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With 9th being out for more than a half a year, I’d thought it be interesting to go over what I like least
About. Overall I think the edition is pretty solid, but these are the major issues I’ve seen with it so far.

1) Core, as it is being handled, is a mistake. While I get GW’s desire to stop captain equivalents babysitting vehicles in the backfield, their solution has been worse than the disease. I was skeptical of core the moment it was announced, and that skepticism has only increased as we see more and more books come out. The reason we saw captain equivalents with tanks so much, is because the tanks needed the extra efficiency to be competitive. It was also at least somewhat interesting being able to find and use combos with
vehicles. Having played deathguard with their new rules, I think a lot of our vehicles aren’t good enough because they aren’t core, and even the ones that are feel less interesting to play because they have no added synergy beyond maybe use a strat with them, or play poxmongers to buff up a an inv. Based on what I’m seeing with necrons and marines, I don’t think this is just a Deathguard problem.

2) Deepstrike isn’t good enough. Outside of a few shooty units, I feel that deepstriking is never a good idea. I have played both custodes and deathguard, and the thing these 2 armies have in common is that I’ve pretty much never deepstrike a terminator unit in either army. The board getting smaller and game length going down was enough to stop a lot of 8th’s deepstrike problems. GW decided to double down on this and make it so very little (aside from SM) can get better than a 9 inch charge. If I deepstrike a combat unit and fail that charge, than I will have effectively not used that unit for 2/5 turns of the game, where one of these turns is the most important turn of the game.

3) Book secondaries are being mishandled, Why do marine armies get 2 sets of 3 choices to make for secondaries. Why are some of these book ones much better than others? Why does GW think competitive players like this?

4) Restrictions have gotten to be too much. I get that GW wants to make this game more casual appealing, but restrictions add more problems then they solve in a lot of places, Already plenty of units of been invalidated because of equipment choices they had in previous editions, and army construction is becoming more and more difficult/ samey between armies. In essence, GW is hurting the flavor of the game with these level of restrictions.

5) GW’s rules writing structure is getting to become more and more of a problem. Right now we are living in age of 10 point revears and 275 kill tanks (yes they are OP, try them if you aren’t sure). Why did this happen, because GW releases things piecemeal and adresses
problems only after something else bad shows up, Simply put having this many models and rules in the game requires that GW faq things more frequently, and move more towards digital (army builder needs to be better).

10 points reavers is definitely a typo, just like when SW had EVERYTHING with obj sec. It will be fixed. Kill Tanks are FW, almost no one owns them, and while they may be undercosted (and yet SM have tons of more undercosted stuff) they won't break the game as only a tiny fraction of games will have them.

About core vehicles I don't know, I play orks and my vehicles can't benefit from generic auras anyway. What I do know is that fielding 3 ravagers in a corner babysitted by an archon (yes, I also played them a lot) was an abomination and I'm glad it's over.

To me 9th has basically three issues: one is the rules bloat, second is the massive dice rolling, and last is the presence of superheroes and superheavies in regular games, although this is something that GW introduced several years ago, it's not a 9th edition thing. Still, playing against knights, primarchs, etc it's something I despise .

Honestly, and I get perhaps they had to release it last year but I think dropping a new edition during what is currently going on is a crap idea. I can't speak for everyone but I won't be buying any books until I can actually hope to regularly play a game once more. This edition feels like the ramp up of codex creep and edition of the marine releases.

Which I love marines but really, this is silly. I feel like it'll end up being my least played edition since I started playing warhammer and I can't imagine I'm alone in that regard.

When something drops, you have to pray to the emperor to get it. Order anything its a life time away and yeah this isn't their fault but its a sign of the time from last year to this one.

This, over all, feels like the worst edition of warhammer and it's not all GWs fault it just is what it is. At this point I wonder if I'll play any 9th before they nuke the whole system from orbit and flip it all on its head again to clear up the bloat and codex creep once more.

I feel like with the limitations GW can't handle model releases, rules testing, or even road maps at the moment. They may have had to drop 9th but I don't think this edition will be remembered for the robust use of its game system but more for the turmoil all around it.

