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Interesting selection of flaws and a few contentious picks.

Of course any more length would just be adding salt but it was a choice to pick fish of fury over near indestructible falcons, lash prince over siren prince, leafblower over raw codex creep, etc.

If you wanted to point out all the wrong broken things in 40k over its entire lifespan it would take far longer then a 30m video.

I might have mentioned something about 2++ re-rollable saves. Codex creep should have been talked about. Maybe in context of things like scatbikes or serpent spam.

Haven't watched it, but I doubt that the title is true.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Haven't watched it, but I doubt that the title is true.

True.

The thread title “every edition of 40k is broken” is correct, but the video “every broken 40k army explained” is just scratching the surface.

Just watched that this morning. My comments:
Rogue Trader: Never played it, but I think it was never intended to be fair in any case, more a toybox of stuff to play with your friends.
Second Edition: I remember Jain Zar being an absolute beast, but we played with what we had and had very limited exposure to anything tournament related back then. Everything was broken as far as I remember!
Third Edition: I played my first tournaments in this edition. I think it's pretty fine if you just get rid of that awful janky Blood Angels codex (I was so disappointed by it when I got my hands on it as a teenager!). 3.5 chaos was abused but the codex itself is also one of the best representations of Chaos that's ever been put to paper so I can't hate it.
Fourth Edition: Strongly agree about Falcon Holofield nonsense being the real pain in the backside here. I definitely had more issues with that than Tau Devilfish. But Lash was worse than the video makes out, because not only could it shift you off objectives, it also could arrange your big mob of boyz into a perfect pie plate shape to be blasted by vindicators.
Fifth Edition: The Nob Bikers and Paladin death star issues were well discussed, but I think the codices here are where the game really went off the rails and left a solid core ruleset with a janky game that wasn't much fun to play.
Sixth Edition: Hoping for them to fix the issues with fifth and they really doubled down on a lot of bad choices instead. This was when I stopped picking up new editions. Though the edition was so short I dunno if the box I picked up was 6th or 7th actually. When people advertise HH as being based on 7e rules it's not a plus to me!

Never played 8e or onwards, though I do sometimes think I should grab the index version of 8e in print at least - I have 3e and 8e is the next "paradigm shift" so even from a hobby history POV it's interesting to have it.

 Da Boss wrote:
Never played 8e or onwards, though I do sometimes think I should grab the index version of 8e in print at least - I have 3e and 8e is the next "paradigm shift" so even from a hobby history POV it's interesting to have it.

If you ever plan to play a few retro games of 8e then White Dwarf June 2019 (UK) included updated objective card rules.

Early 8e suffered from entirely random objectives - you might get dealt cards to kill a unit your opponent didn't have or hold all five objectives at once on turn 1, while your opponent might get a string of cards to take the objectives they were already holding.

As much as I remember these broken armies, I also remember solutions. For example Swedish comp of the 6th (or was it 5th?) was like a magic wand, single-handedly turned all of my group's casual games from pointless gear checks into affairs so balanced, that I have never experienced anything like that in my entire history with GW games.

Watched it yesterday, as I’m a regular viewer.

He’s not wrong about the Guide D-Cannon being really nasty. But this was the same edition of Really Nasty Whirlwinds, Basilisks, Griffons and various and sundry Nasty Barrage Weapons. When all I really need do is squish two Guardians? It’s threat was somewhat (but not wildly) overstated.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Watched it yesterday, as I’m a regular viewer.

He’s not wrong about the Guide D-Cannon being really nasty. But this was the same edition of Really Nasty Whirlwinds, Basilisks, Griffons and various and sundry Nasty Barrage Weapons. When all I really need do is squish two Guardians? It’s threat was somewhat (but not wildly) overstated.

Yeah. I never saw the trouble in dealing with these guys... of course, I played armoured companies, so that's probably not a fair judgement.

As a(n) (unintentional?) skew player
I didn't see the issue with a lot of these "broken" lists. But, what the video doesn't talk about is all the great ideas people had to counter these boring copy-cat armies.

Which edition had the absolutely unkillable seer council? Was it third?

3rd had the unlimited size Seer Council...

I think 7th had invisible rerollable blobs of seers. One pf the many deathstars of the era.

He also kinda missed the issue with Formations.

It’s not that if you took the right Marine Units, you got a bunch of freebies. It was that other armies had no equivalent Formation. And the Lots of Freebies Formations were themselves uneven in what you needed to take to get the goodies.

Yeah, they were all over the place. Some you needed to take trash tax units to get a situational bonus. Others were like the aspect host. Take any 3 aspect squads you want, and get either +1 WS or BS. No tax, take what you want, free boost.

