Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
Well, it dosent help that mele in general is wastly pointless in 8th.
(and i dont think that will change untill 9th)

Is it that bad in the edition?
And compared to 7th?

 Kaiyanwang wrote:

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
Well, it dosent help that mele in general is wastly pointless in 8th.
(and i dont think that will change untill 9th)

Is it that bad in the edition?
And compared to 7th?

With Tyranids and Blood Angels melee is definitely something you can see at the top tables.

Sounds like the opponent in the OP mint like infinity a bit better. It has more complexity around scoot and shoot as the focal point of the game, and less focus on melee (though it can happen)

With 40k, you can dance a bit and do some things with shooting, but trying to focus solely on it shows off some of the superficiality of the game. You can just plant models and make d6 rolls for the duration (for moving would actually be detrimental for some)

Spoletta wrote:

 Kaiyanwang wrote:

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
Well, it dosent help that mele in general is wastly pointless in 8th.
(and i dont think that will change untill 9th)

Is it that bad in the edition?
And compared to 7th?

With Tyranids and Blood Angels melee is definitely something you can see at the top tables.

And Outside tournament? Is the tournament the only paradigm?

We don't know that BA melee is actually going to be usable yet. They are still power armor CQC, whose default setting is "terrible".

Melee loses to guard because they can catch the t1 charge on chaff and then fallback and volley.

Everyone else gets hurt and struggles to stop from being overwhelmed.

Personally not a fan of 8th being that way. There should be a much bigger downside to falling back out of combat. Some like la test that can fail a decent amount of time or at the least a free round of attacks on the fleeing unit.

So one of the worst armies in the game lost to one of the best armies in the game. How does this prove anything about the grander picture of 40k? I mean other than Guard continues to chunk people with 0 effort.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ordana wrote:
Melee loses to guard because they can catch the t1 charge on chaff and then fallback and volley.

Everyone else gets hurt and struggles to stop from being overwhelmed.

Personally not a fan of 8th being that way. There should be a much bigger downside to falling back out of combat. Some like la test that can fail a decent amount of time or at the least a free round of attacks on the fleeing unit.

Just make it so that units fall back in the fight phase, at their normal activation, but only on the controlling players turn.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

Do any of you agree with this? Do you think melee should be scrapped from the game, making it about movement, shooting and psychic only? Should I forget about trying to use melee against this opponent?

Maybe your friend has a hangover from past editions where melee was more drawn out and complicated? I still have flashbacks to 2nd ed and have to reassure myself it's not like that anymore!

I'd say don't pressure him or take melee entirely out of your own plan. When you make a charge, keep it casual and get your dice rolled to show how quick and streamlined melee has become.

Maybe if it's kept to minimum fuss he'll realise it's not so bad and surprise you with a melee unit of his own one day.

 Marmatag wrote:
So one of the worst armies in the game lost to one of the best armies in the game. How does this prove anything about the grander picture of 40k? I mean other than Guard continues to chunk people with 0 effort.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ordana wrote:
Melee loses to guard because they can catch the t1 charge on chaff and then fallback and volley.

Everyone else gets hurt and struggles to stop from being overwhelmed.

Personally not a fan of 8th being that way. There should be a much bigger downside to falling back out of combat. Some like la test that can fail a decent amount of time or at the least a free round of attacks on the fleeing unit.

Just make it so that units fall back in the fight phase, at their normal activation, but only on the controlling players turn.

I would be ok with that tho it would massively limit the use.

The only scenario where you would want to do it that I can think of is 'weak combat unit A' gets charged, your turn reinforce the combat with unit B (strong combat unit or chaff) and unit A retreats.
Any other scenario and you just get charged again.

Of course melee should be a vital part of the game.
But it is ham strung very badly in 8th by:

random charge rolls
-2" into terrain charges
fall back rules
terrible terrain / LOS rules (making shooting more dominant)
overwatch (somewhat diminished, granted)
shooting in general being more lethal
few truly dedicated melee armies with mechanics to actually achieve a full melee utility

Granted its better than 6/7th but as we've all acknowledged that wasnt too hard

Ordana wrote:
Melee loses to guard because they can catch the t1 charge on chaff and then fallback and volley.

