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Its been over two weeks now if im correct, and we have not seen a thing for those two supps in the FAQ section.Im not speaking in terms of "they need to be nerfed", its just a geniune oddity that nothing at all has came up. Even the clearest and most well founded books have had at least a couple clarifications. I really doubt either book is perfect.

GW are giving marines some time in the sun before they're pushed back to the army for beginners.

Short answer - no-one knows.


Wild speculation from another thread:

 chimeara wrote:
Speaking to one of the play testers today about the IH issues. While he's bound by contract not to disclose specifics of things. He did say there was a MASSIVE error in communication in regards to the IH book. Which is part of why the FAQ is late.

I'd expect some major changes once it drops.

I do wonder if it when something like

GW iron hands can have move and shoot heavy weapons without penalty in devistator doctrine or reroll 1's

Playtesters Both(either) are fine

GW Both (combined) is balance find replace or with and job done.

I honestly can't imagine GW saying "yeah sure" and printing those rules themselves. Wouldn't they have their own play testers as well as the external ones?

 Tyranid Horde wrote:
I honestly can't imagine GW saying "yeah sure" and printing those rules themselves. Wouldn't they have their own play testers as well as the external ones?

These are the same people who thought 3 moral immune conscripts etc etc were fine, most of them are narative players first and foremost they wouldn't spot OP even if it slapped everyone else in the face.

GW is just roleplaying as the Imperium. Everything is barely on time or delayed without reason, things that need more resources don't get them, things that don't need more resources get flooded with more, Xenos are just a waste of resources that could be better spent on the Imperium, Chaos is just a bunch of heretics using outdated equipment who should've never left the far superior Imperium, and Grey Knights don't exist so stop asking about them. Joking aside, I suspect that GW was surprised by how competitive and meta warping the supplements are and as a result the FAQs were delayed to include some balance changes.

 Tyranid Horde wrote:
I honestly can't imagine GW saying "yeah sure" and printing those rules themselves. Wouldn't they have their own play testers as well as the external ones?

Their own playtesters are incompetent when it comes to actually testing, that much has been obvious throughout the decades.

And either their external testers are little better or, more likely, they are not listened to enough.

Their own playtesters aren't incompetent by any stretch of the imagination.

They just aren't playing with ITC or other common 'tournament'(read: house) rules...and frankly, I've been thinking for awhile that the external playtesters are using this as a way to get a leg up for tournaments.

Theres one thing not taking tournaments into account.

Whatever happened during IH play tests IS NOT that.

 Kanluwen wrote:
I've been thinking for awhile that the external playtesters are using this as a way to get a leg up for tournaments.

That's a little silly, because its not like only they will have access to the codex.

Ordana wrote:

 Tyranid Horde wrote:
I honestly can't imagine GW saying "yeah sure" and printing those rules themselves. Wouldn't they have their own play testers as well as the external ones?

Their own playtesters are incompetent when it comes to actually testing, that much has been obvious throughout the decades.

And either their external testers are little better or, more likely, they are not listened to enough.

Kanluwen wrote:Their own playtesters aren't incompetent by any stretch of the imagination.

They just aren't playing with ITC or other common 'tournament'(read: house) rules...and frankly, I've been thinking for awhile that the external playtesters are using this as a way to get a leg up for tournaments.

It's a combination of all the above.

So you want a FAQ to tell you "For now, everything's working as we intended."?

No, because that'd be a bald faced lie, or alternatively proof that GWs play testing is using narrative missions played by 12 year olds.

 Tyranid Horde wrote:
I honestly can't imagine GW saying "yeah sure" and printing those rules themselves. Wouldn't they have their own play testers as well as the external ones?

You must be new here. GW didn't even realize you COULD playtest games until like 2016.

 vaklor4 wrote:
No, because that'd be a bald faced lie, or alternatively proof that GWs play testing is using narrative missions played by 12 year olds.

It not working how YOU intend =/= not working how GW intends.

I have a feeling that there is small chance that GW doesn't know what the goal of testing something suppose to be. Or they use the video games understanding of the worde, were companies put out games 6 or 12 months too soon, and expect that the stuff will somehow work itself out.

That's a little silly, because its not like only they will have access to the codex.

But is is a leg up to know that GW is thinking about something like doctrins. Or a new edition of WFB not being WFB, but AoS.

ERJAK wrote:

 Tyranid Horde wrote:
I honestly can't imagine GW saying "yeah sure" and printing those rules themselves. Wouldn't they have their own play testers as well as the external ones?

You must be new here. GW didn't even realize you COULD playtest games until like 2016.

Not new, just tired of pure stupidity.

 Kanluwen wrote:
Their own playtesters aren't incompetent by any stretch of the imagination.

They just aren't playing with ITC or other common 'tournament'(read: house) rules...and frankly, I've been thinking for awhile that the external playtesters are using this as a way to get a leg up for tournaments.

That's stupid. I'm sorry but that's really stupid. First of all, ITC doesn't change all that much and what it does change is designed to tone down GW's ridiculous crap, not exacerbate it. (Plus the Michigan GT uses pretty much straight from the book rules and the ironhands guy there dominated everyone. If it wasn't for his gak paint score he would have taken first by a massive margin.)

Second of all, tournament players are just as likely to stick with an army they're comfortable with for an entire edition as they are to chase the dragon, and most of the time they'll win either way.

Third of all, the vast majority of players are terrible and good tournament players would only really need help beating other good tournament players. And other good tournament players would be just as able to take advantage of the rules.

This seems like a pretty typical conspiracy theory from someone who doesn't understand what being good at the game is actually like.