I just really hate formation style list design. Warmachine introduced it in Mk2 which was otherwise my favourite version of that game and I really disliked it, and then they leaned further into it with the next edition and I noped out.

I understand the problem it's trying to solve- you've got massive unit choice and you're trying to incentivise background appropriate armies rather than weird and janky hodge podges, but I really dislike being pushed down that path so hard. Just trust me with the damn list building!

I was really put off by all that stuff in 7th edition and noped out of Warhammer completely (8th edition Fantasy had already put a bullet in my love for that game). I was really surprised to find that 8th edition had done a lot to fix long standing issues (bringing back modifiers, degrading profiles, unifying monsters and vehicles, simultaneous updates for every faction) but they also did a bunch of stuff I disliked (metacurrency in my wargame, random scenario objectives, base size shennanigans) and so I ended up moving to One Page Rules.

I must be a real Grognard though because even OPR caused me to stop following the update train and stay with an earlier edition!

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Which edition had the absolutely unkillable seer council? Was it third?

3rd did have a Seer Council that could get rerollable 4++ saves with Fortune. In the context of 3rd ed that was pretty tough.

 Nevelon wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Haven't watched it, but I doubt that the title is true.

True.

The thread title “every edition of 40k is broken” is correct, but the video “every broken 40k army explained” is just scratching the surface.

"How every edition of Warhammer 40,000 broke" is the video title. Unless you were refering to another video I am not aware of.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Da Boss wrote:
Just watched that this morning. My comments:
Rogue Trader: Never played it, but I think it was never intended to be fair in any case, more a toybox of stuff to play with your friends.
Second Edition: I remember Jain Zar being an absolute beast, but we played with what we had and had very limited exposure to anything tournament related back then. Everything was broken as far as I remember!
Third Edition: I played my first tournaments in this edition. I think it's pretty fine if you just get rid of that awful janky Blood Angels codex (I was so disappointed by it when I got my hands on it as a teenager!). 3.5 chaos was abused but the codex itself is also one of the best representations of Chaos that's ever been put to paper so I can't hate it.
Fourth Edition: Strongly agree about Falcon Holofield nonsense being the real pain in the backside here. I definitely had more issues with that than Tau Devilfish. But Lash was worse than the video makes out, because not only could it shift you off objectives, it also could arrange your big mob of boyz into a perfect pie plate shape to be blasted by vindicators.
Fifth Edition: The Nob Bikers and Paladin death star issues were well discussed, but I think the codices here are where the game really went off the rails and left a solid core ruleset with a janky game that wasn't much fun to play.
Sixth Edition: Hoping for them to fix the issues with fifth and they really doubled down on a lot of bad choices instead. This was when I stopped picking up new editions. Though the edition was so short I dunno if the box I picked up was 6th or 7th actually. When people advertise HH as being based on 7e rules it's not a plus to me!

Never played 8e or onwards, though I do sometimes think I should grab the index version of 8e in print at least - I have 3e and 8e is the next "paradigm shift" so even from a hobby history POV it's interesting to have it.

I started in 3rd myself, pretty much near the beginning of 3rd, BFG was what drew me in to 40k. I remember the blood angel rhino rush, and sometimes people buffing up the death company as much as possible. I also quit around 6th ed, or rather, I "quit getting new editions" after 6th. The core rules are fine but yeah codex creep and "new model kit happens to be the best rules" happened annoyingly frequent.

I've never heard of "Swedish comp" but I feel like 3rd edition wasn't that broken if you were able to hammer down some of the broken armies, and including some, many, or all of the optional rules that were printed for the edition over the years could help with some stuff.

Things I've re-discovered since working on the battle bible: Ordnance weapons creating craters every time they fire. Units getting access to smoke grenades for a once per game cover save. Roads allowing for bonus to reserves roll. "Forced March" allowing for units to go twice as far in the movement phase but failing morale checks automatically. Some of this stuff too perhaps needs tweaked.

After my battle bible is done preserving the totality of 3rd edition as it was, I'm planning on a points re-balance of the edition, then add "new" units back into 3rd using my rebalanced points formula.

The crux of the matter is, 40k was never a good game, in any edition, and players came for the models and the Lore surrounding them, and just bear with the terrible gameplay.

Between GW wanting to sell codex and rule books regularly, and some vocal Players being attached to legacy systems that don't make sense anymore (like IGOUGO and D6), the game, in spite of having frequent new editions, doesn't really improve, it just changes.

Siegfriedfr wrote:
The crux of the matter is, 40k was never a good game, in any edition, and players came for the models and the Lore surrounding them, and just bear with the terrible gameplay.

