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Someone asked for the Weekest faction poll in the other thread so here you go. Which faction focus do you think is the weakest and why.

Death Guard were not inspiring. Mostly due to them having mechanics we're already used to and not seeing anything dynamic.

Uninspiring is not the same as weakest, however. The toughness decrease bubble might require a specific tactics, but isn't necessarily weak.

Sticky and gross objectives definitely isn't impressive, but I'd say that's true of about half the detachment abilities.

It'd be easier to say weakest or strongest faction trait, because at least we know all those. As a whole, we don't even have basic units for a lot of factions.

Ya I think most uninspiring would be more accurate. DG I thought was pretty lame but its not worthless. Drukhari I hated but they could end up being very potent depending on how it all shakes out. Still wouldn't make me very happy about it.

Ya death guard look weakest to me. But we will know soon enough.

Chaos in general. DG got a pretty gakky set of rules, and the defining factor of Chaos Marines now is that they kill themselves if they pray too hard.

What a joke.

I'll nominate DE as having the weakest Detachment ability.

People who voted Death Guard clearly did not read Necron's army focus lol.
Necron would kill for skill to decrease enemy T outisde of engagement range.This gives so much possibilities, in shooting and combat. whiners...

 vipoid wrote:
I'll nominate DE as having the weakest Detachment ability.

I know you're not a fan of it, but I feel like the detachment ability is fine for people who want to use all three HQs in the first place. It's just annoying in the short-term because it kind of compels dark eldar players to build their armies a certain way or be at a disadvantage.

 Xyxel wrote:
People who voted Death Guard clearly did not read Necron's army focus lol.
Necron would kill for skill to decrease enemy T outisde of engagement range.This gives so much possibilities, in shooting and combat. whiners...

What possibilities?

It’s either +1 to your wound roll or does nothing.
That’s potentially pretty potent… but not exactly game-breaking or even game-changing

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Chaos in general. DG got a pretty gakky set of rules, and the defining factor of Chaos Marines now is that they kill themselves if they pray too hard.

What a joke.

Chaos marines in general, perhaps. (Though WE's faction yahtzee is more annoying than weak, and TS faction is pretty good. Hate the detachment though. Other units need to absolute spam psychic attacks for that to be worthwhile).

But while not necessarily the strongest, Chaos Knights and Chaos Daemons got some really nice and thematic sets of rules. Knight's faction and detachment abilities even synergize rather than working against each other!

Ironically Necrons would have the same anti-synergy with -1T as Death Guard with all their Gauss being LETHAL HITS.

Death Guard have the "hidden" issue that their units will be priced similarly to Thousand Sons, Grey Knights, World Eaters and Space Marines whether they are as good as them or not.

Plague Marines, Rubric Marines and Grey Knight Strike Squads spent most of the edition all costing 21 or 22 points each.

Blightlord Terminators, Scarab Occult Terminators and Grey Knight Terminators spent most of the edition all costing 40 or 42 points each.

A DG Predator, a TS Predator and an Iron Hands Predator have all been the exact same points the whole edition (changing the same amount at the same time) despite being wildly different in actual strength.

Necrons aren't evil/smelly versions of X so don't have the constraint of being priced the same as X.

To be fair, while I would 100% take Command Protocols over Spread the Sickness, I would say Nurgle's Gift versus Reanimation Protocols is at least debatable.

Spread the sickness is honestly weird. There are corner cases for the contagion range, but sticky objectives is a trait that some battleline troops just have. They aren't sacrificing a detachment trait to it.

And if you're completely abandoning an objective it usually means the enemy can't take it, so you still get to score, or you've accepted that you can't hold it and want to keep your forces intact (for whatever that maneuver is worth in 40k). If you're actively fighting over it, whoever has the most OC is what matters, not stickyness.

Voss wrote:
Chaos marines in general, perhaps.

Sorry, yes, you're right. I meant CSMs.

I wasn't even factoring in Daemons or Chaos Knights.

Although I want to change my vote to Imperial Agents now.

What the fething feth were they thinking with that Generic Inquisitor???

I'm going to say Genestealer cults myself. The respawning units is nice and all, but it has a solid chance of just, doing nothing if you roll average or the opponent moves on those tokens.

By virtue of not being a faction, Agents are the weakest faction.

No enhancements or strats, no detachment rule and an army rule that is entirely "How to use the models in a game without it it actually being an army."

PenitentJake wrote:
By virtue of not being a faction, Agents are the weakest faction.

No enhancements or strats, no detachment rule and an army rule that is entirely "How to use the models in a game without it it actually being an army."

That's what we get for not just having no studio champion, but a studio that is actively against playable Inquisitorial armies as a concept.

Hooray for Inquisitors being generic with generic weaponry.

 Xyxel wrote:
People who voted Death Guard clearly did not read Necron's army focus lol.
Necron would kill for skill to decrease enemy T outisde of engagement range.This gives so much possibilities, in shooting and combat. whiners...

