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Does anyone else see the value in a FAQ to limit what DG and other Power Armor factions can do with Drop Pods? I mean Deathguard is the hot new ugly army to face, but I am also scared of playing the new +1 to almost everything Blood Angels in turn 1 drop pod assaults.

Has anyone come up with any private table FAQ's on Drop Pods or think GW should make one?

I was thinking of lowering them to T6, maybe 7 wounds? Or keeping them so that you have to spend your turn disembarking the unit? I mean, with the new 2W Plague Marines and their new attack profiles with -1 to all damage, I don't want those in my face or on all the objectives turn 1. It's broken and needs to be altered somehow for 9th.

Do DG have access to drop pods? They don't (or at least didn't) have normal drop pods, and I was under the impression that the various deepstriking Forgeworld transports got moved to Legends.

As for drop pods in general, my understanding is that they're generally considered not very good. So unless that has changed, I'd be reluctant to nerf a unit that's already viewed as undesirable.

I don't have the new marine book yet, but the lcassic issue with drop pods was mostly that they're an easy way for your opponent to make his units untargetable. If you leave a pod too close to an objective, your opponent can just charge it, stay in combat with it, and control the nearby objective while ignoring all of your opponent's shooting except that of the drop pod itself.

Maybe that has changed?

If drop ods were to change, I like the idea of...
* Making them cheaper.
* Making them lower toughness and fewer wounds (T5 W4?) because you really just have to damage the gun and it ceases to exert any influence over the battlefield.
* Make it so that being within 1" of them doesn't prevent the enemy from shooting you.
* Deploy them and their contents before the battle anywhere that is more than 9" away from enemy units and outside the enemy deployment zone rather than having them arrive as reserves. The idea being the battle has started because the pods have arrived. The pods aren't patiently waiting for just the right moment to land in exactly the right place based on the flow of battle.
* Maybe disallow turn 1 charges for the units that just slammed to earth from orbit. Maybe.
*Oh. And clarify that doors don't count for purposes of movement blocking, etc.

The intended end result is that pods become a cheap (50ish points?) way of starting your units closer to the enemy/objectives. The pods themselves stop causing problems (enemies hugging them, movement blocking melee armies, etc.). You'll want to direct some attacks at them to clear them off of objectives, but they'll die to one or two lucky lascannons.

That said, that was my pitch from before 2W tactical marines were a thing, so the idea might need rethinking.

I just think DPs are a hold over mechanic from a long past edition that is pointlessly broken in the new edition, it's practically a different game now. There are very few who still cling to the "it's Thematic" excuse now that Primaris are stock standard and "thematic".

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
I just think DPs are a hold over mechanic from a long past edition that is pointlessly broken in the new edition, it's practically a different game now. There are very few who still cling to the "it's Thematic" excuse now that Primaris are stock standard and "thematic".

Alright. well, neither you nor I are making the "it's thematic," argument, and primaris aren't available to Death Guard nor are they able to go inside a drop pod. So what is it about drop pods that you feel is broken? A rhino full of tacticals or plague marines can generally get onto the mid-field objectives on turn 1. So is it specifically the threat of having enemy models gunning for your backfield on turn 1 that has you concerned? If so, making the drop pods themselves less survivable doesn't seem like it would fix that.

I guess I wouldn't be opposed to preventing charges out of drop pods on turn 1? Although if we've decided that turn 1 charges are too big of a problem, we probably ought to do something about warsuits and Raven Guard while we're at it.

And again, do DG actually have access to drop pods at the moment?

Dread Claws? I think so, or I just got cheated out of a game in my FLGS last weekend.

Dreadclaws are functionally very different from "modern" pods. They're more analogous to something like a Stormraven.

Beyond them, no, Chaos has zero access to pods, and the kind of turn 1 rush being discussed here is not mechanically possible for non-loyalist Astartes.