 AngryAngel80 wrote:
Honestly, and I get perhaps they had to release it last year but I think dropping a new edition during what is currently going on is a crap idea. I can't speak for everyone but I won't be buying any books until I can actually hope to regularly play a game once more. This edition feels like the ramp up of codex creep and edition of the marine releases.

Had they not released it during covid then for duration of covid there would be pathetic amount of sales.

GW lives by new releases. Models sell majority of all the sprues they are going to sell in lifetime in first months. If they don't release new kits they don't have new sales in significant amount. That's what dropped FB sales. GW moved resources to do AOS and as such only trickle of new kits which meant sales dropped hard.

They did not have luxury of waiting for covid to go away especially as there was no quarantees there would be vaccine even within couple years while 9th was released.

Salt donkey wrote:
With 9th being out for more than a half a year, I’d thought it be interesting to go over what I like least
About. Overall I think the edition is pretty solid, but these are the major issues I’ve seen with it so far.

1) Core, as it is being handled, is a mistake. While I get GW’s desire to stop captain equivalents babysitting vehicles in the backfield, their solution has been worse than the disease. I was skeptical of core the moment it was announced, and that skepticism has only increased as we see more and more books come out. The reason we saw captain equivalents with tanks so much, is because the tanks needed the extra efficiency to be competitive. It was also at least somewhat interesting being able to find and use combos with
vehicles. Having played deathguard with their new rules, I think a lot of our vehicles aren’t good enough because they aren’t core, and even the ones that are feel less interesting to play because they have no added synergy beyond maybe use a strat with them, or play poxmongers to buff up a an inv. Based on what I’m seeing with necrons and marines, I don’t think this is just a Deathguard problem.

2) Deepstrike isn’t good enough. Outside of a few shooty units, I feel that deepstriking is never a good idea. I have played both custodes and deathguard, and the thing these 2 armies have in common is that I’ve pretty much never deepstrike a terminator unit in either army. The board getting smaller and game length going down was enough to stop a lot of 8th’s deepstrike problems. GW decided to double down on this and make it so very little (aside from SM) can get better than a 9 inch charge. If I deepstrike a combat unit and fail that charge, than I will have effectively not used that unit for 2/5 turns of the game, where one of these turns is the most important turn of the game.

3) Book secondaries are being mishandled, Why do marine armies get 2 sets of 3 choices to make for secondaries. Why are some of these book ones much better than others? Why does GW think competitive players like this?

4) Restrictions have gotten to be too much. I get that GW wants to make this game more casual appealing, but restrictions add more problems then they solve in a lot of places, Already plenty of units of been invalidated because of equipment choices they had in previous editions, and army construction is becoming more and more difficult/ samey between armies. In essence, GW is hurting the flavor of the game with these level of restrictions.

5) GW’s rules writing structure is getting to become more and more of a problem. Right now we are living in age of 10 point revears and 275 kill tanks (yes they are OP, try them if you aren’t sure). Why did this happen, because GW releases things piecemeal and adresses
problems only after something else bad shows up, Simply put having this many models and rules in the game requires that GW faq things more frequently, and move more towards digital (army builder needs to be better).

1: I agree Core is a bad concept. It's basically a return to vehicles not getting chapter tactics, for some reason.

2: Honestly, deep strike is super good for me. I'm including an extra patrol of Stormtroopers in my IG lists to leverage deep strike, and my Space Marine and Grey Knight lists have tons of outflankers and deep strikers. That Said, it has felt devalued not because of a lack of strength, but because any unit can come close now with standard reserves coming with baked-in outflank capability, which is definitely something I think should go to preserve the advantage units with native deep strike have.

3: The regular secondaries are also mishandled, so that's nothing new. The missions of 9e are one of the lowest point parts of the edition for me, and they have so many problems from the scoring structure that devalues later turns, unequal secondaries and anti-faction secondaries, and a huge first turn advantage that I don't think they made a dent in after they methodically stripped out anything that would give the second player some recourse against being on the wrong side of lanchester's law.

