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Hey all,

I love 8th edition, i think the game flows so much better than previously. However I am aware of a couple of downsides and am sure I will discover more as time goes on.

But i'm interested in what the community thinks?

EDIT: If you voted no please just say what edition was your favourite below

No. It's an over-simplified, over-homogenized mess that only looks good in comparison to the utter disaster of 7th. IMO 5th edition is far better, with more strategic depth than 8th and none of the absurd power creep that defined 7th.

Going to give best set to 3rd, so answered no, but I'm pretty damn fine with it. HOWEVER, there's WAY more room for improvement here, and the recent FAQ for 40k so soon out of the gates has me feeling good that they will honestly be trying to continuously improve it this time.

I think it is how 3rd edition would become

 Peregrine wrote:
No. It's an over-simplified, over-homogenized mess that only looks good in comparison to the utter disaster of 7th. IMO 5th edition is far better, with more strategic depth than 8th and none of the absurd power creep that defined 7th.

Yes I found 7th a big pile of crap too

I believe simple (even dumbed down) rules are better for the hobby in the long run. The game was very difficult to pickup in the last edition - coupled with high cost of entry.

I like the fact that I was able to read through the new rules in about 15 mins and actually walked away confident that I retained most of it.

Tactical depth will come with the codex releases and if for some reason it doesn't then at least we have a relatively fun game system.

I started playing in 7th sooooooo. YEAH. For me, anyway. It is good that they are actively correcting it with 2 yes 2 FAQs out already

I wonder how much of the "3rd/5th was way better" comes from people viewing those editions through nostalgia goggles. Not saying that 3rd or 5th weren't good, I played both and thoroughly loved 3rd (not as much love for 5th but it was still good), but I still feel that 8th is recieving a lot of unfair judgement and that 3rd/5th seem to be getting the 'pedestal of perfectness' treatment when both were far from perfect.

I wanna say yes actually. I've played since 3rd, and I have never viewed such a large percentage of my models as mediocre or better.

Also I was amazed at how fast I could teach a brand new player the game in and out including list building.

Jury's still out for me. I think for everything I like, there's something I dislike. I still feel that 5th with tweaks would be a better base to build from if we're sticking within some general confines of 40k rulesets. As ever, 40k is still confused as to what kind of game it wants to be, and tends to fail equally at being all of them.

7th was better overall

7th just needed a slimming/trimming to be vastly better

8th literally gutted the system.

Been around since 2nd and I do think that 8th is shaping up to be the best edition ever. It does have a few issues (although mostly minor)

The fact they have released rules for all the factions simultaneously at the top of the the new edition, as well as putting out FAQ, gives me great confidence for 8th.

Also been around since 2nd, and I think this is the best one so far.

All the people playing 5th do have some serious nostalgia goggles.

Personally, 2nd is my favourite edition but it's not really fair to compare it to recent editions as it's designed to be played on a much smaller scale.

My favourite edition from 3rd onwards would be 4th (although it still had its problems...just fewer than any other edition). It helped that the larger units and fliers were largely restricted to Apocalypse and Forge World. It remains to be seen whether 8th can provide the same level of enjoyment even if it is a technically superior system.

5th is probably the most overrated edition ever. Horrible wound allocation shenanigans. Terrible mission mechanics (KPs far gamier than VPs and the arbitrary Troop tax). Parking lots everywhere. 4+ cover save for standing behind a twig. No thanks.

5th cover saves were mental. Forgot about those beauties.

Been playing since RT days. This is best edition yet

 mrhappyface wrote:
I wonder how much of the "3rd/5th was way better" comes from people viewing those editions through nostalgia goggles. Not saying that 3rd or 5th weren't good, I played both and thoroughly loved 3rd (not as much love for 5th but it was still good), but I still feel that 8th is recieving a lot of unfair judgement and that 3rd/5th seem to be getting the 'pedestal of perfectness' treatment when both were far from perfect.

8th edition is a huuuge change, so obviously views on it are gonna be mixed. that said I think people do view 5th through rose coloured glasses as it was the last edition before 6th and 7th really started to get a tad silly.

5th by far was the best edition

Best? Hard to say.

Better than 3.4, 3.55, 3.66 and 3.67 though.

Whether you prefer 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 8th depends on what you want out of the game.

No, 8th increasingly looks like yet another mediocre rules resuscitation after an appalling 5 year performance since 6th edition topped by the absurdity 7th produced.

8E is better than 7E, no question, it's even dramatically better than 6E, but I don't think it's better than 5E (which was itself a far from perfect ruleset with heaps of issues). 8E has some wonkiness and lots of very poorly translated units and weapons and some major unit level balance problems and wonkiness.

What I do think 8E does however is offer a better fundamental base for balance than we've seen in a while. The execution is, as typical for GW, flawed in a way that you'd have to intentionally go out of your way to do (replete with plainly obvious "why would anyone ever use that/why would you not run as many of those as possible" issues in some cases), but it is better than what we've had before for potential balance.

