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Stux wrote:

Ix_Tab wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
Yea I think it's pretty clear that GW don't playtest 40k enough to catch all the outliers and weirdly costed units. A cursory glance at almost any index tells us this. Or likely the people responsible for play testing have their favourite armies and play them more than others.

Either way it looks like (hopefully) GW are now listening to their Players and are even involving us in the testing (look at the beta rules).

Anything as bad as the Dakkajet-DeffKopta comparison needs to be reported to GW so they can sort it. I'm sure it was unintentional but they can't fix what they don't know about.

GW may be listening since they got kicked in the bottom line and came round to the fact that the world had turned but the results of that are worrying, conscript nerfed and then ending up at the same cost as guardsmen, the smite beta rule which seems worse every time I think about it etc.

Did they get kicked in the bottom line? I might be wrong, but all reports I heard were that business was still booming this edition.

I mean circa 2013

ERJAK wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ix_Tab wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
Yea I think it's pretty clear that GW don't playtest 40k enough to catch all the outliers and weirdly costed units. A cursory glance at almost any index tells us this. Or likely the people responsible for play testing have their favourite armies and play them more than others.

Either way it looks like (hopefully) GW are now listening to their Players and are even involving us in the testing (look at the beta rules).

Anything as bad as the Dakkajet-DeffKopta comparison needs to be reported to GW so they can sort it. I'm sure it was unintentional but they can't fix what they don't know about.

GW may be listening since they got kicked in the bottom line and came round to the fact that the world had turned but the results of that are worrying, conscript nerfed and then ending up at the same cost as guardsmen, the smite beta rule which seems worse every time I think about it etc.

And classic Dakka financial reporting. The thread is finally complete.

I thought I was simply stating a truism that the New Games Workshop TM was driven by commercial imperatives.

It amazes me how much people complain, and hate on GW.

They are a company who want to make a profit.

8th was and is constantly being playtested, they even listen to us unlike ever before, and the chapter approved and codex are proof of that.

No one is forcing you to play the game, if you dislike GW don’t buy their products.

usmcmidn wrote:
It amazes me how much people complain, and hate on GW.

They are a company who want to make a profit.

8th was and is constantly being playtested, they even listen to us unlike ever before, and the chapter approved and codex are proof of that.

No one is forcing you to play the game, if you dislike GW don’t buy their products.

Making a profit is fine as long as the product supplied gives value to the customers, gw vary rarely does this.

If 8th had been properly tested they'd have picked up issues we see day one, not everyone but its very telling how bad CA was a book meant to improve balance utterly failed.

Your right no one forces us to play but we saw what happened when people stopped in the Kirby years, a decade of steady decline.

We are six months in and they've already humped the chinchilla, now they are asking us to alpha test for them while wanting our money, if 8th wasn't ready they shouldn't have released it.

hobojebus wrote:

usmcmidn wrote:
It amazes me how much people complain, and hate on GW.

They are a company who want to make a profit.

8th was and is constantly being playtested, they even listen to us unlike ever before, and the chapter approved and codex are proof of that.

No one is forcing you to play the game, if you dislike GW don’t buy their products.

Making a profit is fine as long as the product supplied gives value to the customers, gw vary rarely does this.

If 8th had been properly tested they'd have picked up issues we see day one, not everyone but its very telling how bad CA was a book meant to improve balance utterly failed.

Your right no one forces us to play but we saw what happened when people stopped in the Kirby years, a decade of steady decline.

We are six months in and they've already humped the chinchilla, now they are asking us to alpha test for them while wanting our money, if 8th wasn't ready they shouldn't have released it.

This was how I felt about AoS as well, they should have held on to it until they were done with fyreslayers, sylvaneth, and overlords, had more for stormcast and had the GHB ready to go, then dropped it all at once. but I think my issue here is, GW has been in this business for a long time. This game hasnt really changed too fundamentally over that period. 15+ years and you should have a much better idea on how to balance this turkey.

 Brutus_Apex wrote:
Based on the fact that we got games like AoS, I'm going to go with no...

Included in terrible game design of 8th ed. 40K:

-Flyer rules not included in the main rules section and standardized for everyone
-Characters not joining units. Theres no reason or point to not allowing characters to join units, it simply complicates the game more. Hence the stupid targeting rules on characters.
-Morale Phase. Could have made the game more tactical, but now we have marines gaking their pants and running away when a squad member dies.
-Psychic Phase. More all or nothing, absolutely no skill required to use or any kind of dice management or scaling power system.
-This new way of using modifiers to hit/wound that makes absolutely no sense at all. The old way is much better and intuitive.
-The cover system
-Rules for terrain
-Various terrible codex's like Grey Knights etc.