4: Confused exactly what your saying. Things feel about the right amount of, if not restricted enough. I for one would like to see a return to the old force org. of 1-2HQ, 2+Troops, and 3ea of FA, Elite, and HS.

5: I would like to see a return to having 1 codex per month and having a set of model releases for each codex during that month, like at least how I felt it was when I started; as opposed to the codecies without models coming at a breakneck pace with lots of marine releases interspersed.




In terms of positive things:
Terrain. I really like the terrain, but vertical engagement is really silly. Guardsman Timmy has a really long bayonet. The whole "knights can't reach upper floors" could be solved by having models measure to a vertical volume of themselves, or by having knights and walkers have a special rule for a taller engagement range rather than guardsman timmy having a 25' long bayonet.

And... uh... yeah. That's kind of all I can think of. I think the game was at it's best in terms of balance just a little before the SM supplements came out a year and a half ago.

Salt donkey wrote:

2) Deepstrike isn’t good enough. Outside of a few shooty units, I feel that deepstriking is never a good idea. I have played both custodes and deathguard, and the thing these 2 armies have in common is that I’ve pretty much never deepstrike a terminator unit in either army. The board getting smaller and game length going down was enough to stop a lot of 8th’s deepstrike problems. GW decided to double down on this and make it so very little (aside from SM) can get better than a 9 inch charge. If I deepstrike a combat unit and fail that charge, than I will have effectively not used that unit for 2/5 turns of the game, where one of these turns is the most important turn of the game

And? You could foot slog it across the board, fail your turn two charge, and achieve achieve exactly the same amount of nothing.
At least on the DS + charge you save yourself a round of eating fire....

 Blackie wrote:

To me 9th has basically three issues: one is the rules bloat, second is the massive dice rolling, and last is the presence of superheroes and superheavies in regular games, although this is something that GW introduced several years ago, it's not a 9th edition thing. Still, playing against knights, primarchs, etc it's something I despise .

I definitely agree. The rules bloat and dice rolling in particular.

I'd say the biggest problem of 9th is GW's release strategy. The slow codex feed and uneven rules distrubution makes many armies feel very out dated or unplayable. At least in 8th they had the indexes in the start of the edition, but it was same problem when the codexes started to trickle in. Playing for example orks or tau now and having to wait at least a year for an update while marines rofl-stomp you with creeping rules is not fun really.

Gw should pretty much release all main factions together with the main edition rulebook. This would force them to have some coherent design aswell. In order to achieve this they really should streamline their rules.

 AngryAngel80 wrote:

Which I love marines but really, this is silly. I feel like it'll end up being my least played edition since I started playing warhammer and I can't imagine I'm alone in that regard.

Well, a global pandemic interfering with normal life will make playing games more difficult.

 AngryAngel80 wrote:
When something drops, you have to pray to the emperor to get it. Order anything its a life time away and yeah this isn't their fault but its a sign of the time from last year to this one.

Maybe that's a regional thing. I've had zero issue on any new release. No praying, I just let one of my local shops know what I want & come release day I get a text saying "Hey, come get your stuff..." Sometimes just a pic.

Let me just start by saying I like 9th edition. I have had somewhere around 6 to 8 games with it I think, with pandemic and all.

What I do not is when I get games that are despises turn 2 with one army beeing gone. It happened with my tyranids once, and with SW both times I played it.

I have concluded that stacking a whole lot of buffs on units like SM can do is very unbalanced. Especially on units with a high damage potensial. I am also unsure if giving multimelta 2 attacks was wise as they are very deadly. I would like to see things be less deadly so we get actual games. Not more deadly.

