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It's little secret that 6th ed is currently a total mess from a balanced gameplay perspective. However, I can clearly remember a year ago, 6th ed was thought of as relatively well-balanced, barring a lack of AA (which obviously would become a non-issue once AA got patched into each dex) and maybe some Aegis Line shenanigans. DA and CSM were both very reasonable armies when they were released and allies didn't create broken armies (in fact, the FAQs eliminated almost all the broken combinations from the old books, and the Ravenwing and Deathwing forces denied potentially cheesy combos of scoring Bikes and Terminators... something that would never happen now). Was it Tau that started the trend? Eldar? Or maybe Codex: Inquisition starting the whole "yo dawg, I heard you liked allies!" thing that just makes the FOC basically a suggestion? I actually am wondering about this because it wasn't until quite recently that 40k started to go a bit off the rails.

*EDIT*

Ok, maybe I should clarify a bit: 6th ed was obviously unbalanced to begin with due to a lack of AA, but there was an optimism that the game would be balanced within a year as more armies got AA options. When people first heard about the allies rule, they were expecting everyone to take Sanguinary Priests to get FNP or KFFs to get themselves free cover, but GW FAQ'd these options out. Dark Angels were also a dirty option for cheap, scoring Terminators for every army, but then GW quickly put out DA with a "Ravenwing and Deathwing allies are never scoring units" concession to plug this gap. Not only that, but DA and CSM were both fairly decent Codices, neither broken (although the Heldrake FAQ was idiotic). So what I'm getting at is, at the onset of 6th ed, it seemed like GW still cared about balance and were doing what they could to not break the game... and idea which seems to have been thrown out around the time Tau dropped.

Heldrakes. Silly good fliers in a meta that still didn't have anything in the way of anti-aircraft other than a quad-gun.

Don't blame Tau for starting the cheese wheel rolling. It was already merrily trundling along before we got here thank you very much.

It was cheesy from the start.

Say hello to Mr. Vendetta.

As a melee player, roughly when they released 6th edition.

From when players turned to page 113 and saw that the allies matrix made almost no sense.

6th ed was never balanced. Looking back on it when I started with the beginning of 5th ed it wasn't all that balanced then but I never started noticing it until about halfway through 5th ed. The BA dex was the biggest factor in driving me away from the game. The SW and GK ones didn't help a lot either but I'd say BA was where I would say this downward spiral really started.

 welshhoppo wrote:
From when players turned to page 113 and saw that the allies matrix made almost no sense.

The allies matrix made my eyes bleed

Early 6th ed was horribly imbalanced, but still better than what we have now.
Most people would probably point to the Uber-Heldrake FAQ starting the escalation (pardon the pun) of cheese.

It's been a gradual creep, which pretty much every book apart from Codex: Dark Angels, Codex: Space Marines and Codex: Tyranids has been part of.

First we had one obviously nasty unit (Chaos Space Marine Heldrakes), then a codex which could combine the effects of several units to make one really overpowered one (Chaos Daemons Screamerstar), then a codex which did that plus allowed easy abuse of allies (Tau), then one which did all of that and had an easily-spammed super-tank (Eldar).

Then we started ignoring the FOC with Codex: Inquisition and allowing super-heavies (and, more significantly, Destroyer weapons) with Escalation. Now we've got Codex: Imperial Knights, which gives us super-heavy walkers which effectively ignore the FOC.

For me its been the recent flurry of releases, suppliments, crossover rules and additions.
I dont even try to keep track of them anymore :(
The permutations and possibilities with LOW, Fortifications and Formations simply baffle me.
Whilst not leading to an imbalance in terms of games I play personally, it makes it incredibly difficult to pick and create a balanced and fair army list, as in one game you could face a Revenant Titan, in another a sub faction you've never even seen rules for e.g. Tau Farsight and in another a more standard army build.

As above, 6th wasn't particularly balanced from the get go, and the while the first codices weren't top power level material, they were still awfully balanced internally.

It really only got progressively worse from there.

6th edition started us off with the Necron flying circus. Then it was Heldrake n' friends. Then was it Mr. Riptide and his many brothers. Then Eldar really just broke the game.

And if I recall correctly, Demons used to have a powerbuild from their WD codex that abused screamers. Yeah, 6th was always a horridly imbal-FORGING A NARRATIVE FRIENDLY game. It just got much, much, much worse over time.

dementedwombat wrote:Heldrakes. Silly good fliers in a meta that still didn't have anything in the way of anti-aircraft other than a quad-gun.