1. the rules are free now. Yeah I didn't buy a rule book, so I might have to print out a page or 2 of an FAQ to add the 7 pages of the battle primer. I also don't own any flyers or ever play against people using them. So this specifically, I just don't care.
2. I really dont see how this complicates the game. the targeting rules would be there with or without the ability to join squads.
3. I dont think you understand how the morale phase works. its basically impossible for a marine squad to take a single casualty and fail a morale check especially with their rules, unless they are getting a morale debuff from a psychic power or something. It seems like you're describing the morale rules of the past when -50% strength squads would spend the rest of the game running off the table after the first failed morale check. Ill take every unit basically having old school fearless over -50% units running off the table. This really seems like you're inventing a problem that doesn't exist so you can complain about it.
4. I really don't know what you mean by "dice management" or "power scaling" in this context.
5. thats like your opinion man.
6. I have no problem with cover system. I've always thought most issues like these are best solved by the player discussing how the terrain will be handled before the game starts.
7. Im sure they will eventually expound on the terrain rules, in the meantime I have no problem coming up with some. once again its best for players to discus how the terrain will be handled before the game starts. This also gives the players an opportunity to try new/different rules.
6. wow youre going to use GK as your example? lets see their first codex came out in 2008 and they didn't get a new one until 2014. 6th ed came and went without them getting a new codex. and you act like in the past there weren't any sub-par codices. Ill take GW's new publishing schedule over the old one. Ill also take that GW can now freely adjust the points cost of units allowing them to make units that are not good into viable options purely by adjusting points cost.

usmcmidn wrote:
It amazes me how much people complain, and hate on GW.

They are a company who want to make a profit.

8th was and is constantly being playtested, they even listen to us unlike ever before, and the chapter approved and codex are proof of that.

No one is forcing you to play the game, if you dislike GW don’t buy their products.

The vast majority of folks complaining don't hate on GW, its righteous criticism from those of us who expect rules that are on parity with the quality of the model they sell...a standard that GW has unfortunately rarely managed to achieve.

If you research or play other games, what you will come to realise is the slating GW get over balance issues really is justified. Take powerfists for example -for 4 consecutive editions they have failed to address the issue of them costing the same on a guardsman as on a space marine. That's beyond poor playtesting -it's glaringly lazy.

1. the rules are free now. Yeah I didn't buy a rule book, so I might have to print out a page or 2 of an FAQ to add the 7 pages of the battle primer. I also don't own any flyers or ever play against people using them. So this specifically, I just don't care.
2. I really dont see how this complicates the game. the targeting rules would be there with or without the ability to join squads.
3. I dont think you understand how the morale phase works. its basically impossible for a marine squad to take a single casualty and fail a morale check especially with their rules, unless they are getting a morale debuff from a psychic power or something. It seems like you're describing the morale rules of the past when -50% strength squads would spend the rest of the game running off the table after the first failed morale check. Ill take every unit basically having old school fearless over -50% units running off the table. This really seems like you're inventing a problem that doesn't exist so you can complain about it.
4. I really don't know what you mean by "dice management" or "power scaling" in this context.
5. thats like your opinion man.
6. I have no problem with cover system. I've always thought most issues like these are best solved by the player discussing how the terrain will be handled before the game starts.
7. Im sure they will eventually expound on the terrain rules, in the meantime I have no problem coming up with some. once again its best for players to discus how the terrain will be handled before the game starts. This also gives the players an opportunity to try new/different rules.
6. wow youre going to use GK as your example? lets see their first codex came out in 2008 and they didn't get a new one until 2014. 6th ed came and went without them getting a new codex. and you act like in the past there weren't any sub-par codices. Ill take GW's new publishing schedule over the old one. Ill also take that GW can now freely adjust the points cost of units allowing them to make units that are not good into viable options purely by adjusting points cost.

1) So you don't play with flyers so that means that the rest of the world doesn't deserve actual flyer rules in the main rule book? This is purely a means of simplifying and reducing unnecessary rules to the game. There's absolutely no reason for basic flyer rules not be included in the main rules rather than re-written on every flyer entry. They also need to add flyer arcs of movement back into the rules.

