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I have read a lot of comments that 8th edition was in pretty good shape until the second
Space Marine Codex was released.

I played a game of 8th (as Eldar) against a friend with Blood Ravens last weekend, and I
did find it odd that the Space Marines had so many army abilities with all of the Angels of
Death abilities compared to my limited Eldar army abilities.

But was that it, or were there some additional factors that made people think that the codex
was broken?

Also, if it is considered broken, are there any suggested "fixes" to scale them back a bit?

Thanks!

Been a while but if I recall the big issue was the Iron Hands who, on top of Angels of Death, gotcould reroll hit rolls of 1 in Devastator doctrine. Had a feel no pain of 6+, could fire overwatch at 5+ and could double the wounds on any model that had a wound chart.

At a time when most armies had one special ability this was the start of the feature/power creep that took off in late 8th and 9th edition.

Layered special rules.

Prior to SM 2.0 most army books would have an army-wide rule or two and a sub faction rule. So for example orks got Waaagh and Ere we go, which allowed them to reroll charges and have one turn of enhanced damage. Then they could pick a sub faction rule, so I top off that they might also get exploding 6s in melee or benefits of cover at certain ranges.

2.0 SM codex introduced truly insane numbers of layered rules. So marines would get bolter discipline and ATSKNF, then a sub faction rule layered on top. Then they’d have doctrines ontop of all that, followed by EVEN MORE sub faction rules from the mini codexes, and then more ways of modifying and controlling doctrines via further sub faction rules.

So while other codex would get 3-5 goodies from faction and sub faction, marines got more like a dozen between faction, sub faction, sub-sub faction, and sub-sub faction successor.

Yeah Space Marines 2.0 were an early 9th edition codex in the middle of 8th. Meaning it had way more combos and lethality and rule layers than any other codex at the time (even if it would be anemic compared to a late 9th codex).

Most of the hate seems to come from the fact that it broke the eldar and knight domination of the game, and that marine armies actualy became fun to play with. Plus there were multiple builds and multiple different units used with different game play, and not just smash hammer with castellan or early 8th gunboats, or nothing else. IF played different then RG, which played different the IH, which again played different then Ultramarines. You could actualy try to play melee marines, with actual marines in your army, and not instantly lose the game.
A more or less unheard of state when multiple marine armies were good to play with.

Somehow that many people having fun playing their armies, is considared bad and worse then having eldar of some sort sitting at 70-80% win rates and making the game unfun for everyone.

The Iron Hands were the real powerhouses of the SM 8.5 era. While Doctrines and Chapter Tactics were involved, Iron Hands in particular leaned into (likely unforeseen by GW) use of Forge World dreadnoughts. IH would usually stay in Devastator Doctrine, and their Chapter Tactic helped with heavy weapons (no penalty for moving and shooting heavy weapons and reroll all 1s to hit). That seems rather ho-hum now, but it was big in 2019. IH also had a stratagem to make an IH Dreadnought a character.

Chaplain Dreadnoughts and Leviathan Dreadnoughts screened by Intercessors were quite powerful. The FW Chaplain Dreadnoughts could not be targeted by shooting as long as the Intercessors were around, and Iron Hands also had a Stratagem (Cogitated Martyrdom?) to pass wounds from characters onto Intercessors (thus protecting Character Dreadnoughts with more wounds than Look Out Sir covered), which they could then shrug. In the lead-up to LVO the use of Chaplain Dreads was so prevalent that they had rules about what could pass for a proxy for Chaplain Dreadnoughts. I think it was also a wake-up call to GW about just how many models were on tables using FW rules. Which may have had downstream effects...

The list that won LVO had three Chaplain Dreadnoughts and a Leviathan supported by a Primaris Apothecary giving a 5+++ FNP.

Salamanders also had a spicy Stratagem with flamers that allowed Aggressors to be able to delete pretty much anything.

9th Ed saw a reset of the worst aspects of SM 8.5, with the 9th Ed SM book being a bit of a nerf overall.

