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Meh this rumor has come from nowhere.

It would be nice to believe that GW will be patching up holes in the system from day one though.

The main is the problems they can cause to the enemy as well how much they can kill.
Now S3 is way better than before. And they cost 3 pts and are easily (and cheap) buffable.

To see how op they are just need compare them with gretchins since they have same cost I think. Compare attributes, armor, basic weapon, weapon choices, the orders option....

Conscrips has been 3 ppm for years, and now in 8th you can even snipe the comissar. (Quite easily too, 3 T3 wounds with no invuln isn't hard to deal with.)

The Gretchin comparison is moot, as I said they've been 3 ppm for years.

Calling this rumor bullsh*t, especially since the edition isn't even officially released yet.

 MinscS2 wrote:
Conscrips has been 3 ppm for years, and now in 8th you can even snipe the comissar. (Quite easily too, 3 T3 wounds with no invuln isn't hard to deal with.)

The Gretchin comparison is moot, as I said they've been 3 ppm for years.

Calling this rumor bullsh*t, especially since the edition isn't even officially released yet.

Calling it bs based on conscripts getting their points raised is highly naieve, and shows you haven't been following 8th edition news very closely.

 Rippy wrote:

 MinscS2 wrote:
Conscrips has been 3 ppm for years, and now in 8th you can even snipe the comissar. (Quite easily too, 3 T3 wounds with no invuln isn't hard to deal with.)

The Gretchin comparison is moot, as I said they've been 3 ppm for years.

Calling this rumor bullsh*t, especially since the edition isn't even officially released yet.

Calling it bs based on conscripts getting their points raised is highly naieve, and shows you haven't been following 8th edition news very closely.

Feel free to explain then. Also, whats with the attitude?

I can't personally see conscrips costing the same as regular guardsmen. Feels wrong in more than one way.

Apologies, there was no attitude in my post. It doesn't help I am typing instead of speaking.

Look at the amount of units that have had the same points for years that have changed. There is alot of them.

8th is so very different from 7th, that some points costs do not carry across very well for balance. Expect bigger changes in a year's time when the first rules balance comes out.

if they just did 0-1 unit restriction, or maybe 0-3 and left them at 3ppm, that would be better

While true, it still would be wrong with conscripts costing the same as regular guardsmen.

Personally I don't think the problem with the conscripts is cost, but spammability. They used to require a infantry plutoon before you could take a unit, but now in the index they don't, so AM-players are free to fill their troops with them.

Just make it so you require 2-3 infantry squads for each conscript squad and the spamm is eliminated.

Personally I'd consider ultra-cheap scions with plasma and veterans being elite for some strange reason to be the main issues with AM-troops at the moment.

 MinscS2 wrote:
While true, it still would be wrong with conscripts costing the same as regular guardsmen.

Personally I don't think the problem with the conscripts is cost, but spammability. They used to require a infantry plutoon before you could take a unit, but now in the index they don't, so AM-players are free to fill their troops with them.

Just make it so you require 2-3 infantry squads for each conscript squad and the spamm is eliminated.

Personally I'd consider ultra-cheap scions with plasma and veterans being elite for some strange reason to be the main issues with AM-troops at the moment.

Nice to see someone else who is irked about vets being elites. Also, my theory is mortars get nerfed to d3 shots, like every other small blast right now

God I hope this rumor is a lie. Not because I have any opinion on the specific changes, but because a day-zero update would be a concession that GW didn't bother to do even superficial playtesting on 8th and confirmation that it's a defective product.

tneva82 wrote:

Arachnofiend wrote:
A lot of rules in 8th that didn't exist in 7th that heavily favor mass units. Guard will be fine.

Yeah. Too bad it requires basically shelfing of units guard players used previously and mass buying units that didn't see much point previously like tempestus command squads and mortars.

So short of those massive collectors who have lots of everything prepare to hand out hundreds of euros to get back in game or get hit badly.

Making units that were totally underpowered previously up to par is something we want GW to do. Complaining about it is ridiculous.

 Peregrine wrote:
God I hope this rumor is a lie. Not because I have any opinion on the specific changes, but because a day-zero update would be a concession that GW didn't bother to do even superficial playtesting on 8th and confirmation that it's a defective product.

Not really sure why you think this.
We know that perhaps for the first time in many years GW have playtested this edition.
It is quite possible however they have learned more in the last couple of weeks now that a much wider player base have started experimenting with the system.
Some points are clearly out of balance and a tweak early is probably than one in twelve months time.

 Peregrine wrote:
God I hope this rumor is a lie. Not because I have any opinion on the specific changes, but because a day-zero update would be a concession that GW didn't bother to do even superficial playtesting on 8th and confirmation that it's a defective product.

We've seen the rules and the index. We know there are issues.
Now GW can admit it and try to fix it asap, or just ignore it. I don't see how the second option is better.

Tyel wrote:
Not really sure why you think this.