Agree that deep strike for the most is a trap. There are some exceptions. (Tyranids scoring units.) But you need a good early board presence, and preferably different lines of units/consistency plans. Sort of like a buddy system.

ccs wrote:

Salt donkey wrote:

2) Deepstrike isn’t good enough. Outside of a few shooty units, I feel that deepstriking is never a good idea. I have played both custodes and deathguard, and the thing these 2 armies have in common is that I’ve pretty much never deepstrike a terminator unit in either army. The board getting smaller and game length going down was enough to stop a lot of 8th’s deepstrike problems. GW decided to double down on this and make it so very little (aside from SM) can get better than a 9 inch charge. If I deepstrike a combat unit and fail that charge, than I will have effectively not used that unit for 2/5 turns of the game, where one of these turns is the most important turn of the game

And? You could foot slog it across the board, fail your turn two charge, and achieve achieve exactly the same amount of nothing.
At least on the DS + charge you save yourself a round of eating fire....

Foot sloggers aren't fishing for 28% chance charge, 48% with CP reroll. Bit different when you are at best(for one unit a turn) doing less than 50% chance with less than 30% for rest vs lot bigger chance for all ;-)

Main problem of 9th (and 8th):

rules written for a Patrol sized wargame with RPG elements is used to play Company sized games

hence why there is rules bloat as problem coming from using the "wrong" level of rules is tried to be fixed with even more rules while at the same time even more rules are added to fit the "fluff"

My main issue with 9th is that overall it does seem rather boring at the competitive level as you just see the same strategies and units used in the majority of lists:

- Obliterators w. MoS and Endless Cacophany.
- Tau Commanders with Command and Control node.
- Guilliman w. Hellblasters and Leviathan Dreads.
- 5x Dark Eldar w. Blaster in a Venom (spammed)

These are just the examples I can think of on the go. Obviously some are more competitive than others, my issue is just how boring they seem. I would just prefer some levelling out within the Codex so they aren't autopicks.

It also would be good to have a single LoW option in the Battalion detachment. Probably the idea of a Knight Castellan terrified GW enough to put a +3CP tax on every single LoW unit, but it'd be nice to run a Valdor or Malcador, admittedly crappy LoW units, without having to give up 1/4 of my CP to do so, then another CP just for the regiment bonuses.

tneva82 wrote:

ccs wrote:

Salt donkey wrote:

2) Deepstrike isn’t good enough. Outside of a few shooty units, I feel that deepstriking is never a good idea. I have played both custodes and deathguard, and the thing these 2 armies have in common is that I’ve pretty much never deepstrike a terminator unit in either army. The board getting smaller and game length going down was enough to stop a lot of 8th’s deepstrike problems. GW decided to double down on this and make it so very little (aside from SM) can get better than a 9 inch charge. If I deepstrike a combat unit and fail that charge, than I will have effectively not used that unit for 2/5 turns of the game, where one of these turns is the most important turn of the game

And? You could foot slog it across the board, fail your turn two charge, and achieve achieve exactly the same amount of nothing.
At least on the DS + charge you save yourself a round of eating fire....

Foot sloggers aren't fishing for 28% chance charge, 48% with CP reroll. Bit different when you are at best(for one unit a turn) doing less than 50% chance with less than 30% for rest vs lot bigger chance for all ;-)

True, in ideal circumstances the %s are better. But failures still happen. + there's so many more things things that can go wrong with the plan.

I mainly dislike the secondaries. They were garbage as ITC rules and somehow Reese and company conned gw into thinking they were good.

I have yet to play for obvious reasons but I've also always hated the codex creep and wait your turn for your update crap, however neither of those are new. Sure it's not as bad as the old days when you'd have to wait a long time for a new book, if you ever got one, but that doesn't make how they do it now any good.

Honestly with their campaign type supplements I think it's about time they moved to a format like Warmahordes did: you don't update the existing stuff outside of errata and the new books are campaign type books that add in extra units for multiple factions.

tneva82 wrote:


Foot sloggers aren't fishing for 28% chance charge, 48% with CP reroll. Bit different when you are at best(for one unit a turn) doing less than 50% chance with less than 30% for rest vs lot bigger chance for all ;-)

It depends on the footsloggin unit, not everyone has jump packs or plays sisters . Meganobz with their 4'' M will never reach combat without either a transport, a psyker to teleport them, or the deep strike stratagem. For them being able to appear 9'' away from an enemy unit is the best chance they get to be in combat, even if they fail the charge and soak one turn of shooting in response.

