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I'll start with two factions that used to be my absolute favorites.

1. Everything about the "new" Alpha Legion. The old school Alpha Legion full of arrogant jerkbags who turned, quite bitterly, to a 10,000 year long guerrilla war after they lost in the Heresy was about 340 billion times cooler than the ridiculously awful Mission Impossible Marines of Dan Abnett's imagination.

2. Orks being endlessly reproducing galactic mold that gets bigger when you hit it. They were so much more awesome when they were the galaxy's rambunctious neighbors who spent their entire lives in a loop of The Road Warrior fighting amongst themselves until a really powerful warlord would get them all riled up and go about smashin' fings.

On to other things:

3. Over-grimdark. At some point, Games Workshop decided to +1 the entire universe. Instead of everyone living in this decrepit, slowly crumbling galaxy, they decided to ramp up the Grimdark Factor as much as possible. It used to be that Tyranids were going to eat everything, and the reason they were going to do it was because everyone else was too busy fighting eachother to stop them.

Now everyone is going to eat everything. Necrons went from being these mysterious Egyptian Space Terminators and the remnants of an ancient civilization to this massive, billions strong and about to awaken ancient civilization. The Orks, like I mentioned, now reproduce by getting killed ( ) and can match a Tyranid hive fleet simply through force of mold (nevermind how stupid the idea is that the Orks could reproduce full sized warriors at that rate). Chaos was once the bitter and angry remnants of a 10,000 year old treachery who were only able to mount one large, and ultimately failed, offensive every several hundred years and spent the rest of the time raiding and plotting insurrections. Now they're a massive threat that is going to eat the galaxy.

The game was much cooler when the Imperium was slowly crumbling, but sorta barely holding on. That's the dystopic feel the original writers were going for. At some point, apparently Games Workshop felt that players were too stupid to enjoy such a setting, and that people would only play the xenos and Chaos armies if they were "winning".

It looks like I've mentioned this once or twice before, because people are now repeating it. Well, just like "special snowflake", I guess I am a fountain of contributions to the Dakka community.

Don't like that WS apparently now have have dreadnaughts.

 Void__Dragon wrote:

 Jimsolo wrote:
Runner up: Chaos in general. If it isn't written by Dan Abnett or Aaron Dembski-Bowden, every chaos story I've seen seems to revolve around "We're evil because...evil! Raaawr!" There seems to be a consistent lack of clear, understandable motivation for Chaos followers. That's okay when it comes to demons (they're creatures of chaos, so they don't have to think logically. I can accept that.) But humans, at some point, had to have a moment where they agreed to go down the chaos-road willingly, and for some reason. By and large, the stuff I've read never seems to make sense on that score.

Abnett?

What Abnett books gave you that impression? Abnett's villains tend towards mustache-twirling cartoon villains, almost invariably, from what I've seen.

Part 2: I haven't, however, read any of his Iron Snakes stuff, nor any of his Gaunt's Ghosts stuff. (No interest in the former, haven't found the first book for the latter.) So it's entirely possible that those contain more of that moustache-twirling you're mentioning than his Heresy and Inquisitor work.

 Jimsolo wrote:


Part 2: I haven't, however, read any of his Iron Snakes stuff, nor any of his Gaunt's Ghosts stuff. (No interest in the former, haven't found the first book for the latter.) So it's entirely possible that those contain more of that moustache-twirling you're mentioning than his Heresy and Inquisitor work.

Oh, you're missing out. If you liked Prospero Burns, I think you'll like the Iron Snakes stuff. The Snakes are the classic BL marines (ie one of them vs 10 genestealers would be a fair fight). Gaunts Ghosts is about like the Horus Heresy stuff. Most of the books are good, a majority a great, a couple just connect the dots. Traitor General and Last Command are incredible. If you've not read Titanicus, I recommend it too. All and all most of the villians are very well developed... Especially the reoccurring ones.

I'd like to say I kind of hate the fact that the space marines went from Mk4 to MK7 in the time of the heresy. I'd prefer if they ended the heresy with Mk5 and the later marks came thousands of years later.

 gianlucafiorentini123 wrote:
Don't like that WS apparently now have have dreadnaughts.

White Scars have always had dreadnoughts...........

Just because WS use a lot of bikes, doesn't mean they're not a fully formed chapter with all that that entails.

 sing your life wrote:
I'd like to say I kind of hate the fact that the space marines went from Mk4 to MK7 in the time of the heresy. I'd prefer if they ended the heresy with Mk5 and the later marks came thousands of years later.

Well, that's something of a side effect of the fluff changing over the years.

Originally (the "Space Marine Armour" article by Rick Priestley), the idea was that the Mk6 was a slightly more sophisticated stop-gap. Both Mk6 and Mk5 were temporary solutions. The "beakie" helmet was just a "improved" version of the Mk4 helmet.

The Mk7 was supposed to be the final iteration of the Mk6 armor. Better helmet, better leg articulation, better chest protection of the suit's internals. But the parts were supposed to be largely interchangeable.

Basically Mk5 was "Stopgap Mk4 Armor" and the Mk7 was "Optimized Final Production Model Mk6".


Where the awesomesauceness of the earlier Marks of armor was played up was in the Forgeworld fluff. Which is strange since one of their best selling products are legacy power armor sets for players looking to make their Marines look different .

MWHistorian wrote:Just because WS use a lot of bikes, doesn't mean they're not a fully formed chapter with all that that entails.

Agreed.