There are many ways around that.

So...

To the best of my knowledge, most tactical-scale wargames have some representation of close-quarters action. I don't think it should be removed all together.

I certainly wouldn't cry if melee was gone from the game, I don't care about it.

I'd never considered it shouldn't be there, it's been part of warhammer 40,000 as long as I have been playing.
I like close combat quite a lot.

The problem with melee combat vs ranged combat in this game is the same problem melee combat has in real life. If you can only kill me from within arm's reach, and I can kill you from anywhere between arm's reach up to 100m away, 99.99% of the time I'm going to win a fight between us.

There's a reason ranged weaponry surpassed melee weaponry in the real world, its inherently superior due to being able to kill your enemy before he can kill you. Yes, before anyone says, I am well aware that 40k is Science Fantasy and that melee combat is a notable part of the universe, I'm not saying that it should go away. Far from it.

But if melee combat is meant to be balanced against ranged combat, it has to be buffed to insane levels comparatively. You either have to allow melee units to start within their threat range to nullify the ability of ranged weapons to engage from a distance, make melee units so durable that shooting attacks can't hurt them (or at least not kill them before getting into melee), make melee so powerful and deadly that it doesn't matter when or how many melee units get into combat, once they do they immediately win and kill the enemy, or some combination of the three.

Trying to balance melee vs ranged in 40k is always going to be difficult and precarious, and probably will never be properly done, as GW has to balance/design their way around a fundamental rule of reality; If you can kill your enemy from further away than he can kill you, you win.

The reason we see all these shooting modifiers lately is to change the idea that all armies have to shoot well to win.

Hasn't helped much.... But I think it is what they were trying to do.... But since I play Orks and Chaos I don't mind as much.

Melee is honestly what really drives me to 40k. The chainswords, the power weapons - all part of the over-the-top, heavy metal ludicrousness of the setting. It's iconic. For better or worse, my DG army is almost entirely melee focused. I don't expect it to win me any tournaments, but if I can get close enough I know I can cause some damage.

@OP

Ask the Alpha Legion, they seem to have gotten a mass influx of Beserkers in their ranks these days.

Being able to fall back freely from CQC, then fire at no penalty is one of by biggest issues with 40k 8th. Make it a LD check, make you fire at 6+ to hit afterwards, something. Currently it favors shooting armies far to heavily for me to care about 8th.

Thank the Emperor for 30k.

hobojebus wrote:
Melee exists because power armour, force shields, holo fields and other such tech negates shooting attacks to one extent or another but isn't as effective as the disruptor field on a power weapon.

A melee weapon capable of cleaving terminator armour is easier to produce than the gun that can do the same.

A guy 100 foot away shooting you doesn't invoke the same fear as he does when he's in your face swinging an axe at your head.

There's reasons it exists and should be equal to shooting.

Thats how it should be except when it doesnt.

many force shields work just as well against shooting as it does melee.

would of been nice if "force" weapons bypassed invuls except that invules are a abstract and can kinda cover all sorts of effects so that doesnt really work.

on the bright side they are lowering the price for some of those melee weapons which is nice.

PA doesn't work better agaisnt ranged weapons than it does agaisnt melee weapons, either, and aren't those force field, PA and other things really rare? I wonder if the ressources wasted in making high tech melee weapons would be better used to make high tech ranged stuff, just less of it, and there would still be enough to take care of armoured targets.

*Stares at his 10,000 points of Khorne*

YES MELEE IS GOOD SHUT UP

LunaWolvesLoyalist wrote:
Being able to fall back freely from CQC, then fire at no penalty is one of by biggest issues with 40k 8th. Make it a LD check, make you fire at 6+ to hit afterwards, something. Currently it favors shooting armies far to heavily for me to care about 8th.

Thank the Emperor for 30k.

Except of course that's not actually how the rules work. Right now no one is allowed to fall back and shoot by default. Only units with special rules are able to do so.