Specifically, Codex: Space Marines? I can try to answer it as I was focusing on playing my Primaris only army since that codex was the first time I felt Primaris had enough units to stand on their own.

Under costed units. In my case, Intercessors were too cheap. They were 17 points a model in that codex. Which was fine before Bolter Discipline, Shock Assault, Doctrines and weaker bolt rifles. But was about 2-3pts too cheap at that time in 8th. Cheap Intercessors with pick-to-stay in the Doctrine you like, were perfect to deal with 50-70% of your opponent's army. Which was just too go for a Troops option.

Stay in the Doctrine you like made Heavy weapons in particular way better than they needed to be. But even a Primaris only player like myself, who wasn't affect by the forced progressing of Doctrines still found a lot of power there. My opponent's armies just weren't built to accept the new space marine Doctrine AP breaks. Maybe they could have adjusted as everyone did in 9th, but at the time few had the ability to shift their army to deal with it.

Double the Chapter Tactics or at least far more effective chapter tactics. I can't remember clearly now, but I believe C:SM 8.5 chapter tactics were roughly twice as good as they were in the previous codex. And even the named chapters had excellent and/or widely applicable chapter tactics. They certainly didn't have turn Rapid Fire into Assault for infantry (read: bolters and combi-bolters) like my Black Legion did.

The Repulsor Executioner. The Primaris really needed some anti-tank and C:SM 8.5 answered with an under costed, over gunned vehicle with 8th edition Fly. The main gun alone nuked just about everything in a single shot. And your opponent had to destroy it at range. Because if you weren't a WAAC and perched it on top of terrain, you could easily just leave melee. Leaving that enemy unit twistin' in the wind.

Aggressors rolled more dice than Orks but still hit like marines. I also can't remember if boltstorm Aggressors could attack twice before C:SM 8.5, but with the new codex rules. But even if they could before, they didn't with the force and fury they could in 8.5.

Eliminators could shoot through walls and were better shots for doing so. Human special characters could be one shot with ease. Even tougher foot special characters weren't safe either. And many factions absolutely relied on their special characters. But nowhere was safe except off the table or in a vehicle where those characters' abilities didn't work. And removing Eliminators at range was a fool's errand. More so than in 9th, since their cloaks minus from the enemy's to hit roll in a time when AP wasn't nuts on most units (read: most had AP -3 or less). I had a Phobos Librarian (with the cloak relic) face tank my opponent's army for half the game because of how camo cloaks worked.

Improved Stratagems and more useful strats in general. There was a bunch of superb pre-game strats (Chapter Master). As well, things like Transhuman Physiology that really took off for space marines. Giving marines the edge both offensively and defensively. Before and during the game.


And that's all I can remember from the vanilla codex. Just to play my Primaris army, I would limit myself to 1750-1900pts just to try and keep things fair. And I never used a Chapter Supplement, either. There was no way I was that good of a player, too. The codex was just way too good.

Hahaha. I remember the delicately placed tanks on top of three story ruins claiming 'wobbly model'. If was comical to watch. And then GW yanked fly away from that model.

Karol wrote:
Most of the hate seems to come from the fact that it broke the eldar and knight domination of the game, and that marine armies actualy became fun to play with. Plus there were multiple builds and multiple different units used with different game play, and not just smash hammer with castellan or early 8th gunboats, or nothing else. IF played different then RG, which played different the IH, which again played different then Ultramarines. You could actualy try to play melee marines, with actual marines in your army, and not instantly lose the game.
A more or less unheard of state when multiple marine armies were good to play with.

Somehow that many people having fun playing their armies, is considared bad and worse then having eldar of some sort sitting at 70-80% win rates and making the game unfun for everyone.

I know this is Karol being Karol, but a couple of points:

Ynnari reaper castles and Alaitoc flyer spam were overpowered before marines 2.0, and they were still overpowered after marines 2.0. Adding certain builds of marines to the list of OP things that sucked to play against didn't make the other OP things less OP or make the game as a whole more enjoyable.