2) Characters joining units means that you don't need strange and unnecessary abstract rules about targeting characters. The rules for which have been found wanting, considering they needed to address this issue with a recent errata. This also eliminates strange circumstances in the rules for example: A necron character cannot teleport into battle with his unit from a Night Scythe or Monolith because of the way the rules are written. This is simply because they decided that joining a character to a unit is too complicated, for no reason. They've joined units for decades, why bother even changing it?

3) I thought it was pretty clear that my example was hyperbole. I know exactly how the morale system works. Previously we had things like fear, panic, pinning and breaking from combat. All of these things add a level of realism and tactical depth to a game if done properly. GW eliminated this element of the game in favour of dumbing it down so that little Timmy doesn't hurt his head learning too many rules.

4) The Psychic phase needs a power/dispel dice system in order to add tactical depth and offer a level of spell management to the game. As it currently stands it's a completely thoughtless activity. Sometimes it goes off, sometimes it doesn't. And on top of that you have Smite spam, which they've tried to eliminate in a very ham handed way. The psychic phase lacks any nuance or ability to attempt to bluff your opponent into making a mistake or trying to manage your dice to attempt to pushing through an important spell. Again, the dumbing down of rules. And before you comment, No. I don't not want the reintroduction of the 7th edition psychic phase which was also terrible.

5) Night fight causes plasma weapons to explode more often. Chaos Marines wielding Power Fists are no longer mad at the imperium. Thats not an opinion, thats a fact. Thats what you get when you don't think about the consequences of stupid rules. The way they've worded modifiers is counter intuitive, and has several poor repercussions on the game as a whole.

6) You don't get cover when hiding behind a giant tank. That doesn't seem like a problem to you? A good rules system should never require you or your opponent to resolve a major flaw in the rules just to have a proper game.

7) Again, rules should be clear and concise on every major point without having to resolve major issues with your opponent. You shouldn't have to figure out what cover does what. It should be all laid out clearly in the book.

8) I don't understand what your point is about the previous Grey Knight Codexes. So, because GW released poor codexes in the past, that some how gives them a pass on releasing another bad codex? What kind of logic is that? They should be adjusting points costs and rules if they are broken. Nothing is wrong with that, but lets be honest, they could have done that before too. Their medium hasn't changed, they just decided to release official FAQ's and Errata's in a more timely manor.

Not quoting that whole mess but 2, 3 and 4 are all pretty silly. You discuss some minor fluff inconsistencies with characters joining unit but completely gloss over how that stupid crap broke every edition since 5th. The character shooting rules are a bit odd now but they're leagues better than 'have to kill every model in the unit to get to the character' or 'deathstar-O'clock'.

3. But we didn't have any of those things. Any unit actually effected by those things never saw the tabletop. And since we're being casually dismissive "we don't need to keep pointless bookwork rules that never amount to anything significant because some grognard starts shouting 'muh immersion!'.

4. They tried power/dispel dice. Across 2 different games. Both systems were stupid. Not to mention that, functionally speaking the current cast/dispel system is functionally exactly the same as powerdice but with the pools being called 'casting models' vs 'dispelling' models instead of warp charges and w/e. That's all not even getting into the fact that a decent chunck of the major factions don't have ANY psykers. How many """"""deeep tictacal decisions"""""""" do you really think Tzeentch is gonna have to make against Tau in the psychic phase?

6. The cover system is the thing that needs the most work. Fair enough. The idea that you can't have a 'proper game' as is is a bit silly though.

BRutus_Apex:

1 Is tied to a larger principle in 8th, they moved away from USRs and unit types and moved everyhting to datasheet in order to ease new people into the game. And no matter what else you may think of this, that worked. It is easier for new players to understand the game.
Remember the rules for 1 basic unit could be spread out over 8 pages in 7th down to 4 in 8th.

If characters were able to join units you would need to redo the whole wounding and morale system.
Not going to happen, and frankly i like it this way.

 Earth127 wrote:
BRutus_Apex:

1 Is tied to a larger principle in 8th, they moved away from USRs and unit types and moved everyhting to datasheet in order to ease new people into the game. And no matter what else you may think of this, that worked. It is easier for new players to understand the game.
Remember the rules for 1 basic unit could be spread out over 8 pages in 7th down to 4 in 8th.

