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 Filch wrote:
The most disappointing fluff I have read is all the pointless and useless fluff written into every rule book to make it a 100+ pages hard cover book to sell at $100 . For real, the real rules to play is less than 10 pages per codex and even the big rule book can be a 20 page packet. Fluff belongs in a 300+page novel not the rule books. I should not have to pay $100 to play an army or the game.

I think the real issue is the way that they waste huge amounts of space with blank space and excess artwork (like 30 pages of minis that belong in a "how to model" book, not the actual Codex). You could shave off 20 pages by just getting rid of the useless space.

I still like that GW has explanations for a faction in each book along with art work, color pallets, model examples. I wish codexs were a little cheaper but 40k to me is more than just a game, it's an immersion hobby. Truthfully for me the game itsn't enough to keep me interested, it's the background, the setting and the modeling and painting aspect that really sells it.

Battle for the Abyss.

An interesting premise for a novel which sadly seems lacklustre throughout.

I found the whole necron pariahs fluff very disappointing as I thought their story was very cool , captured people slaved to the Necrons and their minds transferred to Necron bodies. A very cool concept I think.

Then along comes GW and says BAM now theyre reconned cause they don't fit the narrative blah blah...

I was upset about some of the changes when Necrons were changed to Tomb Kings IN SPAAACE!!! They did need something more than a vague idea that they were terminators that would occasionally kill Sisters of Battle, but I though the direction that they took them was too generic and removed a lot of good stuff. in this change, my two biggest sources of disappointment were the changes to the C'tan and the Flayed Ones.

The C'tan were wonderful in the grimdarkness. Creatures almost as old as the universe whose motives are strange and difficult to understand to us petty mortals. The variety that the C'tan were hinted to come in before their civil war painted a picture of an almost Lovecraftian galaxy. The role they played in the fall of the Necrontyr was a brilliant showcase of their inhuman pragmatism. Their fall was an interesting display of the dangers of hubris and provided a nice introduction to the two main surviving C'tan: The Nightbringer and the Deciever, both of whom have an excellent background. The Emperor's fight with the Void Dragon as well as its imprisonment beneath Mars always struck me as both amazing and frightening, having one of the galaxy's most powerful beings locked away on Earth's doorstep is just a disaster waiting to happen.

Then the C'tan were all killed by the Necrons and broken into shards. There isn't even much on how they killed these supposedly immortal star-gods, it just sort of happens. The Void Dragon's fight with the Emperor is now probably one of the most nonsensical battles there is. Even a low estimate of the Emperor's power levels suggest that there really should not have been a titanic battle against a paltry shard .

The Flayed Ones are my biggest problem with the changes though. Before the flayed ones did not have much of a "why?" attached to their wearing the skins of the dead in the codex and I was fine with that. One of the best Warhammer 40,000 short stories that I have read (I think it was in Fear the Alien) featured an Imperial Guard unit fighting against the Necrons and to the surprise of the Guard, they were actually holding. Then some of the dead, blasted corpses that littered the area around the command stood up, revealing the flayed ones that had been wearing the skins to blend in on the battlefield. They promptly slaughtered everyone around them, causing the Guard to break. That story made me fall in love with the flayed ones and I tried to save up my pennies (I didn't have a source of income back then) to buy the metal models.

Then the new fluff changed the flayed ones to being necron warriors driven mad by a virus that causes them to hunger for flesh (what?). The new models were made to reflect this and are hideous things that carry around bloody trophies and skulls. I would be fine if those were on Chaos Space Marines, Orks, or Dark Eldar, but I want some nice emotionless robots, not blood crazed madbots.
[/rant]

GW's, FW's and BL's inconsistency when it comes to the background material and writing. That is my main gripe. But there are some individual bits of "fluff" that I dislike based on their own merits.

 the Signless wrote:
I was upset about some of the changes when Necrons were changed to Tomb Kings IN SPAAACE!!! They did need something more than a vague idea that they were terminators that would occasionally kill Sisters of Battle, but I though the direction that they took them was too generic and removed a lot of good stuff. in this change, my two biggest sources of disappointment were the changes to the C'tan and the Flayed Ones.

The C'tan were wonderful in the grimdarkness. Creatures almost as old as the universe whose motives are strange and difficult to understand to us petty mortals. The variety that the C'tan were hinted to come in before their civil war painted a picture of an almost Lovecraftian galaxy. The role they played in the fall of the Necrontyr was a brilliant showcase of their inhuman pragmatism. Their fall was an interesting display of the dangers of hubris and provided a nice introduction to the two main surviving C'tan: The Nightbringer and the Deciever, both of whom have an excellent background. The Emperor's fight with the Void Dragon as well as its imprisonment beneath Mars always struck me as both amazing and frightening, having one of the galaxy's most powerful beings locked away on Earth's doorstep is just a disaster waiting to happen.