Because the game hasn't even been released yet. There hasn't been time for thorough community playtesting, and what we know now is barely more than what GW's internal playtesters should have known. So we have one of two possibilities: either GW's own playtesters are shamefully incompetent and missed obvious balance problems that the community immediately spotted, or GW is second-guessing their playtesters based on poorly informed first impressions and reflexive forum whines and rushing out a fix to appease the whiners. Neither one of these possibilities is a sign of a healthy development process that is worthy of long-term confidence.

Tyel wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
God I hope this rumor is a lie. Not because I have any opinion on the specific changes, but because a day-zero update would be a concession that GW didn't bother to do even superficial playtesting on 8th and confirmation that it's a defective product.

Not really sure why you think this.
We know that perhaps for the first time in many years GW have playtested this edition.
It is quite possible however they have learned more in the last couple of weeks now that a much wider player base have started experimenting with the system.
Some points are clearly out of balance and a tweak early is probably than one in twelve months time.

People underestimate the vast difference between internal testing and live user testing. Even with the best testing department and a huge budget, the hours that you can put in are just the tiniest fraction of what the user base can do in a week. I''m not excusing poor attention to detail that GW has been known for, but there is a good reason that products often get updates very quickly after release.

MaxT wrote:
Making units that were totally underpowered previously up to par is something we want GW to do. Complaining about it is ridiculous.

Making previously underpowered units good choices and previously good units into bad ones smells more like cash grab. "Okay we sold enough X but Y has been not selling much. X market is flooded, Y plenty of potential. Switch the power!"

One thing if they were equally good but now it's more like "take these previously undercosted units, spam them and you are at advantage over somebody who sticks to units who were good before".

You want to be handing out hundreds every time army gets updated? You call THAT balance?

fresus wrote:
We know there are issues.

No, we really don't. We have first impressions, nothing more, and first impressions are very often wrong (both in 40k and in other games). We have no long-term playtesting where people see how their first impressions match real performance and evolve a metagame, and we have no competitive tournament results where balance theories find their ultimate test. If GW lets people jump to conclusions without enough time for significant playtesting and immediately rushes out changes to appease the loudest complainers it's going to be a disaster. They need to have confidence in their playtesters, wait a while to see how things settle out (including tournament results), and then see what needs to be done based on trustworthy data.

I don't particularly trust the rumor, but I'll take back my objections to putting the point costs for things far from the unit cards if it means that GW is now willing to fix some of the more egregious balancing errors quickly post-printing.

I'll be ready with some correction tape and a pen.

My best guesses:
- Eldar: Avenger Catapults go from 7 to 0. This will line up with the Power Level.
- Ministorum: Celestine is made unique. (Sorry to those of you who just bought 5.)
- Custodes: Venerable Land Raider is given Transport keyword, so it can actually transport things.

Can they make it so GK can't perils when casting smite? Each model is so expensive we're literally trading 1:1 for points when you average out succesful smites and perils.

 Asmodai wrote:
I'll be ready with some correction tape and a pen.

My best guesses:
- Eldar: Avenger Catapults go from 7 to 0. This will line up with the Power Level.
- Ministorum: Celestine is made unique. (Sorry to those of you who just bought 5.)
- Custodes: Venerable Land Raider is given Transport keyword, so it can actually transport things.

Catapults CANNOT be 0. For one exarch. For second 6" range increase has to show somewhere. That's one of the 2 big leaps weapon ranges have!
Unique celestine logical enough.
Custodes: Funny catch

I will put a guess in too, patching that hole where technically you can make all your faction keywords the same lol
Name your Chaos Warband, Space marine chapter, and Ork mob as "Cheese", then they can all work together (not that anyone would actually allow this to happen)

 Traditio wrote:
Is it just me, or does a lot of what GW is doing in 8th basically make it seem like they've been reading my posts here?

yeah man only you said those things

you are a visionary thanks for enlightening us

the Commies blam and pass should be replaced with a blam and re-roll. I think people are most irritated with this unbeatable blob for some armies without sniper weapons.

I've always hated playing Guard Blob Tank Spam armies anyway... Just means they havent gotten any better IMO.

I'm fine with Day 1 FAQs if they are simply correcting things that proofreading didn't catch before things went to print.

But if they're actually doing balancing with this then it makes it iffy. Like someone said up there, it feels more like a kneejerk reaction and if they will react this fast to community outcry it could be bad, because it means any nutter with enough people riled up can cause the game's balance to be drastically skewed.

 Peregrine wrote:
God I hope this rumor is a lie. Not because I have any opinion on the specific changes, but because a day-zero update would be a concession that GW didn't bother to do even superficial playtesting on 8th and confirmation that it's a defective product.