It's easier to get into, but harder to master, and not in a good way. I'm 100% fine with them having the rules spelled out on every sheet, but they should still have some universals-like Deep Strike.

If I were in charge, rules would look like this:

Deep Strike (9")-Teleportarium Chamber
[Some fluff blah blah blah about teleporting in], [rules about how it works].

That way, everyone can use the same nomenclature, even if they're new to the game, but it still has its nice fluff and the rules right there.

Having the same rules with a bunch of different names isn't easier at all its redundant.

Striking scorpion infiltrate is no different from a terminators deep striking for all intents and purposes for example.

hobojebus wrote:
Having the same rules with a bunch of different names isn't easier at all its redundant.

Striking scorpion infiltrate is no different from a terminators deep striking for all intents and purposes for example.

Yes, this is very annoying and IMHO the opposite from what they should have done. They should have codified these rules and just apply them where needed, rather than duplicate the same rule and give it a different name or, worse, slightly modify it.

 thegreatchimp wrote:
Take powerfists for example -for 4 consecutive editions they have failed to address the issue of them costing the same on a guardsman as on a space marine. That's beyond poor playtesting -it's glaringly lazy.

Not even 10 posts down in this forum you have a thread complaining that things DON'T cost the same for guard and marines, and here you are complaining that they do. The hate is real; the half of players that GW pleases with changes are only quiet long enough for the other half to yell about how the company is a failure.

I'm glad they are listening to players now, but I 100% understand why they didn't want to in the past.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

hobojebus wrote:
Having the same rules with a bunch of different names isn't easier at all its redundant.

Striking scorpion infiltrate is no different from a terminators deep striking for all intents and purposes for example.

For now, but having them be different entries means one can be tweaked without affecting the other.

 davou wrote:

 thegreatchimp wrote:
Take powerfists for example -for 4 consecutive editions they have failed to address the issue of them costing the same on a guardsman as on a space marine. That's beyond poor playtesting -it's glaringly lazy.

Not even 10 posts down in this forum you have a thread complaining that things DON'T cost the same for guard and marines, and here you are complaining that they do. The hate is real; the half of players that GW pleases with changes are only quiet long enough for the other half to yell about how the company is a failure.

I'm glad they are listening to players now, but I 100% understand why they didn't want to in the past.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

hobojebus wrote:
Having the same rules with a bunch of different names isn't easier at all its redundant.

Striking scorpion infiltrate is no different from a terminators deep striking for all intents and purposes for example.

For now, but having them be different entries means one can be tweaked without affecting the other.

Name one rule that was a USR that's been tweaked without it being a universal tweak.

I've read the FAQs, and I can't recall any offhand.

 JNAProductions wrote:

Name one rule that was a USR that's been tweaked without it being a universal tweak.

I've read the FAQs, and I can't recall any offhand.

why should I? Just because something hasn't happened yet does not mean its not a good idea to set it up to be easy.

 davou wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

Name one rule that was a USR that's been tweaked without it being a universal tweak.

I've read the FAQs, and I can't recall any offhand.

why should I? Just because something hasn't happened yet does not mean its not a good idea to set it up to be easy.

Because it would help support your position?

We can either have clear, easy to udnerstand across all armies rules (still fully printed on the sheet, still with their own fluff) at the cost of making it SLIGHTLY harder to adjust just one rule, or we can have it so that new players will try to learn what a million different rules are and only later learn that THEY'RE ALL THE FLIPPING SAME.

hobojebus wrote:

usmcmidn wrote:
It amazes me how much people complain, and hate on GW.

They are a company who want to make a profit.

8th was and is constantly being playtested, they even listen to us unlike ever before, and the chapter approved and codex are proof of that.

No one is forcing you to play the game, if you dislike GW don’t buy their products.

Making a profit is fine as long as the product supplied gives value to the customers, gw vary rarely does this.

If 8th had been properly tested they'd have picked up issues we see day one, not everyone but its very telling how bad CA was a book meant to improve balance utterly failed.

Your right no one forces us to play but we saw what happened when people stopped in the Kirby years, a decade of steady decline.

We are six months in and they've already humped the chinchilla, now they are asking us to alpha test for them while wanting our money, if 8th wasn't ready they shouldn't have released it.