Don't blame Tau for starting the cheese wheel rolling. It was already merrily trundling along before we got here thank you very much.

BrotherHaraldus wrote:It was cheesy from the start.

Say hello to Mr. Vendetta.

Again, flyers were a problem because GW made the idiotic decision of not giving every army flakk missiles at the get-go, so flying circuses became dominant to exploit this. However, the mindset was that obviously this was going to be rectified as more codices got AA (and this did eventually happen... unfortunately, that army was Tau ). So no, the game wasn't balanced obviously, but there was a state of mind that GW was doing what it could to balance the game as more armies were released. Of course, this isn't even a consideration anymore...

It was never "relatively" balanced, even at the outset nearly 2 years ago you had some very clear "Good" and "Bad" armies, remember the Necron Air Force? The double-whammy of the Tau and Eldar books then came out and were just so natively powerful that they're still seen as the best armies generally a year and several other armies later, while we've had stinkers like the Tyranid codex and non-helturkey CSM armies. We'll see what the IG bring.

But, really, it was the last few months of 2013 that began to include things like "free abilities for no extra points and no FoC usage" formations and D weapon titans to pickup games.

To bring the discussion back to some kind of objective level, what is the difference in power level between codexes now?

In 5th edition, I reckon if a middle tier codex was 100, then a top tier codex was 110 and a bottom tier codex was 90. Maybe the range was 120 down to 80 for the very best to very worst match-up, but still not impossible to overcome with skill and luck.

What is the differential now?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
To bring the discussion back to some kind of objective level, what is the difference in power level between codexes now?

In 5th edition, I reckon if a middle tier codex was 100, then a top tier codex was 110 and a bottom tier codex was 90. Maybe the range was 120 down to 80 for the very best to very worst match-up, but still not impossible to overcome with skill and luck.

What is the differential now?

Actually it was just as nad back then, you either had good mechspam, or you didn't. Tyranids were ranked the lowest by a wide margin and such.

The only difference, we had three top tier codex. IG, SW, and GK, rather then two, Tau, Eldar.

 Perfect Organism wrote:
It's been a gradual creep, which pretty much every book apart from Codex: Dark Angels, Codex: Space Marines and Codex: Tyranids has been part of.

I'm sorry what? Omniscope Grav Centurions moving and wasting 2 enemy MEQ squads at a time led by beatstick CM taking any and all enemy fire and dropping orbital bombardment that happily scatters off to a nearby tank doesnt ring a bell? Or biker command squad going all grav? Or Imperial Fist Lascannon Devastators? White Scar all biker army where almost every unit is scoring?

I feel that the imballance happened with the drop of 6th edition. And while a new edition does bring up a shake up, 6th edition was worse. The addition of flyers, snap shots, and flying monsterious creatures, was a huge swing that some armies still have yet to compensate for. This was made worse when things that were strong for their pricing suddenly became godly due to the flyer rules (vendettas).

There usually has been a shift in power between shooty and assault, one swings up, one swings down, but nothing like what 6th edition brought. variable charge ranges, overwatch, no assault from inside vehicles, outflank, or deepstrike. Now add in move and shoot heavy weapons, increases to rapid firing weapons, and lower over all cover saves just swing that pendulum to the extreme ends. Now each of those ideas individually isn't a bad thing. I personally love the reduction in cover saves, it needed to happen to keep the game moving), but when all of that is combined together... Some armies just took a huge hit to the happy sack.

 ThunderFury 2575 wrote:

 welshhoppo wrote:
From when players turned to page 113 and saw that the allies matrix made almost no sense.

The allies matrix made my eyes bleed

are you sure you haven't got the I-am-legend virus?

6th edition, with its wound allocation rules, has created deathstar builds. that needs to go.

plus beef the assault rules again (heck, you can keep all the buffs to ranged rules like overwatch etc.) and the edition is perfect.

 Sir Arun wrote:

 Perfect Organism wrote:
It's been a gradual creep, which pretty much every book apart from Codex: Dark Angels, Codex: Space Marines and Codex: Tyranids has been part of.

I'm sorry what? Omniscope Grav Centurions moving and wasting 2 enemy MEQ squads at a time led by beatstick CM taking any and all enemy fire and dropping orbital bombardment that happily scatters off to a nearby tank doesnt ring a bell? Or biker command squad going all grav? Or Imperial Fist Lascannon Devastators? White Scar all biker army where almost every unit is scoring?