I really don't know what their internal process is. I suspect their issue is not that they don't do "enough" playtesting, but is instead that they're not involving people who are competent to determine how to playtest and how to think about the results of that playtesting, and often who aren't even competent to come to a decent first impression of units based on math. You see this with lots of games -- often the people who are making decisions about balance are mostly there in the first place not because they're great at working out game balance but because they're great at fluff or overall design or something like that, and further a lot of these companies tend to be pretty unwilling to pay what they'd need to to attract the kind of people who would be best at this (whereas there are almost certainly many of those people in the game's audience). I don't think it's very surprising that when you release the rules to a wide audience, many of whom will be much more comfortable with and capable of a sort of scientific approach to game balance than the people who were actually in charge of that process, some things will quickly be seen to be pretty unbalanced. Often this will be expressible in ways that will make sense to the balance team after the fact, and so it's easy to imagine them changing their minds once a problem is pointed out to them. Now, sure, there will be lots of hyperbole and lots of people who are even more unqualified than the internal people who will have very strong and wrong opinions about lots of things, but this is universal.

A point on the difficulty of playtesting:
I think a lot of people have this notion that you can playtest a unit by putting it in your 2000 point army and seeing how it performs, but, really, this doesn't make much sense. That'll tell you how fun the unit is, sure, and that's important, but if we're talking about a ~200 point unit then even very significant cost issues just won't be apparent. Maybe its true value is only 150 points. That's a 33% overcosting! But it's still only 50 points in a 2000 point game. And the individual unit's performance is obviously going to depend on a lot of things, including dice rolls. You would have to do far more of this sort of playtesting than anyone could think reasonable to figure this stuff out, and even then you'd need a rigorous process for interpreting all your playtest data. You're really not going to get anywhere just going off of the players' comments after the game about which units they felt did a good job.

Well, I've already seen units changing FOC slots between leaks and the Warhammer TV stream (Enginseers and Datasmiths become HQ instead of Elite,) so I'm guessing a release-day errata is likely. Then again, it's possible that GW is just messing with us... I know *I* would have fun intentionally leaking rules that are mostly accurate but have a few mistakes.

...why is there no popcorn Orkmoticon?

 Peregrine wrote:

Tyel wrote:
Not really sure why you think this.

Because the game hasn't even been released yet. There hasn't been time for thorough community playtesting, and what we know now is barely more than what GW's internal playtesters should have known. So we have one of two possibilities: either GW's own playtesters are shamefully incompetent and missed obvious balance problems that the community immediately spotted, or GW is second-guessing their playtesters based on poorly informed first impressions and reflexive forum whines and rushing out a fix to appease the whiners. Neither one of these possibilities is a sign of a healthy development process that is worthy of long-term confidence.

Or playtesting is an ongoing process, not a one-off event and the lead times for printing all the books is likely to be at least 3 months. That means there will be things they've found in the intervening time that they want to change. They'll also have been looking at a lot of feedback in the last few weeks since the rules leaked and advance copies went out to stores and various other people. Testing with that number of people will always be vastly superior to any in-house testing you can do, simply due to the numbers. It's not a question of competence, it's a well-known issue in the field of usability.

I know it's fashionable to hate GW but even the idea of a day zero update is such a step in the right direction I, for one, am willing to cut them some slack here. If it improves the game, what's the problem?

Slipspace wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

Tyel wrote:
Not really sure why you think this.

Because the game hasn't even been released yet. There hasn't been time for thorough community playtesting, and what we know now is barely more than what GW's internal playtesters should have known. So we have one of two possibilities: either GW's own playtesters are shamefully incompetent and missed obvious balance problems that the community immediately spotted, or GW is second-guessing their playtesters based on poorly informed first impressions and reflexive forum whines and rushing out a fix to appease the whiners. Neither one of these possibilities is a sign of a healthy development process that is worthy of long-term confidence.

Or playtesting is an ongoing process, not a one-off event and the lead times for printing all the books is likely to be at least 3 months. That means there will be things they've found in the intervening time that they want to change. They'll also have been looking at a lot of feedback in the last few weeks since the rules leaked and advance copies went out to stores and various other people. Testing with that number of people will always be vastly superior to any in-house testing you can do, simply due to the numbers. It's not a question of competence, it's a well-known issue in the field of usability.

I know it's fashionable to hate GW but even the idea of a day zero update is such a step in the right direction I, for one, am willing to cut them some slack here. If it improves the game, what's the problem?

Honestly, it baffles me that people want a balanced game, but if GW tries to balance it they're told they're incompetent. Some people seem to be getting angry that the game might get enough balance updates that they no longer can whine about that.

This wouldn't be the first time there was a Day Zero update. The issue is while they *are* appreciated, you end up asking why it was needed in the first place! ("Shouldn't we have caught this in QA?")

Tau got a Day 0 FAQ back in 6th amusingly enough, and this was just to say "No, you can't give Missile Drones to every squad in your army". Which then begs the question: why make such an option so undercosted to begin with, but then artificially restrict it to only a single unit, while other unit-specific drones were included in unit entry options rather than the main Wargear section?