)

Wound allocation was always a pain.

Formations. Nice idea in theory, horribly Implemented (if only they had charged a pts value for actually using them on top of paying for the units...)

princeyg wrote:


Formations. Nice idea in theory, horribly Implemented (if only they had charged a pts value for actually using them on top of paying for the units...)

I liked the idea of rewarding players for taking a fluffy force, the idea of a wayto enchourage taking tac marines backed up with assault and devestator marines (instead of "scouts backed up by whatever FOTM elite choice you have") but yeah in practice it was bad, as some formations where crap, others where too good. and then some basicly had rules attached to it that where pretty much the only way you could get the army to work.