Terminators? Their transports are so inefficient and expensive that risking the possibility of failing the charge and getting shot off the board after that is still their best chance to do their job.

 Valkyrie wrote:
My main issue with 9th is that overall it does seem rather boring at the competitive level as you just see the same strategies and units used in the majority of lists:

- 5x Dark Eldar w. Blaster in a Venom (spammed)

That's not an 'issue' with 9th.

Drukhari (or at least Kabals) are a transport and infantry army. The codex has two transports in it. Would it be better if it were Raiders being 'spammed'? Or if it's the spamming that is offending your sensibilities, what balance of Venoms to Raiders is now not a problem?

As it happens, most of the recent Drukhari lists have been some flavour of Coven with Dark Technomancers (at least until the recent nerf), and now 'discount bin Reavers'. Kabalites in Venoms is so 'early 8th'.

I didn't really understand the problems I had with 9th edition until I played a different game a few times with a friend of mine, a WW2 game called Battlegroup with a fairly similar model count to your average 2000pt game.

The problems with 9th (and 8th, and 7th, honestly) are:

1) Time to resolution.

When you have made a decision, the amount of time that it takes to resolve that decision in 40k and determine the outcome is double or triple other wargame systems.

BG granularizes down to similar numbers of dice per model that 40k does, and has a similar triple roll resolution matrix where you either spot-hit-save vs non armored stuff or spot-hit-penetrate vs armored stuff. however, that's only for "Aimed Fire" which tends to be much harder to achieve results with than suppressive "Area Fire". and when you shoot "Area Fire" you take all the rate of fire you would have (say, 6 dice, for a fairly typical tank with a pair of machine guns) and then just roll a single pair of dice on the table to see if you've flung enough bullets to keep your target's heads down.

2) Deadliness

40k requires a MASSIVE amount of terrain on the table to prevent games being fully resolved by tabling in a matter of a few turns. Rerolls, stratagems, special abilities, relics etc are all massively tilted in the favor of offense rather than defense, and core mechanics like the morale system and mission structure add more deadliness rather than allowing players alternative ways to affect an opponent's models rather than getting them off the board.

Problem 1 in conjunction with Problem 2 results in a situation where you play other games the same length of time you'd play 40k, but you play more turns and end up with vastly more on the board at the end of the game, so you've had more actions and made more decisions with a vastly larger number of units.

3) Effective range as a percentage of board size

An intercessor with a bolt rifle is most likely exactly as effective shooting at a target that is 30" away as he is shooting at a target that is 2" away.

30" is nearly 3/4 the width of the board. What this tends to mean is, functionally, basically nothing is ever 'out of range' in 40k. And if you're fully in effective range, then there's no reason to move to a different location on the board. In an average 40k game, it is the correct decision to sit still and pump out damage for about 1/3 of your units to 1/2 of your units, depending on the army you're playing.

It definitely seems like this slow escalation of ranges has been ongoing since you were no longer forced to field the comparatively lower-ranged troop models in 7th, and lists like "oops all Riptides" became the norm, where everything could just have 30-40" range guns. Adding in Bolter Disipline/BadLer Eevilscipline (or whatever dumbfuck thing they named the CSM version) was just another step in the ongoing escalation. Basically just passing to marines what had been the norm for any shooting focused army for about an edition.

3rd edition: space marines have the unique ability with their troops to shoot 1 shot at 24" if they stand still with their basic gun

5th edition: Rapid Fire is a USR on most basic guns, allowing troops to shoot 1 shot at 24" if they stand still

7th edition: Rapid Fire still a USR, can now shoot 1 shot at 24" even if on the move

8th edition: Space Marines now have the unique ability on their troops to shoot both shots at 24 - or 30" - if they stand still

You can have weapons that have super long ranges while ensuring that there's a trade-off present to trying to sit back and use the long range - just build in modifiers for trying to shoot something far away.