For guard, that means paying for either a platoon commander or company commander who can then grant that special ability to one or two infantry squads, heavy weapon squads, conscripts, or tempestus scions. Not Ogryns. Not Ratlings. Not Leman Russes, rough riders, chimeras, blah blah blah. And the scions have to use their own specific commander. For guard that's their special thing, orders.

For Space Marines, it means playing as Ultramarines. Raven Guard can't do it. Black Templars can't do it. I don't know about the other codex armies, I haven't bought them.

Yeah, you can't hide in CC anymore and nullify your opponents entire army anymore. I'm certainly not shedding any tears over that. Does that maybe mean certain elite CC units are over costed as a result? Possibly. And they should be fixed if so! But shutting down your opponent's ability to fight back because you got into CC was a stupid game mechanic and deserved to be nerfed from orbit like it was.

I think there's a dissonance between the actual and perceived power of melee.

CQC units are not as good at killing things as ranged units, generally. Ranged units offer more efficient damage-cost, because they can be hitting from turn 1 and they can generally hit almost anything they want.

Because CQC units aren't great at actually killing things, this gives the perception that CQC is weak. Your big expensive terminator blob getting caught up on 40 points of Imperial Guard Riflemen, who then leave combat while the tanks behind them pulverize you, doesn't make a good impression.

However, just getting into CQC, and charging intelligently, is a powerful tool, and is very efficient. Most units take ~3 times their cost in shooting to destroy, and as units get destroyed your ability to keep putting out the required firepower downrange drops. However, it doesn't matter how strong a unit in melee is, once it in melee most units aren't able to continue shooting. It's the most efficient way to disable a unit. While my squad of Seraphim is standing next to a Leman Russ, the tank isn't shooting, and I can pull them back at will and blow it up once my antitank units are ready to deal with it.


Anyway, cheap, fast melee units are really good, expensive ones are bad. As a rule, most expensive things are bad, though.

Perhaps a better thing would be to alter cover a bit more. its pretty simple and its good for that. but it could stand to be stronger depending on the situation.

people need to play with more LOS blocking terrain it can really skew the game in favor of melee when there are no fire lines so terrain rules need to kinda be properly written to make sure there is a good balance of LOS blockage and the ability for people to still shoot.

 GI_Redshirt wrote:
The problem with melee combat vs ranged combat in this game is the same problem melee combat has in real life. If you can only kill me from within arm's reach, and I can kill you from anywhere between arm's reach up to 100m away, 99.99% of the time I'm going to win a fight between us.

There's a reason ranged weaponry surpassed melee weaponry in the real world, its inherently superior due to being able to kill your enemy before he can kill you. Yes, before anyone says, I am well aware that 40k is Science Fantasy and that melee combat is a notable part of the universe, I'm not saying that it should go away. Far from it.

But if melee combat is meant to be balanced against ranged combat, it has to be buffed to insane levels comparatively. You either have to allow melee units to start within their threat range to nullify the ability of ranged weapons to engage from a distance, make melee units so durable that shooting attacks can't hurt them (or at least not kill them before getting into melee), make melee so powerful and deadly that it doesn't matter when or how many melee units get into combat, once they do they immediately win and kill the enemy, or some combination of the three.

Trying to balance melee vs ranged in 40k is always going to be difficult and precarious, and probably will never be properly done, as GW has to balance/design their way around a fundamental rule of reality; If you can kill your enemy from further away than he can kill you, you win.

This, and I say this as a Guard player who charges quite a bit in most of my games.

You just can't build a list around melee and expect everything to be fine. That's just not feasible on a fundamental level. Melee units need support to make it in, that's just a fact of life.