I disagree completely. If the gameplay is as bad as you make it out to be, then people wouldn't play it.

Lore does not make a game popular by itself, it needs a good game to be attached to it.

There are hundreds of games sitting unplayed and unloved sitting on shelves, while people are having fun playing GW games.

There have always been broken things, balance has never been, and will never be perfect, but how it feels to face it, is the real impact.
Ultimately, whatever rises towards the top and feels bad will be considered broken.

My friends and I play 5th edition now. We know about Paladins and Nob Bikers. But they feel so much less oppressive and overall better to play with than 40k 9th and early 10th, when we made the shift completely.

And example might be that a giant squad of 2 wound high save guys... is exactly what every space marine unit is now, and this realization in part contributed to dropping modern 40k. But back then, of I needed Draigo and Co gone, a Demolisher Cannon or Exorcist would cut through all their bulls*** and just kill them. Every broken thing is counterable.

The thing that makes me like older 40k more than newer 40k is that actions feel much more decisive and the counter structure is harder. If I shoot marines with a tank, they just die. No saves, no nothing, the entire squad gets picked up. In late 9th, a battle cannon killed an average of less than 1. If you shoot plasmaguns at my tank, nothing happens, it's immune. If you shoot a railgun or a vanquisher or a meltagun at my tank, I dont have a tank anymore.

Which is great, if you have a Demolisher or equivalent S10, AP2 Pie Plate Delivery Service in your list, let alone your Codex.

2nd Edition was mental, and the rules were mental. Most everyone had some kind of filth they could rely on. And whilst pre-internet of course so my access to opinions was naturally super limited? I don’t recall any Codex being seen as feeble compared to others.

It did help that a bunch of the nasty Wargear Cards were universal. And everyone’s Psykers, even the Sanctioned Psykers of the Imperial Guard had access to bonkers powers.

But, as I said. My experience of all that was pre-internet, and so I’ve only dim memories of a small pool of opinions to draw on.

Anecdotally, 7th WAS super bad, enough so I quit the game for 9 years.

As a pure Tyranid player, my options were 1)Flyrant w/Devourers Spam

But other factions had Grav Spam, D weapons, Screamerstar, 1st Turn Drop Pod spam, Wave Serpent spam, etc. Formations were a mess. You got shot in the face with overwatch on every charge. But most importantly, the VIBE was really bad at that point.

Thats why coming back to 10th feels (for me) like basically everything that was wrong with the game is fixed - Not true obviously, but its so much better than ever before.

The frequent FAQs and points fiddling certainly helps there.

Not to say they’ve got it right, or will ever get it right. But it’s vastly preferable to 2nd Edition getting hardly any (only one that sticks in mind is the ‘tear up your Virus Outbreak Strategy Card’ WD apology).

Other editions did better than 2nd Edition for FAQ and Errata, but it was still fairly periodic.

Siegfriedfr wrote:
The crux of the matter is, 40k was never a good game, in any edition, and players came for the models and the Lore surrounding them, and just bear with the terrible gameplay.

I don't agree with that. It's never been the BEST game, but it's not bad. Or at least, certainly not ALWAYS bad.

10th Edition, right now? It's got flaws. It could definitely be improved. But it's baseline fun. I wouldn't be playing it if it wasn't.

 JNAProductions wrote:

Siegfriedfr wrote:
The crux of the matter is, 40k was never a good game, in any edition, and players came for the models and the Lore surrounding them, and just bear with the terrible gameplay.

I don't agree with that. It's never been the BEST game, but it's not bad. Or at least, certainly not ALWAYS bad.

10th Edition, right now? It's got flaws. It could definitely be improved. But it's baseline fun. I wouldn't be playing it if it wasn't.

Yeah it's always felt like GW always could have done better given their resources but they've always been fun games with enough depth to make things interesting even if everyone has their editions they like and don't.

Of all the editions and their relative failings? Formations has to be the worst.

Triple Wraithlord boredom I could “load for bear” and deal with in some fashion.

2nd Ed every had their own glorious nonsense so it did kinda balance out.

3rd Ed Blood Angels? I’d just need to do a shallow deployment, and see if I could trap them in No Man’s Land, allowing me to shoot them up or get the charges on my own terms.

But Formations? There’s just no counter to an opponent fielding an army packed with freebies. If I’ve brought 2,000 points, every model paid for, and my opponent has the equivalent of 2,500 points? I’ve no real counter to that, because it’s not really a matter of tactics or strategy. They just have an “off the board” advantage.