But yeah, other people have pretty much nailed it. Marines 2.0 was where we really started to see the stacking buffs. Right before the 2.0 book came out, there was errata that gave marines bolter discipline and shock assault, and they were in a pretty decent place with that update. Then the 2.0 stacked on a bunch of extra rules on top of that, and they went from feeling comfortably-capable to overtuned.

I'm fuzzy on the exact order, but marines got shock assault, bolter discipline, an extra wound, doctrines, and chapter supplements (which meant even more stratagems than most people had plus "super doctrines") in a relatively short span of time. So somewhere in that series of updates they went from being a somewhat underwhelming army to being top tier along with the handful of other broken builds. And because everyone and their dog has a marine army, you were pretty likely to run into updated marines.

Two things went wrong:

GW completely failed to think about how people play the game outside of their Jervis-style echo chamber at GW HQ. GW assumed you'd advance through doctrines as quickly as possible to get to melee because melee is cool, in the real world everyone was content to sit in devastator doctrine with a gunline full of heavy weapons and the chapter supplement that buffed them as much as possible. It was incredibly obvious and figured out by players on release day but GW openly admitted they had no clue people would play like that.

Too much buff stacking. C:SM 2.0 was where the bloat (which continued into 9th) really started to get bad. You had your faction rule, your doctrine bonus, and your favored doctrine bonus on ever unit. And then you stacked up aura buffs, the chapter stratagems/WLTs out of all the too many options that best suited your choice of units, etc. That was why Iron Hands were so dominant. Take the best chapter rules for heavy weapon spam in permanent devastator doctrine, add an overpowered stratagem to make dreadnoughts into characters, add a character with a -1 damage aura, it was all too much stuff perfectly tailored to castle up with a bunch of tanks and dreadnoughts and trade fire until you won.

It was really just the stacks and stacks of rules they got. The 8.5 Codex was more or less a preview of 9th but most armies didn't get anything in the same style.

In general, the stacking of rerolls and extra AP everywhere just turbo-charged the damage output of SM armies. Then the super doctrine abilities pushed a bunch of the mover the edge. Initially you could stay in Devastator doctrine all game, so the armies that had a super doctrine that relied on Devastator were especially busted. It didn't help that GW made those same armies have the best abilities. Iron Hands were the kings of broken armies for a long time. Their abilities and super doctrine were extremely strong. Then they had multiple ways of reducing damage to the point where shooting at any of their units became pointless.

One thing that was quite common in 9th edition was how a unit's stats and weapons rarely told you how powerful they actually were. To get the full picture you needed to consider strats, army abilities, character synergies, etc. The 8.5 SM codex started that trend. Many units were maybe slightly undercosted, but what really broke things was, for example, Aggressors rerolling all hits and 1s to wound while shooting twice thanks to a strat that made them count as stationary and also getting bonus AP on their shots. The basic datasheet for the unit wasn't too bad but in practice it was really easy to push them well beyond what should have been possible.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Ynnari reaper castles and Alaitoc flyer spam were overpowered before marines 2.0, and they were still overpowered after marines 2.0. Adding certain builds of marines to the list of OP things that sucked to play against didn't make the other OP things less OP or make the game as a whole more enjoyable.

Timeline isn't quite right.

Ynnari, Eldar Flyers and Knights both got nerfed in the late April FAQ. Marines 2.0 came out in August (with the supplements following in the months afterwards).

There were a few obnoxious lists in this 3~ month window (complaints about mass plaguebearers backed by untargetable Tzeentch character mortal wound spam comes to mind) - but it was a time when a lot of armies could have a go. Its why people said the meta was in a good shape.

But yeah. Marines got a new codex which would have made them top tier on its own. Then they got the supplements on top that caused them to go supernova. IH were the worst offenders - but UM and WS were winning all the tournaments in the month or so their supplement got rolled out. RG were a few dice away from winning the LVO.

And then, inexplicably, the 2nd Psychic Awakening book turned up and gave even more potential bonuses to Marines...