Assault has benefits, and can sometimes end a game in a single turn, but as it is the fall back mechanic really hurts it. It needs to test on something, or at least give the melee unit a free swing. If falling back meant the opponent got to do another round of combat on the guys fleeing for free, in your movement phase, I think that would be what is needed to "fix" assault. There would be a definite trade off even for armies that can fall back and fire or assault. If I were to change fallback it would be this

At the start of your movement phase, you may elect for any or all of your units to fall back from a close combat. Once you have declared the units that wish to fall back, any enemy units engaged to at least one of your falling back units may attack as if it was the assault phase. Each enemy unit may only perform one phase of attacks (so if your squad of 5 beserkers had 20 attacks on a charge, that's what they get here, whether they're touching one enemy unit or 20) Resolve these attacks as normal, however they may only target enemy units that are falling back. After these attacks are done, any surviving units may then make a fallback move at their normal move characteristic. Once these units have completed their fallback move, the enemy player may then make a free consolidate move, just as if it was the end of the fight phase.

If the falling back unit can not escape this pile in for whatever reason and remain within 1" of an enemy unit(aka you've trapped them in a corner, tank only has move value of 3", etc) they count as being stuck in combat again.

Badda bing, badda boom. Even IG, with our order that lets us fall back and shoot with 0 penalties, now have to seriously consider if they want to attempt the fallback move or stay stuck in and use "fix bayonets". Obviously I am not a professional rules writer but I think you get my point with it. Clean it up a little and it'd be a huge boon to assault while also giving shooty players that chance to fall back that we love so much.

It's even more realistic, since trying to fall back from a close combat in real life would be one of the most dangerous things you can do. With bad luck, a disciplined retreat could become a terrified rout and the entire unit could be destroyed.

Desubot wrote:Perhaps a better thing would be to alter cover a bit more. its pretty simple and its good for that. but it could stand to be stronger depending on the situation.

people need to play with more LOS blocking terrain it can really skew the game in favor of melee when there are no fire lines so terrain rules need to kinda be properly written to make sure there is a good balance of LOS blockage and the ability for people to still shoot.

I really wish GW would make more affordable/cheaper terrain. Just to really help push game clubs to use more terrain. I'd also love if they could design a selection of pre-made terrain boards (mat plus terrain features) which would represent "balanced" game boards. I honestly think that terrain is a huge thing in games; but one where most people are not well educated in how to use it.

From how much to bring to the table; to positions; to how to use it for best effect during a game.
Bad terrain can seriously spoil game experiences (and close combat armies tend to feel this more so over ranged)

Kaiyanwang wrote:

And Outside tournament? Is the tournament the only paradigm?

No. However tournament typically represents the rules working as intended with armies working as intended. So if close combat is viable and isn't reliant upon very niche or abusive list design at that level then it filters down through all the other levels of the game into casual. So it makes sense to look at the game at that level and than use that to base an interpretation of the games overall balance, structure and focus.

The time that casual comes into play is when you're looking at things like army list diversity. If everyone playing Tyranids is taking the same list or very same list with the same theme; that suggests the internal codex balance compared to the rest of the game is such that the codex offers few real choices. Meanwhile if you see higher diversity in viable lists that do win; then you have a basis to say that the codex is offering more variety of choices; which greatly benefits casual level games and variety within the hobby.

Yup, it is. If they don't like melee, they should play something different, like Flames of War, X-Wing or stuff that has only 'pew-pew'

Of course melee has a role in 40k. It should probably have more of a role than it does currently. The style of warfare in 40k approximates mid 20th century (e.g. WW2 and early Cold War) strategy and tactics. Close quarters fighting is necessary to take and hold ground from the enemy. The proliferation of leaf blower style lists since 5th ed has been to the detriment of the variety of play styles.

Unfortunately 40k has lacked a decent CC system since 2nd ed (which was unwieldy but was at least somewhat intuitive). CC is too specialised as since 4th ed (3rd ed was a slight exception as Fearless was OP in CC) you more or less only want to assault with dedicated assault troops. In 2nd you needed dedicated assault troops but supporting assault troops with non assault troops was a highly effective tactic as taking greater numbers was always an advantage. It's unfortunate that they can't replicate this in a more streamlined and abstract system.

The emphasis on melee combat is a striking feature of 40k, compared to a lot of modern/sci-fi games. It's why Jedi are cool, and space marines with chain swords are cool. It gives the models and the setting a lot of its flavor and character.