That was an interesting video! I started my 40k journey in early 7th with the Dark Vengeance box set (technically 6th was still the edition when I bought it but I didn't play until after 7th dropped). I still have my DV Dark Angels models too! I definitely remember a lot of broken stuff over the course of my years of playing 40k.

Some of the main ones I remember:
7th:
-Formations, or rather the big composite detachments (formations of formations?). Gladius was but one of the broken ones. Necrons started off all that nonsense with their Decurion detachment and specifically the Canoptek Harvest detachment. Eldar (before they got changed to being called Aeldari) liked to abuse the Aspect Host formation, which allowed them to simply spam the crap out of Warp Spiders (see below, I've got more to say about them later). Tau had some really nasty ones that I myself abused, like the Optimized Stealth Cadre that let you effectively choose which facing on an enemy vehicle you hit with your guns (and you got to bring Stealth suits and a Ghostkeel so you had good units for it). AdMech had the big one from White Dwarf, the War Convocation, and got some extremely nasty rules from that. Some of the formations/composite detachments were more tame, like the Blood Host from Khorne Daemonkin (I miss that book so much, it wasn't powerful but it was hella fun!).
-Deathstar units. Basically take some durable unit and add characters, often from multiple different books, with all their relics/warlord traits, and have a big, basically untouchable unit that can just destroy everything while being immune to any retaliation. Very unfun to play against. Wolfstar is the main one I think of (Space Wolves TWC, usually with a vanilla SM Librarius Conclave formation for all the psychic buffs), but there was also the Bark Bark Star (Fenrisian Wolves with Azrael and the aforementioned Librarians), there was a Necron deathstar involving Lichguard and a bunch of characters, there was Centstar (Centurions and characters, especially librarians and sometimes even Draigo), and I want to think Eldar had one too.
-Flying Monstrous Creatures. While not as obnoxious as the above things, these could be a pain to play against for some armies. Chaos Daemons had a Flying Circus type list with a bunch of these (I had a buddy who liked to run it with a mix of Kairos Fateweaver, a couple of Slaanesh princes, and a CSM prince with a big relic that made a "bomb" of damage measured from its base). Flyrants were pretty strong too but not quite as annoying as the Daemons, as the Daemons got to use psychic powers to make them basically unkillable.
-Invisibility. This particular psychic power is what made many of the deathstar units tick. Basically you made your unit unable to be hit except on a roll of a 6, even in combat, and the unit couldn't be targeted by template or blast weapons at all since they counted as firing snap shots. Just totally broken, and it was the subject of one of the first widely accepted house rules by the ITC, which made it where you would hit on a 5+ in combat (treated as WS1 instead of only hitting on a 6+) and you could fire blast/templates at them, counting as BS1 for purposes of scatter.
-Destroyer weapons. Strength D weapons were basically a delete button to be used by armies with access to them. Particularly ranged D weapons, which the Tau Stormsurge and several Eldar units had. If you rolled a 6 to wound, you just deleted whatever you were attacking basically. As someone who has found himself on both ends of ranged D weapons, I can say they make for some real feels bad moments in games.
-Superheavy Vehicles/Gargantuan Monstrous Creatures. Not only were these models very hard to kill, they often had Stomp attacks that could potentially just delete stuff with a roll of a 6 (like a D weapon kind of). This is one thing that made Imperial Knights a pain to play against. And it led to pretty stupid things like the Tau Stormsurge actually being more powerful in combat than in shooting because of the stomps.
-Warp Spiders. I still get Vietnam flashbacks when I see these things. They were in basically every Eldar list, usually like 30-45 of them too. They were basically unkillable with shooting because they'd just jump behind a wall, and they had the mobility to reach out and kill stuff at a distance, then thanks to being jet pack infantry they could just jump back into cover to avoid retaliation. Just one of the most annoying units in the whole game.
-Daemon Factory. Basically Chaos players (and some non-Chaos players too, just with more risk) could take a psychic discipline called Malefic Daemonology and use it to generate free units of Daemons throughout the game. Whole lists were built around this mechanic, so that one player would have an 1850-point list and end up facing over 3k points thanks to all the free daemons. I do know of one list that abused this called Tzeentch Clown Car, but I'm not sure that was the strongest iteration of Daemon Factory.
8th:
-Malefic Lords. Way back at the beginning of 8th, there was a little known Chaos unit known as the Malefic Lord, from the Forge World Lost and the Damned list. Basically a psyker character that only cost 30 points and had no official model, so people would use whatever model they had that was even somewhat suitable and spam the crap out of them. They were useful mainly for casting Smite for d3 mortals, but they could also be used to summon stuff since they were Chaos characters. Thankfully summoning now cost points but it was still potentially powerful. One build I remember because my same friend that liked the Daemon Flying Circus in 7th was a total of 13 Malefic Lords, a ton of Nurglings for move blocking/preventing the Lords from being shot, and enough reserve points to summon a bunch of Slaanesh Heralds (so by the end he'd be throwing out 25+ Smites per turn!). Just not a fun experience to play against that. Thankfully GW nerfed Malefic Lords hard fairly early so spamming them went away less than a year into the edition.
-Unit spam in general. The video explained most of this so I don't need to reiterate. But I definitely remember people spamming things like Flyrants and even Stormravens and Plagueburst Crawlers.
-Soup lists. Again, the video explained it very well. I myself ran the Loyal 32 a few times. Another thing like that was the "Rusty 17", which was 2 AdMech Enginseers and 3 5-mans of Skitarii.
-Aircraft spam lists, specifically Aeldari ones. GW might have made it so you could only take 3 of anything, but Aeldari could bring 3 Crimson Hunters and 3 Hemlocks, plus one or two of some FW flyer. That list provided a negative play experience for the opponent, and I remember being matched against it in a tournament once and almost refusing the game (would have just immediately conceded) since it was going to be unwinnable for me. I decided to be a good sport and play anyway, but it was about as much fun as having my testicles rubbed all over with a cheese grater.
-Maelstrom of War. Sometimes fun for casual play, but it added way too much of a RNG factor for serious competition.
9th:
-Power Creep. Like the video said, books and the stratagems within just got more and more powerful as the edition wore on, until GW inevitably went too far with the Votann book and the players rebelled, so it got a day 0 nerf.
-Stratagem Bloat. Again, covered in the video, but I remember being gotcha'd more than once by a clutch stratagem I had no idea existed. I probably did it to a few opponents myself even if I don't remember.
-Faction Secondaries. This was a cool idea in concept, but it ended up becoming a major "haves and have nots" situation, as some factions had some auto-take easy ones and some factions' secondaries were pure garbage. Plus armies that didn't have a 9th edition book didn't have them at all until they did get their book.
10th:
-Inconsistent power level of detachments. What I mean by this is that some factions got some really strong detachments that work well with a variety of units, and others got some fairly meh detachments. My Dark Angels got done pretty dirty by this, as the detachments in their book kind of suck, even after GW's attempts to fix them with errata/FAQs. And some of the cool ones get completely frozen out by ones that are just more efficient even within a faction (there's a reason Gladius remains one of the most popular detachments for all Space Marines).
-Free Wargear. I don't hate this all that much, but it does mean that a lot of people who built their armies when stuff cost points now have units that are just missing the awesome free weapons. And they either have to cut up their models to give them the weapons or buy new ones, which feels bad. And it also means that every weapon effectively costs the same (nothing) so many options will get frozen out because they are simply not equally powerful.