Tyel wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Ynnari reaper castles and Alaitoc flyer spam were overpowered before marines 2.0, and they were still overpowered after marines 2.0. Adding certain builds of marines to the list of OP things that sucked to play against didn't make the other OP things less OP or make the game as a whole more enjoyable.

Timeline isn't quite right.

Ynnari, Eldar Flyers and Knights both got nerfed in the late April FAQ. Marines 2.0 came out in August (with the supplements following in the months afterwards).

There were a few obnoxious lists in this 3~ month window (complaints about mass plaguebearers backed by untargetable Tzeentch character mortal wound spam comes to mind) - but it was a time when a lot of armies could have a go. Its why people said the meta was in a good shape.

Good catch. My local group mostly stayed away from the gnalier combos so I couldn't recall if ynnari and Alaitoc flyers got nerfed before 9th rolled around or not.

But yeah, I remember being really happy about where the game was around that time. At least in the context of our casual weekly league at the FLGS, we were seeing a lot of variety in factions and lists. Then marines 2.0 came out, and most of stopped playing against marines because most of the marines were playing against each other at the top tables having outranked most of the other builds. They basically removed themselves from the league by virtue of being too strong to de-rank far enough to play against most of the other armies that showed up.

For the sake of discussion, I'll also point out that part of the reason late 8th marines were so annoying was that they were functionally doing a lot of playstyles better than the non-marine factions associated with those playstyles. They were outshooting guard and tau, out-stabbing orks and Khorne, and out-lasting necrons and death guard (thanks to their second wound).They even sort of kind of felt "faster" than craftworlders and drukhari with tricks like being able to jump out of a moving transport or rush an entire army of White Scars bikers into the enemy's deployment zone on turn 1. So there was some salt in the wound when you realized that marines were not only overpowered, but they were beating you at your own game.

Thanks for all of the responses, folks.

So if we wanted to theorize a "fix" to the Codex, would replacing all of the Angels of Death Rules with JUST Bolter Discipline and Shock Assault do a good job at balancing the SM2 Codex against other armies of that era of play?

 flakpanzer wrote:
Thanks for all of the responses, folks.

So if we wanted to theorize a "fix" to the Codex, would replacing all of the Angels of Death Rules with JUST Bolter Discipline and Shock Assault do a good job at balancing the SM2 Codex against other armies of that era of play?

TBH just delete the codex and play with the original 8th edition book if you're going to keep playing old editions.

 flakpanzer wrote:
Thanks for all of the responses, folks.

So if we wanted to theorize a "fix" to the Codex, would replacing all of the Angels of Death Rules with JUST Bolter Discipline and Shock Assault do a good job at balancing the SM2 Codex against other armies of that era of play?

If you wanted to go back to 8th edition to play games of it, I'd start with any space marine player building their list with 1750 points for 2000 point games. Because the stuff that C: SM 8.5 added was a lot of fun for space marine players. And if that's not enough points, cut back further.

And I think that part gets missed when it gets brought up when groups turned into a majority space marine players overnight after this codex. It wasn't just that the codex was OP. It was the first time in a long time that marines felt like marines. And not a gray mush, jack-of-all-trades faction. Marines could be scary, but had too many points to cover redundancies or too much of the table or not feel much pain from double battalions for the CP.

Additionally, posters here on Dakka will say the 8th was in a great place just prior to C: SM 8.5, but I can tell you that marines were struggling. Bolter Discipline and Shock Assault were pretty new FAQ/Errata elements to help marines out that early summer/late spring before the new codex. And I believe those rules were added because space marines race to the bottom in points were as about as far as GW want to take marines.

By cutting back on the points, the marines are still scary. But they can struggle with board control. Especially if you stick with 6'x4' tables. And they don't have the easy margins to fill in niceties into their army list. But their marines can still be frightening if they really want to put the investment into them. I know I'd rather get my points cut to the bone than drop the tools the C:SM 8.5 gave the faction.

Oh, and house rule non-aircraft vehicles (I.e. repulsors and impulsors) with Fly can't be placed on top of buildings. As well as consider forcing marine Doctrines to progress, like GW did very quickly after the codex dropped.

