skchsan wrote:...Currently, only few armies are capable of meeting all the criteria for a competitive army. It's either they get toned down or rest of the armies get a boost.
Normally I'm all for trying to fix things with minimal changes; the situation in 8e, however, feels like
GW fundamentally doesn't understand how to-hit modifiers,
AP-as-modifier, and the damage/wounds relationship work. The issue here is that there is a fundamental value to "having a wound" and to "having an attack", and the Guard are more in line with how the system wants to work than, say, Marines are. The Guard don't feel like they're 7e Wraithknights/scatterbikes, or 6e Mechdar, or a 5e Razorback parking lot, where they're massively undercosted and too killy/too durable for the demands of the system.
The really damning bit, to me, is that Guard v. Guard games are more interesting than Marine v. Marine games; Marines v. Marines is governed by degenerate mechanical relationships (expensive high-armour units v. massed good-
AP weapons, smaller numbers of Command Points that have to be burned on more expensive stratagems, expensive melee units that don't have enough attacks to function as melee units, small numbers of anti-armour weapons governed by
d6 damage, high-cost support models that make it nigh-impossible to include a full spectrum of support models in a game...), while Guard v. Guard involves generalist army builds, a flatter bell curve from more mid-value dice/wounds rather than fewer high-value dice/wounds, support models that are inexpensive enough to use and support abilities that make a reasonably significant difference to the game.
In practice I think taking the weaker armies and the ill-considered mechanical relationships as the norm just because there are more of them isn't going to improve games.