This is exactly how everyone in my gaming group feels. We went from "always talking 40k, theory crafting lists, and playing 1-4 weekends a month to basically asking ourseleves, "Is it time to sit out an edition or even finally sell the collections and move on?"

 davou wrote:


Not even 10 posts down in this forum you have a thread complaining that things DON'T cost the same for guard and marines, and here you are complaining that they do. The hate is real; the half of players that GW pleases with changes are only quiet long enough for the other half to yell about how the company is a failure.

I'm glad they are listening to players now, but I 100% understand why they didn't want to in the past.

I did in my bum say that! Read it again, I said points values are only loosely accurate because of unquantifiable variables. (And that's not my opinion, that's the opinion of a very experienced designer) Nothing I said on my last post contradicts that.

SemperMortis wrote:
Legitimate question here. Now your definition of playtest might be different then mine but when I hear "tested" I assume they mean rigorously tested or at the least tested enough to work out most issues. Going by my index army though I have to question this. The list of unplayable units is rather large and the list of uncompetitive units is even bigger. The fact that GW went even further with CA and have the strategy "Dakka Dakka Dakka" shows how little they understand their own game. Spend 1CP to get an extra shot on all 6s. For some armies that would be nice...like SM armies who hit on 3s. For Ork armies though, who hit on 5s, not so much. If you fielded 9 lootas and got the average rolls you would get a grand total of .33 extra unsaved wounds against a SM.

As far as individual units go. Look no further then deff koptas to see how ridiculous GW is with pricing.

2 deff koptas cost 130pts. They are T5, 4 wounds each and have a 4+ save. You also get 12 S5 shots at BS5+

For 8pts more you can take a Dakkajet T6, 12 wounds 4+ save and -1 to hit, with 5 Supa Shootas for a grand total of 15 S6 -1AP shots at BS4+.

Guess which of these is considered an auto include? Neither. The dakkajet is still trash but compared to the Koptas it's gold.


These are all simple things which should have been easy to catch by play testers so the obvious question is; Does GW actually playtest or do they do the minimum and claim the title of "Play tested"?

The playtesters used has clearly not been competent enough for the task.
The ork codex will not be the salvation many ork players hope for.

I hope you're wrong but I really don't think you will be.

Orks are a fun army in the background but haven't had a decent chance since 5th.

I've got a small speed freak army I'd love to build on but don't because I don't find automatically losing fun.

Not quoting that whole mess but 2, 3 and 4 are all pretty silly. You discuss some minor fluff inconsistencies with characters joining unit but completely gloss over how that stupid crap broke every edition since 5th. The character shooting rules are a bit odd now but they're leagues better than 'have to kill every model in the unit to get to the character' or 'deathstar-O'clock'.

3. But we didn't have any of those things. Any unit actually effected by those things never saw the tabletop. And since we're being casually dismissive "we don't need to keep pointless bookwork rules that never amount to anything significant because some grognard starts shouting 'muh immersion!'.

4. They tried power/dispel dice. Across 2 different games. Both systems were stupid. Not to mention that, functionally speaking the current cast/dispel system is functionally exactly the same as powerdice but with the pools being called 'casting models' vs 'dispelling' models instead of warp charges and w/e. That's all not even getting into the fact that a decent chunck of the major factions don't have ANY psykers. How many """"""deeep tictacal decisions"""""""" do you really think Tzeentch is gonna have to make against Tau in the psychic phase?

6. The cover system is the thing that needs the most work. Fair enough. The idea that you can't have a 'proper game' as is is a bit silly though.

Simply adding "may only join units with <keyword>" rule for characters eliminates your issue with death stars. Not that there aren't any death star issues now, which has actually been exacerbated by the new character Auras. Instead of having 1 death star, you have an entire army of re-rolls to hit/re-rolls to wound. So don't come here with that creates death stars BS. Also, all you need to do is kill the unit to get at the character rather than literally the whole army like it is now as long as you have smart placement of the character.

So actually, you are complaining about a rule that should be in place that would actually eliminate death stars, and promoting a broken system that broadens the reach of characters and gives death star abilities on literally an entire army within range of an aura.

I played Fantasy for decades, let me tell you how integral psychology was to that game, and how much immersion it added. The real issue is that GW made most of the armies in 40K essentially immune to many of those psychological rules that should have a huge bearing on the game. Adding janky rules like the morale phase is now just dumbs down the game.