Yeah Space Marines are absolutely top tier right now. It's just the "normal" SM builds aren't very good, so the more casual player doesn't see the insanity that codex can put out. Until they see a Grav Star GOI across the map and delete two Riptides in one go, they won't be believers either.

 Sir Arun wrote:

 Perfect Organism wrote:
It's been a gradual creep, which pretty much every book apart from Codex: Dark Angels, Codex: Space Marines and Codex: Tyranids has been part of.

I'm sorry what? Omniscope Grav Centurions moving and wasting 2 enemy MEQ squads at a time led by beatstick CM taking any and all enemy fire and dropping orbital bombardment that happily scatters off to a nearby tank doesnt ring a bell? Or biker command squad going all grav? Or Imperial Fist Lascannon Devastators? White Scar all biker army where almost every unit is scoring?

I find grav cents more manageable than Wave Serpents.

 anonymou5 wrote:

 Sir Arun wrote:

 Perfect Organism wrote:
It's been a gradual creep, which pretty much every book apart from Codex: Dark Angels, Codex: Space Marines and Codex: Tyranids has been part of.

I'm sorry what? Omniscope Grav Centurions moving and wasting 2 enemy MEQ squads at a time led by beatstick CM taking any and all enemy fire and dropping orbital bombardment that happily scatters off to a nearby tank doesnt ring a bell? Or biker command squad going all grav? Or Imperial Fist Lascannon Devastators? White Scar all biker army where almost every unit is scoring?

Yeah Space Marines are absolutely top tier right now. It's just the "normal" SM builds aren't very good, so the more casual player doesn't see the insanity that codex can put out. Until they see a Grav Star GOI across the map and delete two Riptides in one go, they won't be believers either.

Except a Grav Star can't delete two Riptides in one go easily because of A) Terrible range and B) Good luck finding an opponent stupid enough to put one near enough, yet alone two.

White Scar Grav Bikers are balanced, and a thankful addition given the prevalence of new MC's.

Imperial Fists aren't competitive and IF Lascannon Devs are meh, you need two extra men for each Dev squad for ablative wounds and they're not great HS choices.


Chaos Space Marines gave us the stand out unit of Helldrakes, a radical change to the formula, at a reasonable price, Tau gave us undercosted Riptides, Daemons gave us the unintentional Screamerstar, Eldar gave us admittedly overpowered Wave Serpents.

Its no different from 5th where every other Codex had its stand out overpowered, or extremely powerful unit. The only difference is a lot of the new OP units have been radical list formula changers for the meta.

Not being as broken as Wave Serpents doesn't mean they aren't broken.

 anonymou5 wrote:
Until they see a Grav Star GOI across the map and delete two Riptides in one go

Had me loling. I think the problem with Space Marines is that it has the biggest proportion of 40k newbies playing, so they tend to usually be the losing party when you happen to come across them on a random table in your FLGS, but if played right they are highly competetive.

 Mr.Omega wrote:

 anonymou5 wrote:

 Sir Arun wrote:

 Perfect Organism wrote:
It's been a gradual creep, which pretty much every book apart from Codex: Dark Angels, Codex: Space Marines and Codex: Tyranids has been part of.

I'm sorry what? Omniscope Grav Centurions moving and wasting 2 enemy MEQ squads at a time led by beatstick CM taking any and all enemy fire and dropping orbital bombardment that happily scatters off to a nearby tank doesnt ring a bell? Or biker command squad going all grav? Or Imperial Fist Lascannon Devastators? White Scar all biker army where almost every unit is scoring?

Yeah Space Marines are absolutely top tier right now. It's just the "normal" SM builds aren't very good, so the more casual player doesn't see the insanity that codex can put out. Until they see a Grav Star GOI across the map and delete two Riptides in one go, they won't be believers either.

Except a Grav Star can't delete two Riptides in one go easily because of A) Terrible range and B) Good luck finding an opponent stupid enough to put one near enough, yet alone two.

White Scar Grav Bikers are balanced, and a thankful addition given the prevalence of new MC's.

Imperial Fists aren't competitive and IF Lascannon Devs are meh, you need two extra men for each Dev squad for ablative wounds and they're not great HS choices.

Except it can. Grav Star has Gate of Infinity. So it has a 48 inch range. It generally has Scout too. So make that 54 inch range. That's usually more than enough to get a Riptide or two into death range. It's a top tier build, and extremely powerful.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 PrinceRaven wrote:
Not being as broken as Wave Serpents doesn't mean they aren't broken.

A good Gravstar build laughs at Wave Serpents.