 Blackie wrote:

tneva82 wrote:


Foot sloggers aren't fishing for 28% chance charge, 48% with CP reroll. Bit different when you are at best(for one unit a turn) doing less than 50% chance with less than 30% for rest vs lot bigger chance for all ;-)

It depends on the footsloggin unit, not everyone has jump packs or plays sisters . Meganobz with their 4'' M will never reach combat without either a transport, a psyker to teleport them, or the deep strike stratagem. For them being able to appear 9'' away from an enemy unit is the best chance they get to be in combat, even if they fail the charge and soak one turn of shooting in response.

Terminators? Their transports are so inefficient and expensive that risking the possibility of failing the charge and getting shot off the board after that is still their best chance to do their job.

Not to be rude but have you played many 9th edition games? To win you have be on the center objectives by turn 3 at the latest and you’re already at a disadvantage if you haven’t gotten something on then by top of Turn of 2. Meaning it should be pretty easy for meganobz to get charges by turn 2.

As an example, I run a 10 man squad of blightlords and 2 squads of deathshrouds. The only time I’ve considered deepstriking any of it is when I thought my deathshroud shooting could be impactful (I still didn’t do it even then). In every game I’ve played these could either make a turn 2 charge or the game became unwinnable for my Opponent due to me gaining too much of a point lead early on.

The scion guy is right only because scions A) take up a small footprint B) are relatively cheap/expandable and C) shoot rather than charge when the come in. Blood angles and white scars player deepstrike only because the have a small footprint and can add +2 to their charges.

I definitely agree with the above on the weapon ranges making the game static and boring. That combined with no unit facing mechanics means that there is effectively no agility or manoeuvrability. Its a big shame.

The biggest issue with 8th was lethality. Practically every change made was an attempt to bring down lethality despite codex after codex pushing it higher.

9th has simply kept making this worse. Weapons keep getting more deadly and then rules upon rules get piled on to try and keep things alive on the table in the face of such overwhelming firepower instead of GW taking a step back.

The fact we are now getting 3 wound terminators which can only be wounded on a 4+ just to have them maybe stay on the table for a turn is such failure of game design.

to many attacks everywhere, to much ap, to much damage.

I would love 40k to have some kind of moral system where you can meaningfully impact a unit without just killing it.
40k's moral system isn't really a moral system IMO, it's just "oh a lot of stuff died? Even more stuff dies", really GW?

Different games show a large variety of exactly how such a mechanic could work. But all have the general commonality of allowing yo reduce a unit's effectiveness in ways other than killing them.
That in turns allows you to build a game with interesting tactics beyond simply "kill the enemy".

 Valkyrie wrote:
My main issue with 9th is that overall it does seem rather boring at the competitive level as you just see the same strategies and units used in the majority of lists:

- Obliterators w. MoS and Endless Cacophany.
- Tau Commanders with Command and Control node.
- Guilliman w. Hellblasters and Leviathan Dreads.
- 5x Dark Eldar w. Blaster in a Venom (spammed)

These are just the examples I can think of on the go. Obviously some are more competitive than others, my issue is just how boring they seem. I would just prefer some levelling out within the Codex so they aren't autopicks.

It also would be good to have a single LoW option in the Battalion detachment. Probably the idea of a Knight Castellan terrified GW enough to put a +3CP tax on every single LoW unit, but it'd be nice to run a Valdor or Malcador, admittedly crappy LoW units, without having to give up 1/4 of my CP to do so, then another CP just for the regiment bonuses.

This is both anecdotal and could be applied to literally every edition to 40k. For example, in 5th edition every army had the exact same competitive builds that spammed the same stuff. Every grey knight looks list spammed paladins backed by pyscannon dreadnoughts. Every tyranid list spammed Tervigons with hiveguard. And every army with transports spammed their best ones with their best troop (with whatever their best special weapon were) Tac marines /grey hunter in razorbacks for marines, company vets in chimeras for IG, dire avengers with wave serpents for Eldar, oh and Kabolite warriors in venoms for dark Eldar. Yet people talk about this time as if it where the golden years of 40k.