Then the C'tan were all killed by the Necrons and broken into shards. There isn't even much on how they killed these supposedly immortal star-gods, it just sort of happens. The Void Dragon's fight with the Emperor is now probably one of the most nonsensical battles there is. Even a low estimate of the Emperor's power levels suggest that there really should not have been a titanic battle against a paltry shard .

[/rant]

I don't know, there's something incredibly tragic about a race so hateful that they even murdered their own Gods.

Never thought of it that way, kinda makes the story a bit more tragic.

I too disliked a lot of the changes in the Necron fluff (though much of it is probably more due to the shoddy writing of the new fluff). However, there are two specific things that really irked me. Well, maybe three. 1) Necron Pariahs for reasons stated above, I loved the Pariahs and their complete retcon really pissed me off. 2) Necron Flayed Ones, once again for reasons stated above and this probably irks me more than the Pariah mostly because they became shoddily written robot zombies (pathogen included though it only effects necrons). 3) Necrons create an intergalactic empire but lacked FTL travel (note, I know this was changed but this is in reference to when the ward dex first dropped), that was just idiotic for a multitude of reasons including the time it would take to do or resolve anything. Say there's a civil uprising going on somewhere. Message of it has to first get back to one of the dynastic chain of commands or if it's big enough, to the silent king. That'll easily take hundreds if not thousands if not millions of years. By that time, the uprising quite probably already over and everyone initially involved already dead (and considering the lifespans of the necrontyr, many many many generations ago). Oh, but what if they had some form of instantaneous communication? It would still take hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of years for a military force meant to bring the area of space into compliance to get there by which time, once again, the uprising is over, and everyone initially involved in the uprising would have long since been dead. GW really needs to get a sense of how expansive a galaxy really is.

I just remembered another one: The introduction of Sgt Telion when GW completely forgot about Naaman.

The 2011-present Grey Knights. Necrons are a close second, but at the end of the day I'm going to go with Grey Knights. And a lot of people are going to blame Matt Ward, and as the writer of the codex he does deserve most of the blame, but people are also overlooking something: Matt Ward didn't make the Dreadknight, nor did he make those god-awful teleporter pack antennae. Those were aesthetic decisions made by unnamed model designers. No one took credit for those for a reason... Even the entry to the 2011 Grey Knights book had the Dreadknight looking completely different, but I digress.

I started 40k right after the Grey Knights were released. I wanted to play Daemonhunters, and I bought the Daemonhunters book, and right before I bought anything I heard that they were going to get an update, and I was SO excited. I couldn't wait. Then the leaks came. I saw the dreadknight, I read the scans of the book, we all remember what 40k forums turned into around that time... I wonder if there has ever been a harder collective facepalm at Games Workshop before or since... Maybe Age of Sigmar...

So I decided to play Chaos Daemons instead.

Love the teleport packs : D
They give those models a sort of practicality before aesthetics look.

 oldzoggy wrote:
Love the teleport packs : D
They give those models a sort of practicality before aesthetics look.

Very little is practical about having antenna that could be broken off when the alternative could be backpack integration. Just imagine them with different-looking backpacks with lights, gauges, and other doodads and compare what could have been with what we got.

Most of the more recent Tau fluff.

DAE ethereals are literally hitler, just less competent?

They were always hinted that they were like that.

 CadianXV wrote:
Battle for the Abyss.

An interesting premise for a novel which sadly seems lacklustre throughout.

It's a great personal shame for me that valuable brain-space is taken up by the memories of that steaming gak-pile story. At least you can laugh at books like C.S. Goto's Dawn of War series, BftA was just depressingly poor.

HoundsofDemos wrote:
They were always hinted that they were like that.

They were certainly not "hinted that they were like that". They were hinted to as being Orwellian, certainly. The power they wielded over other Tau was certainly puzzling and ominous, but it was almost universally presented as inspiring ideological zeal and complete conviction in the mind of the people they governed.

They were not presented as snivveling, conniving, incompetent liars, sitting in dank rooms banging their fists, shouting "Farsight is too good! How can we stop him?".
Unfortunately the current-day consensus on the Tau seem to be driven by edgy "hardcores" that generally have little interest in the faction to begin with.

 Commander_Avalanche wrote:

HoundsofDemos wrote:
They were always hinted that they were like that.

They were certainly not "hinted that they were like that". They were hinted to as being Orwellian, certainly. The power they wielded over other Tau was certainly puzzling and ominous, but it was almost universally presented as inspiring ideological zeal and complete conviction in the mind of the people they governed.

They were not presented as snivveling, conniving, incompetent liars, sitting in dank rooms banging their fists, shouting "Farsight is too good! How can we stop him?".
Unfortunately the current-day consensus on the Tau seem to be driven by edgy "hardcores" that generally have little interest in the faction to begin with.