How good command protocols is kinda depends on if the BS nerf is across the board or just warriors. If destroyers are hitting on a 2+ all the time then that's probably pretty good.

Of course Reanimation Protocols is banking pretty hard on the "reduced lethality" being a real thing, which I'm still pretty skeptical of.

DG or SoB. SoB , from what was shown, seem to be the type of army knights were in early 9th ed. no idea how they suppose to function under the given core rule set. DG are just a feels bad army, and worse it is not for the opponent, but for the DG player.

Karol wrote:
DG or SoB. SoB , from what was shown, seem to be the type of army knights were in early 9th ed. no idea how they suppose to function under the given core rule set. DG are just a feels bad army, and worse it is not for the opponent, but for the DG player.

SoB are fine. Probably underwelming, but perfectly functional.

In a world where the Toughness of tanks breaks 10, having your anti tank in the form of 6-12-24" str 8 weapon is not fine. At least in my opinion.

Karol wrote:
In a world where the Toughness of tanks breaks 10, having your anti tank in the form of 6-12-24" str 8 weapon is not fine. At least in my opinion.

We'll see what Sisters' MMs are like at launch. The could well be better.

There have been other editions of bad melta that Sisters have survived. And we have more AT options now.

Karol wrote:
In a world where the Toughness of tanks breaks 10, having your anti tank in the form of 6-12-24" str 8 weapon is not fine. At least in my opinion.

Well that's a bit of a universal thing isn't it? It just depends if some of the other weapons in any given faction go up.

Sisters have no anti tank issues.
They have a T9-11 issue, which is different.

They will make a mess of light vehicles and will a bad matchup for heavy vehilces (T12-14).

They really don't like medium vehicles.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 vipoid wrote:
I'll nominate DE as having the weakest Detachment ability.

I know you're not a fan of it, but I feel like the detachment ability is fine for people who want to use all three HQs in the first place. It's just annoying in the short-term because it kind of compels dark eldar players to build their armies a certain way or be at a disadvantage.

Even if you want to field all 3 HQs, it's still an astonishingly bad ability.

You get 3 extra Pain Tokens and then that's it. That's your entire detachment bonus for the game.


Compare that with, say, Eldar, who get a reroll to hit and a reroll to wound for every unit in their army for the entire game. And they don't even need to take one of each HQ to get it.

cody.d. wrote:

Karol wrote:
In a world where the Toughness of tanks breaks 10, having your anti tank in the form of 6-12-24" str 8 weapon is not fine. At least in my opinion.

Well that's a bit of a universal thing isn't it? It just depends if some of the other weapons in any given faction go up.

It isn't universal. What it comes down to is that some armies have a full range, others don't. And this severely impacts weapon options and platforms.

And it isn't just space marines (before anyone jumps in), craftworlds, chaos marines, guard all have dedicated platforms for a variety of weapon types. Orks... sometimes do (we'll have to see, but some of the buggies and mech guns might become more important. But I can remember editions where they were locked at a soft cap of S8 + shokk attack guns and warboss/dread powerclaws, and that was functionally it for AT). Votann and Tau seem functional enough in terms of weapon variety (though could be better). Knights can certainly bring some big AT weapons, but pure knights have other problems.

Most of the rest have to struggle and scramble for 'enough' heavy weapons. I'm sure someone can pick out exceptions, but in general, there is a set of armies that have a real struggle for all-comers lists, let alone skew.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Voss wrote:
Chaos marines in general, perhaps.

Sorry, yes, you're right. I meant CSMs.

I wasn't even factoring in Daemons or Chaos Knights.

Although I want to change my vote to Imperial Agents now.

What the fething feth were they thinking with that Generic Inquisitor???

And as an added bonus? Say "Buh bye" to a considerable portion (and best looking, IMHO) of the available daemon engines, and all of our drop pods.

The Tyranid army rules just make up for the weaknesses they have. It's a bad deal.

Nomeny wrote:
The Tyranid army rules just make up for the weaknesses they have. It's a bad deal.

That's a weird way to say "Gives even the worst model in the army, the best Ld value in the game".

cody.d. 810118 11541329 wrote:

Well that's a bit of a universal thing isn't it? It just depends if some of the other weapons in any given faction go up.

That is not universal. If I know that lets say eldar have multiple different anti tank units, and various way to deal with tanks, and some were even shown, then even if fire dragons end up on the extrem spectrum of bad it won't matter. For a sister army melta being non efficient is a really bad situation, because it is not like they can just replace it with something else. It is like my dudes melee and stormbolters. If storm bolters are bad, then my dudes practicaly stop having shoting.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Spoletta 810118 11541331 wrote:Sisters have no anti tank issues.
They have a T9-11 issue, which is different.

They will make a mess of light vehicles and will a bad matchup for heavy vehilces (T12-14).

They really don't like medium vehicles.

So they will be okey, as long as they only play vs DE using mass venoms? And who knows maybe DE will be a top meta army, and if true, it won't be bad for SoBs. To me a situation where an entire faction is okey, as long as the opponent doesn't take the good stuff, is not a "being okey" situation.