IMO 9th has much more diversity in both competitively viable armies and units than editions 3-7 (1-2 were never competitive game). I just saw 3 killtanks wreck a deathguard and space marine meta, which would never have happened back in 5th.

Hmmm. Of the list I think book secondaries are the only major issue and I fear its going to get worse due to GW having to come up with dozens and dozens of objectives across all the factions. It would be impossible to balance this even if GW wanted to - and all evidence is that they don't.

For Death Guard, the MBH and dual spitter bloat drone are probably overcosted for what they do. I also think its clear the new Gladiator tanks are overcosted. The lack of synergy may exacerbate this - but I'm not sure every vehicle needs to have a buffbot giving them reroll 1s to hit to be viable.

I don't really mind Deepstriking. It should be for a tactical purpose - i.e. getting to a place on the board you couldn't just jog too. If you are are intending the unit to just brawl over some mid-board objectives, then yes its not an advantage and may even be a disadvantage. But I disagree it should be buffed.

Salt donkey wrote:

 Valkyrie wrote:
My main issue with 9th is that overall it does seem rather boring at the competitive level as you just see the same strategies and units used in the majority of lists:

- Obliterators w. MoS and Endless Cacophany.
- Tau Commanders with Command and Control node.
- Guilliman w. Hellblasters and Leviathan Dreads.
- 5x Dark Eldar w. Blaster in a Venom (spammed)

These are just the examples I can think of on the go. Obviously some are more competitive than others, my issue is just how boring they seem. I would just prefer some levelling out within the Codex so they aren't autopicks.

It also would be good to have a single LoW option in the Battalion detachment. Probably the idea of a Knight Castellan terrified GW enough to put a +3CP tax on every single LoW unit, but it'd be nice to run a Valdor or Malcador, admittedly crappy LoW units, without having to give up 1/4 of my CP to do so, then another CP just for the regiment bonuses.

This is both anecdotal and could be applied to literally every edition to 40k. For example, in 5th edition every army had the exact same competitive builds that spammed the same stuff. Every grey knight looks list spammed paladins backed by pyscannon dreadnoughts. Every tyranid list spammed Tervigons with hiveguard. And every army with transports spammed their best ones with their best troop (with whatever their best special weapon were) Tac marines /grey hunter in razorbacks for marines, company vets in chimeras for IG, dire avengers with wave serpents for Eldar, oh and Kabolite warriors in venoms for dark Eldar. Yet people talk about this time as if it where the golden years of 40k.

IMO 9th has much more diversity in both competitively viable armies and units than editions 3-7 (1-2 were never competitive game). I just saw 3 killtanks wreck a deathguard and space marine meta, which would never have happened back in 5th.

Oh yes, I meant to make a point that the issue isn't unique to 9th.

To add to my previous point, a particular gripe I have with both 8th and 9th is the Mortal Wound mechanic. I just don't like it. It's a lazy and boring mechanic that is just thrown in whenever they need an extra effect on something.

Anyone remember the old C'tan powers? Now they're just different iterations of "roll (x)D6, if you score (y) cause a MW". What harm would a proper ranged profile have done?

Mortal Wounds remove any flavour or character from a particular unit, and overall is just lazy rules design.

I agree, I'm disappointed with the way mortal wounds are used.
Especially since you get stuff like frag mines being about 4x as lethal to Terminators as to Guardsmen.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I agree, I'm disappointed with the way mortal wounds are used.
Especially since you get stuff like frag mines being about 4x as lethal to Terminators as to Guardsmen.

Exactly. A Sentinel blowing up is far deadlier to a Guardman than the Volcano Cannon which destroyed it in the first place.

Tyel wrote:
Hmmm. Of the list I think book secondaries are the only major issue and I fear its going to get worse due to GW having to come up with dozens and dozens of objectives across all the factions. It would be impossible to balance this even if GW wanted to - and all evidence is that they don't.

For Death Guard, the MBH and dual spitter bloat drone are probably overcosted for what they do. I also think its clear the new Gladiator tanks are overcosted. The lack of synergy may exacerbate this - but I'm not sure every vehicle needs to have a buffbot giving them reroll 1s to hit to be viable.