It's clear to me that IH are an example of playtesting gone wrong.
I don't assume malice when incompetence is enough, so I guess that the ones writing the final version of the rules misunderstood completely the playtesters' insight.
I only hope that they are taking their time to address this in a serious way rather than applying a band-aid temporary fix or kicking the can down the road.

It's sincerely unthinkable that the current version of IH rules could go unmodified until the spring 2020 big faq. That's six months from now.

ccs wrote:

 vaklor4 wrote:
No, because that'd be a bald faced lie, or alternatively proof that GWs play testing is using narrative missions played by 12 year olds.

It not working how YOU intend =/= not working how GW intends.

Working how GW intends =/= ACTUALLY working either.

Were the armies played in tournaments under ITC rules and those played in euro tournaments not under ITC rules different to a large degree, with only eldar flyer lists being the thing in common between both tournament types? A lot of people playing in UK seem to have claimed that, over the last 1-2 years or so.

Where is the FAQ? It's sitting on an Editor's desk at GW HQ in Nottingham, right next to the empty bottle of scotch and the passed out editor who can't believe the IH were released like that in the first place.

Karol wrote:
I have a feeling that there is small chance that GW doesn't know what the goal of testing something suppose to be. Or they use the video games understanding of the worde, were companies put out games 6 or 12 months too soon, and expect that the stuff will somehow work itself out.

We know from interviews and such that in the past most of GW's testing was grabbing a bunch of units and throwing them on the table for a fun game.

They didn't (and I imagine still don't) actually try to break things while testing and it shows.

 Tamwulf wrote:
Where is the FAQ? It's sitting on an Editor's desk at GW HQ in Nottingham, right next to the empty bottle of scotch and the passed out editor who can't believe the IH were released like that in the first place.

You think GW has an editor?

 Kanluwen wrote:
Their own playtesters aren't incompetent by any stretch of the imagination.

They just aren't playing with ITC or other common 'tournament'(read: house) rules...and frankly, I've been thinking for awhile that the external playtesters are using this as a way to get a leg up for tournaments.

There's some clear evidence that their playtesters are either braindead or completely incompetent. Look at the infinite exploding 6s ruling that somehow made it through. Look at the Tau Tigershark AX-1 that had a macro weapon on a non-titanic model that has a minimum move speed with the page number for where you can find the macro rules that explain how that model is literally NEVER able to fire that gun. There are some problems that are functionally broken without interacting with any other rules outside of their own and a playtester following the RAW would find the problems immediately. Not a single playtester checked to see if it had the Titanic keyword? Not a single playtester applied the FAQ to the Imperial Fist Bolter Drill RAW?

This is completely different from "Castellans don't need a point increase" and going "just kidding 100 pt increase" a few months later. Balance is subjective and is effected by tons of outside variables like ITC rules, ETC rules, and player skill. They mess up basic functional things and that's a playtesting issue at its core unless they stopped asking "does it work?" before they ask "does it work as intended?"

A little insight into GW's playtesting from their Facebook page:

Warhammer 40,000 wrote:So, we have an internal rules team and around 20 playtesters. Lets say, they all play 3 games a week with a new Codex. That's around 40 games being played a week. So, perhaps 100-120 games get played in the playtest period. They catch LOADs of things that need tweaking, and discuss points values, how rules work together, the way they interact with various enemies etc.

Release day rolls round. We sell (picking a number out of the air) 50,000 copies of Codex: Orks. That means 50,000 games being played on day one. Maybe another 50,000 games being played day 2.

In 2 days, the community has played 100,000 games or more, against every possible enemy, and every possible scenario. They spot a few things our playtesters didn't (it's a vast and complex game after all!) and pass it on to us at 40kfaq@gwplc.com.

Our rules writers, eager to make sure everyone's gaming experience is as good as it can be, take those questions and produce these FAQ documents.

For our rules team and playtesters to get through 100,000 games, they would need to play 3 games a week for almost 5 years. We reckoned you guys didn't want to wait that long, you see!

So some seemingly obvious things slip through. Is it due to incompetence, lack of due diligence, work load or some other reason? I do not know.

 DominayTrix wrote:
They mess up basic functional things and that's a playtesting issue at its core unless they stopped asking "does it work?" before they ask "does it work as intended?"

Maybe someone here knows something about this: are the play-testers just given the rules to play around with or do the 40k rules team also provide a designer's commentary explaining how the rules are "intended to work"? A lot of these problems seem to be caused by the intention of rules not being communicated properly through the way they're written. It seems likely (to me, anyway) that the play-testers could easily miss out an alternative ways of reading/interpreting rules if there's a design commentary influencing them to read those draft rules a certain way.

 DominayTrix wrote:
GW is just roleplaying as the Imperium. Everything is barely on time or delayed without reason, things that need more resources don't get them, things that don't need more resources get flooded with more, Xenos are just a waste of resources that could be better spent on the Imperium, Chaos is just a bunch of heretics using outdated equipment who should've never left the far superior Imperium, and Grey Knights don't exist so stop asking about them. Joking aside, I suspect that GW was surprised by how competitive and meta warping the supplements are and as a result the FAQs were delayed to include some balance changes.

You may well be joking, but that would explain a *lot*...

Wait, if there’s only 100-120 games played in the play test period at 40 games in a week, why is the playtest period only 2-3 weeks for core rules for a game that need to remain relatively unchanged for years due to printing costs? Most games get playtested way more than that. I really really hope (but sadly doubt) that’s only the external playtest period and they do much more internally first.