Also, Primaris space marines always had 2 wounds. Codex: Space Marines 8.5 did not give Firstborn their second wound.

 flakpanzer wrote:
Thanks for all of the responses, folks.

So if we wanted to theorize a "fix" to the Codex, would replacing all of the Angels of Death Rules with JUST Bolter Discipline and Shock Assault do a good job at balancing the SM2 Codex against other armies of that era of play?

You'll definitely want the nerf to the Iron Hands Ironstone as well, I think it'd be obnoxious even if it was just supporting milk-toast vehicles. I don't think you need to remove ATSKNF, just remove Combat Doctrines and Super Doctrines (the Legion specific buffs that you get while the right Doctrine is active). Maybe consider buffing each Space Marine player's favourite bad unit with a points reduction for some goodwill.

Before the stacking modifier nerf I saw five White Scars Primaris guys with knives one-round a Knight from full health under that Codex. I couldn't tell you exactly how it worked, and I do remember it taking a lot of CP to pull off, but after an increasingly grueling slog through the misery that was 8e that was a big wake-up call to me that nothing was ever going to get any better.

 vict0988 wrote:

 flakpanzer wrote:
Thanks for all of the responses, folks.

So if we wanted to theorize a "fix" to the Codex, would replacing all of the Angels of Death Rules with JUST Bolter Discipline and Shock Assault do a good job at balancing the SM2 Codex against other armies of that era of play?

You'll definitely want the nerf to the Iron Hands Ironstone as well, I think it'd be obnoxious even if it was just supporting milk-toast vehicles. I don't think you need to remove ATSKNF, just remove Combat Doctrines and Super Doctrines (the Legion specific buffs that you get while the right Doctrine is active). Maybe consider buffing each Space Marine player's favourite bad unit with a points reduction for some goodwill.

This seems like a decent starting place. Doctrines made sense as a reward for not fielding the loyal 32 and a knight, but they really felt like a hat on a hat once the faction was doing well on the whole. The chapter-specific material had some fun and fluffy parts (especially for Raven Guard), but they were also functionally just another layer of buffs/extra options. I don't remember what exactly was in the marine codex in 8th, but maybe you could treat the chapter-specific content as a side-grade? So for instance, if you play White Scars, you can use the zoom zoom stratagems from the chapter splat, but you lose access to the stratagems from the core marine book. Ditto relics, traits, psychic powers, etc.

It would probably also be a good idea to leave out the psychic awakening upgrades. Ex: no chief apothecaries or whatever the upgrade is called and thus no bringing back tons of wounds worth of outriders.

Do that, and you still end up with powered-up marines with 2 wounds that can double tap at 24" and get a bonus attack every time they charge or are charged plus access to a bunch of flavorful chapter-specific options... You just don't get to roll 6 layers of buffs together all at once.

Thinking on it, it might be a good idea to convert a lot of the aura buffs into targeted command phase buffs too. The marine army crowding around the aura givers was annoying for opponents and weird/restrictive for the marines themselves.

And at that point, I'd be tempted to pick and choose some of the more interesting super doctrines and find a place to squeeze them in. Maybe swap them out for some of the less interesting chapter tactics or turn them into alternative buffs or something. Ex: maybe Raven Guard lieutenants can swap out their reroll to-wound rule for a rule that lets a squad ignore screens and target characters.

The trick is to make all the neat stuff into a sidegrade rather than a straight upgrade.

 flakpanzer wrote:
Thanks for all of the responses, folks.

So if we wanted to theorize a "fix" to the Codex, would replacing all of the Angels of Death Rules with JUST Bolter Discipline and Shock Assault do a good job at balancing the SM2 Codex against other armies of that era of play?

I would think deleting Combat Doctrines and all the Codex Supplements (except the units themselves) would go a long way to balancing SM Codex 8.5 against the rest of the 8th Edition Codexes.

Karol wrote:
Most of the hate seems to come from the fact that it broke the eldar and knight domination of the game, and that marine armies actualy became fun to play with.

Least unhinged Eldar hater