If they can keep up the living ruleset and do a better job of unit balance, the future looks better than the last 5 years. The whole Primaris absurdity and some issues with unit translations into the new ruleset (why are fromerly AV14 Russ tanks only very marginally more resilient than most other vehicles for instance?) really drag stuff down, but the latter at least is fixable and the former one can mostly just try and ignore.

5th would be my pick as the best.

8th is a breath of fresh air, after the ridiculousness of the formation disaster that was 7th. I wouldn't say 8th comes close to being the best though.

 Peregrine wrote:
No. It's an over-simplified, over-homogenized mess that only looks good in comparison to the utter disaster of 7th. IMO 5th edition is far better, with more strategic depth than 8th and none of the absurd power creep that defined 7th.

My view exactly.

No one has mentioned pancake edition?

Did someone really say that 5th had no absurd power creep?

Oh my.

5th edition is why I quit 40k for a while. Because of the power creep. I got tired of fighting Draigo Grey Knights in every game, or necrons, or long-fang spam space wolves.

No thanks. I think 7th was the worst edition ever. But I'd rank 5th as right up there behind it.

5th ed was the best edition with one caveat = needed balanced codexes. By the end of Necron.GK codex creep = that was all anyone played.

So after reading the posts in this thread I have achieved a emphirical conclusion:

Theres no such thing as best edition of Warhammer40k, because different people value different things at different levels, they are influenced by their personal tastes and bias, and in general Warhammer40k in his best moments has been a mediocre ruleset or at his worst (7th) a implayable mess in any semi-serious style of play.

Now, my personal opinion: 8th is fun. Is all what I ask for a game. It offers me a nice middle ground between AoS and Infinity for my wargaming time.
To me thats enough. Theres things to improve, obviously. Time will tell.

 auticus wrote:
Did someone really say that 5th had no absurd power creep?

Oh my.

5th edition is why I quit 40k for a while. Because of the power creep. I got tired of fighting Draigo Grey Knights in every game, or necrons, or long-fang spam space wolves.

No thanks. I think 7th was the worst edition ever. But I'd rank 5th as right up there behind it.

I agree. It's perhaps indicative of how bad 7th was that 5th is retrospectively viewed with some fondness. Towards the end of 5th it seemed like the only competitive armies were GK, SW, IG and BA (Imperium Civil War FTW!) with Necrons coming into the fold late edition.

And this isn't just based on my subjective opinion. The community was clamouring for 6th before it arrived due to how stale 5th had become (pancake edition caused quite a stir) and there was even some enthusiasm when it landed which sadly dissipated fairly quickly.

Let's be honest. GW has never produced really great rules sets. They produced most of their best (from a geek's perspective) work in the 80's and 90's because of the love of the guys who were really starting the company. However, as much as I love 2nd ed. (and I do) the rules were never amazing. They were far more "fun" than 3-7th, etc., but nothing about them was tightly written or beautiful simple/elegant from a mechanic standpoint.

8th is poorly written in many ways as well, but the core idea behind the edition is far more pleasing than 3rd-7th. However 8th also needs some fixes to be what I enjoy in a game. We're playing it this next weekend with new unit activation rules, etc. So for a decent core mechanics? 8th is a good start. As with all editions of 40K the end result will be what you make of it and who you game with.

It's somewhat bizarre that a game like 40K which was never (ever) intended for tournament play is put under such scrutiny for just that. It's like deciding to play soccer (football) and then using a ball of spaghetti held together by elmer's glue - and wondering why the game isn't quite as thrilling as you thought it would be. People who are die-hard tournament players for a game like Warhammer 40K must be sadists. 8th is just as open to abuse, spam, and poorly written rules tricks as any other edition. I'd say it's the best it's been since 2nd though. In fact we're considering running 2nd ed. rules using 8th ed. stats (and modifying what we need for things like initiatives, etc.).

Part of the problem with previous editions was that from 2nd onwards they all suffered from 'legacy issues' - rule mechanics that you wouldn't use if writing a system from scratch but were impossible to get rid off without ripping up and starting again. 8th has done much of the ripping up (completely removing the vehicle system for example) and follows a 'less is more' approach so I think there's reason to be optimistic that even if the game isn't quite there out of the factory, it is laying the foundations for a much improved game.

Although I have played competitively/semi competitively I am far more concerned with whether a game is fun than whether it is tightly balanced. This is why I still love 2nd so much. It's a fun system which seems to spontaneously generate a lot of interesting and entertaining tabletop situations. Subsequent editions became less fun because in the abstraction process they became more like card games played with miniatures and hence more restrictive/proscriptive in terms of the what happens on the tabletop.

8th is undoubtedly a step in the right direction as far as cleaning up 40k's legacy issues. Remains to be seen if it will be more fun than past editions.

8th is a garbage fire. 7th was fine, needed a bit of tweaking. I can say that because it works great for 30k, and anyone's complaints about 7th are inextricably linked with the factions and lack of balance (formations) not core stuff like a flamer NOT shooting down a plane and so on.