The funny thing is you can cram a GOI grav star and a Clan Raukaan CM on bike with Chain of Gorgon command squad gravbikestar in one legal army. Meltabombs for anti-tank.

 Sir Arun wrote:
The funny thing is you can cram a GOI grav star and a Clan Raukaan CM on bike with Chain of Gorgon command squad gravbikestar in one legal army. Meltabombs for anti-tank.

If I was going to run Gravstar, which I refer to as the Teletubby build, I think the rest of my list is just Scouts in Land Speeder Storms. Such a versatile unit. (we've been building a two source Tubby build for ATC, kind of sad the build is becoming known outside of the Atlanta area now. Stupid TOF invite)

 anonymou5 wrote:

 Mr.Omega wrote:

 anonymou5 wrote:

 Sir Arun wrote:

 Perfect Organism wrote:
It's been a gradual creep, which pretty much every book apart from Codex: Dark Angels, Codex: Space Marines and Codex: Tyranids has been part of.

I'm sorry what? Omniscope Grav Centurions moving and wasting 2 enemy MEQ squads at a time led by beatstick CM taking any and all enemy fire and dropping orbital bombardment that happily scatters off to a nearby tank doesnt ring a bell? Or biker command squad going all grav? Or Imperial Fist Lascannon Devastators? White Scar all biker army where almost every unit is scoring?

Yeah Space Marines are absolutely top tier right now. It's just the "normal" SM builds aren't very good, so the more casual player doesn't see the insanity that codex can put out. Until they see a Grav Star GOI across the map and delete two Riptides in one go, they won't be believers either.

Except a Grav Star can't delete two Riptides in one go easily because of A) Terrible range and B) Good luck finding an opponent stupid enough to put one near enough, yet alone two.

White Scar Grav Bikers are balanced, and a thankful addition given the prevalence of new MC's.

Imperial Fists aren't competitive and IF Lascannon Devs are meh, you need two extra men for each Dev squad for ablative wounds and they're not great HS choices.

Except it can. Grav Star has Gate of Infinity. So it has a 48 inch range. It generally has Scout too. So make that 54 inch range. That's usually more than enough to get a Riptide or two into death range. It's a top tier build, and extremely powerful.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 PrinceRaven wrote:
Not being as broken as Wave Serpents doesn't mean they aren't broken.

A good Gravstar build laughs at Wave Serpents.

So what happens when he puts his Riptides in reserve? Uh, diddums?

 Mr.Omega wrote:

 anonymou5 wrote:

 Mr.Omega wrote:

 anonymou5 wrote:

 Sir Arun wrote:

 Perfect Organism wrote:
It's been a gradual creep, which pretty much every book apart from Codex: Dark Angels, Codex: Space Marines and Codex: Tyranids has been part of.

I'm sorry what? Omniscope Grav Centurions moving and wasting 2 enemy MEQ squads at a time led by beatstick CM taking any and all enemy fire and dropping orbital bombardment that happily scatters off to a nearby tank doesnt ring a bell? Or biker command squad going all grav? Or Imperial Fist Lascannon Devastators? White Scar all biker army where almost every unit is scoring?

Yeah Space Marines are absolutely top tier right now. It's just the "normal" SM builds aren't very good, so the more casual player doesn't see the insanity that codex can put out. Until they see a Grav Star GOI across the map and delete two Riptides in one go, they won't be believers either.

Except a Grav Star can't delete two Riptides in one go easily because of A) Terrible range and B) Good luck finding an opponent stupid enough to put one near enough, yet alone two.

White Scar Grav Bikers are balanced, and a thankful addition given the prevalence of new MC's.

Imperial Fists aren't competitive and IF Lascannon Devs are meh, you need two extra men for each Dev squad for ablative wounds and they're not great HS choices.

Except it can. Grav Star has Gate of Infinity. So it has a 48 inch range. It generally has Scout too. So make that 54 inch range. That's usually more than enough to get a Riptide or two into death range. It's a top tier build, and extremely powerful.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 PrinceRaven wrote:
Not being as broken as Wave Serpents doesn't mean they aren't broken.

A good Gravstar build laughs at Wave Serpents.

So what happens when he puts his Riptides in reserve? Uh, diddums?

You kill everything else? lol. Gravstars own Riptide heavy builds, that's one of the reasons they exist, because of how hard they eat Ovesastars. . Riptide comes on the board does a wound or two to the Chaptermaster standing in front, then it dies.

Unless it comes on too close, then Coteaz triggers and the Riptide dies in it's movement phase for some nice irony.