Siegfriedfr wrote:
The crux of the matter is, 40k was never a good game, in any edition, and players came for the models and the Lore surrounding them, and just bear with the terrible gameplay.

Between GW wanting to sell codex and rule books regularly, and some vocal Players being attached to legacy systems that don't make sense anymore (like IGOUGO and D6), the game, in spite of having frequent new editions, doesn't really improve, it just changes.

I'm just curious, what, if any, good games do you think are out there? Or simply, what games are good?

 Da Boss wrote:

Third Edition: I played my first tournaments in this edition. I think it's pretty fine if you just get rid of that awful janky Blood Angels codex (I was so disappointed by it when I got my hands on it as a teenager!). 3.5 chaos was abused but the codex itself is also one of the best representations of Chaos that's ever been put to paper so I can't hate it.

Never played 8e or onwards, though I do sometimes think I should grab the index version of 8e in print at least - I have 3e and 8e is the next "paradigm shift" so even from a hobby history POV it's interesting to have it.

100% Agree with 3rd ed Chaos Codex, that's around when I got into the hobby and my brother got into Chaos. It was so cool all the thematic things you could do with the army at this time and it was one of the things that drew us into the setting. (The Tyranid one of being able to swap weapons across all units because they were all stat modifiers was cool too.)

Coming back in near the end of 8th after stopping in early 7th, it was certainly a big paradigm shift. The thing I've found about the current editions is that they've (for the most part) tended to overcorrect the issues in the past that hurt the game so much in 7th and that's left a fair bit of homogenization for the sake of balance. That being said, the general ruleset and play patters are fun when you play narrative and do your own things, it's a very easily modifiable core toolset. It's just... that there are only so many ways you can make "go stand on objectives in L shaped ruins" work for matched play without getting repetitive, which is a whole different issue.