I don't really mind Deepstriking. It should be for a tactical purpose - i.e. getting to a place on the board you couldn't just jog too. If you are are intending the unit to just brawl over some mid-board objectives, then yes its not an advantage and may even be a disadvantage. But I disagree it should be buffed.

b

Agree with your first point. Objectives are something that are extremely difficult to balance, and GW hasn’t done a great job already.

As a deathguard player, I don’t actually like any of our vehicles outside Mower drone and FW nonsense (FW still warping the game, what a surprise). I thought that plagueburst crawler has a shot to be great, but the flamer variant being S6 with no way to buff it further kinda ruins everything and the cannon version having 2 shots that only hit on 3’s ruins that against anything with even an ok inv (good against marine dreadnoughts though). All of our CSM vehicles are far too fragile to be worth their points, especially because none of them hit very hard/ need to be durable for their function, Marines I’m less knowledgeable on, but I’ve only ever seen them run Core dreadnoughts and speeders for vehicles. Maybe there’s other things people are sleeping on?

You hit the nail on the head for what deepstrike should be used for but are dead wrong about it actually working the way you described. The problem is you are only every getting to where you want be if you have a small footprint/your opponent isn’t trying to screen at all. Even if you do have a small footprint there’s still a good chance your opponent will be able to zone you out. In fact most of the time people deepstrike it is only because they don’t whatever the unit is to be shot before they shoot with them (or in rare cases charge). The rule of thumb I’m of seeing is if you want to deepstrike something,you’d better be ok with it landing near or in your deployment zone.

Salt donkey wrote:


Not to be rude but have you played many 9th edition games? To win you have be on the center objectives by turn 3 at the latest and you’re already at a disadvantage if you haven’t gotten something on then by top of Turn of 2. Meaning it should be pretty easy for meganobz to get charges by turn 2.

As an example, I run a 10 man squad of blightlords and 2 squads of deathshrouds. The only time I’ve considered deepstriking any of it is when I thought my deathshroud shooting could be impactful (I still didn’t do it even then). In every game I’ve played these could either make a turn 2 charge or the game became unwinnable for my Opponent due to me gaining too much of a point lead early on.

The scion guy is right only because scions A) take up a small footprint B) are relatively cheap/expandable and C) shoot rather than charge when the come in. Blood angles and white scars player deepstrike only because the have a small footprint and can add +2 to their charges.

Your blightlords and deathshrouds have M5'', T5, 3W, 2+, 4++ and FNP (or reducing damage) base, without other units' help, my friend. They're extremely more resilient than Meganobz. Litterally no one, including players who placed high at GTs, footslogs Meganobz towards mid field objectives as they aren't resilient at all, they're simply heavy hitters.

You only see 3-5 man squads of Meganobz as a single turn of shooting is enough to invalidate them, that's why you shouldn't invest many points into a single unit of them. You could do it with your nurgle termies, you can't (well you can of course but you really shouldn't) with the ork equivalents. Meganobz do work when they are cheap and expendable (190-200 points for a 5 man squad).

 Valkyrie wrote:

To add to my previous point, a particular gripe I have with both 8th and 9th is the Mortal Wound mechanic. I just don't like it. It's a lazy and boring mechanic that is just thrown in whenever they need an extra effect on something.

I think it also represents the designer's trend to bolt new mechanics on, rather than fixing existing ones. So what we end up with is an ever-increasing pile of one-upmanship.

- Armour saves protect against weapons.
- But high-AP weapons ignore or reduce those saves.
- So Invulnerable saves ignore AP.
- But then Mortal Wounds ignore armour and Invulnerable saves.
- But then FNP saves can resist even Mortal Wounds.
- And now we're seeing stuff that ignores armour saves, invulnerable saves, and FNP.

Looking forward to a future codex introducing the everything-proof save, which can save against Mortal Wounds and also against anything that would normally penetrate armour, invulnerable and FNP saves.