Absolutely, to quote myself (because I'm lazy).

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Tau are pretty Orwellian, it's something that doesn't get used (or used well) in the fluff. It's either shining towers of good will and friendship, or fething mind control worms. The best Orwellian things are subtle, but 40k writers can't do subtle it appears. I liked how in the older codexs there were hints, nothing solid. It was subtle, it was well made. But then we have 6th edition codex which is about as subtle as a brick to the face.

What's this about Tau mind control worms? That sounds almost as bad as the Newcron changes.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
What's this about Tau mind control worms? That sounds almost as bad as the Newcron changes.

The Nagi. If you have the 6th edition tau codex, check page 20.

The 6th edion codex and the farsight stuff destroyed every trace of subtlety in intruge.

I'm still kinda disappointed in how OP the Necrons are in fluff. I mean I love yet another encroaching threat about to stomp the universe, but even the necrons are a bit much with that, with seemingly no weaknesses exploited in the fluff, the ability to destroy suns from across the galaxy, ect.

Even without the silliness that is the Celestial Orrery, oldcrons were plenty broken.

They had no weaknesses except psychic powers, which work on everyone - and they were developing resistance to psionics as well.

They had perfect, risk-free FTL that they could use in combat.

They had infinite troops because almost every destroyed Necron would be rebuilt (before they introduced the silly 'sometimes they self destruct instead' thing).

Not to mention the fact they could literally bring their equivalent to Gork or the Emperor to a fight.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Even without the silliness that is the Celestial Orrery, oldcrons were plenty broken.

They had no weaknesses except psychic powers, which work on everyone - and they were developing resistance to psionics as well.

They had perfect, risk-free FTL that they could use in combat.

They had infinite troops because almost every destroyed Necron would be rebuilt (before they introduced the silly 'sometimes they self destruct instead' thing).

Not to mention the fact they could literally bring their equivalent to Gork or the Emperor to a fight.

Broken? You mean as a peer faction in a setting of point-matched battles? Sure. As something unique in the background that added a lot of depth to the setting and more actual Grimdark than 13 entire Black Crusades? Nope. Reducing every army to one among equals just makes the entire setting feel less mysterious and more monotonous. Fifth edition did the the Necrons what Voyager did to the Borg.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
What's this about Tau mind control worms? That sounds almost as bad as the Newcron changes.

The Nagi. If you have the 6th edition tau codex, check page 20.

The 6th edion codex and the farsight stuff destroyed every trace of subtlety in intruge.

I do not own that codex. I guess I will google it...


Automatically Appended Next Post:
...so now the Tau ethereals are a bunch of Goa'Uld Killgraves?


That's why we can't have nice things.
"You, firewarrior, stop having nice things. They displease me."

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:


Broken? You mean as a peer faction in a setting of point-matched battles? Sure. As something unique in the background that added a lot of depth to the setting and more actual Grimdark than 13 entire Black Crusades? Nope. Reducing every army to one among equals just makes the entire setting feel less mysterious and more monotonous. Fifth edition did the the Necrons what Voyager did to the Borg.

Personally I didn't think they added depth. The C'tan were just suddenly the cause of almost everything. The Eldar and Orks wouldn't have existed without them. The Gothic War was orchestrated by the Deceiver. It was implied that the Deceiver led Abaddon to his magic sword. They were hinted at having added the Pariah gene and possibly guided the evolution of humanity. They were walking gods whereas everyone else's were intentionally left crippled or mostly powerless in the Materium. They appeared out of nowhere and forced into almost every factions background (aside from the Tau). They so powerful there was no reason they hadn't already won between their massively superior fleets, reanimating and walking gods.

For me, some of the biggest background that bugs me actually comes from the Tyranids. From the Doom of Malan'tai destroying a Craftworld, to a single Tyranid organism suggested to have defeated a Titan Legion pretty much singlehandedly to Tyranids without synapse somehow seeming to repopulate on worlds with few Tyranids left and becoming a significant threat again (stealing from the Orks there I feel).

Also, I want Chaos to be shown affecting more different species. It's supposed to be the greatest threat and capable of corrupting almost anything but various aliens turn up and rarely seem affected by Chaos even if they use Psychic powers.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

Broken? You mean as a peer faction in a setting of point-matched battles? Sure. As something unique in the background that added a lot of depth to the setting and more actual Grimdark than 13 entire Black Crusades? Nope. Reducing every army to one among equals just makes the entire setting feel less mysterious and more monotonous. Fifth edition did the the Necrons what Voyager did to the Borg.

No, I mean broken as in "There is only one reason this faction has not negated the setting by killing off everyone else and sealing the Warp away based on its fluff described abilities alone, and that reason is going away".