8th edition fantasy was the best magic system GW ever created. The only issues were that it didn't scale with higher games, and their high level spells were too powerful, but the mechanics were sound. Your point is that many armies in 40K don't have psykers. And thats exactly why 8th ed. fantasy system was better, it allowed the opponent the ability to defend against magic even if they didn't have any magic users. That same system could be brought into 40K and would actually level the playing field for non psyker armies. On top of this it allows for a dice management system that eliminates spell spamming like smite.

1 Is tied to a larger principle in 8th, they moved away from USRs and unit types and moved everyhting to datasheet in order to ease new people into the game. And no matter what else you may think of this, that worked. It is easier for new players to understand the game.
Remember the rules for 1 basic unit could be spread out over 8 pages in 7th down to 4 in 8th.

There is absolutely no reason to have the same rule re-written hundreds of times in various unit entries when it could be clearly laid out nice and neatly in the main rule book once. There's nothing wrong with re-printing it on the unit card if necessary, but its so messy, does nobody at GW have OCD? because they really need a few. The main rule book is laid out so poorly it hurts. Rules are scattered everywhere. Just put it all into one complete tidy area for gods sake.

No they do not. They don't even proofread the rules.

They have a basic lack of understanding of any form of competitive play. They play for fun (not a bad thing) and miss things that are easily exploitable by the competitive mindset.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Earth127 wrote:
BRutus_Apex:

1 Is tied to a larger principle in 8th, they moved away from USRs and unit types and moved everyhting to datasheet in order to ease new people into the game. And no matter what else you may think of this, that worked. It is easier for new players to understand the game.
Remember the rules for 1 basic unit could be spread out over 8 pages in 7th down to 4 in 8th.

It's easier to get into, but harder to master, and not in a good way. I'm 100% fine with them having the rules spelled out on every sheet, but they should still have some universals-like Deep Strike.

If I were in charge, rules would look like this:

Deep Strike (9")-Teleportarium Chamber
[Some fluff blah blah blah about teleporting in], [rules about how it works].

That way, everyone can use the same nomenclature, even if they're new to the game, but it still has its nice fluff and the rules right there.

I mean then you'd have to do the same thing with Infiltrate, Scout, and Outflank and we're right back to what GW was trying to avoid.

Eh, for me I just remember that most of the systems we think of as super balanced have been play tested to death with intent of balance over multiple editions.

I have more of a background in video games, but two examples that come to mind are Starcraft and Street Fighter 3. Both are considered some of the most balanced games in their genres.

However both went through several iterations and weren't in the realm of balanced at release. Even beyond that, the same companies have struggled to hit that level of balance making them somewhat flukes.

True examples of balance that aren't mirrored are ridiculously rare. Heck, people still talk about first turn advantage in Chess and how many points that second turn should have as an advantage in Go, known as Komi.

I'm not saying that it is balanced. I'm saying that it's about as balanced as I expect the first edition of a very knew take on the rules to be.

Hatachi wrote:


I'm not saying that it is balanced. I'm saying that it's about as balanced as I expect the first edition of a very knew take on the rules to be.

Are you implying 40k is in its 1st edition?

They've had 3 decades of experience to learn and change. Calling the changes in 8th to be some kind of new start where we have to discount all prior editions as entirely different games is super disingenuous. 8th may be a more radical departure from 7th than the prior editions were from eachother (back until 2nd to 3rd), but its still fundamentally the same game and lessons learned from the 3 decades of experience prior should have been taken on board and applied.

This is the 8th edition of 40k. I, and everyone else, should expect much better from a veteran game company worth millions. This isn't a garage operation with three dudes working full time jobs and scraping a game together on the side.

 Blacksails wrote:

Hatachi wrote:


I'm not saying that it is balanced. I'm saying that it's about as balanced as I expect the first edition of a very knew take on the rules to be.

Are you implying 40k is in its 1st edition?

They've had 3 decades of experience to learn and change. Calling the changes in 8th to be some kind of new start where we have to discount all prior editions as entirely different games is super disingenuous. 8th may be a more radical departure from 7th than the prior editions were from eachother (back until 2nd to 3rd), but its still fundamentally the same game and lessons learned from the 3 decades of experience prior should have been taken on board and applied.

This is the 8th edition of 40k. I, and everyone else, should expect much better from a veteran game company worth millions. This isn't a garage operation with three dudes working full time jobs and scraping a game together on the side.

I would say that it's in its first edition just as much as say Street Fighter 2 vs 3 vs 4. On a general level they're similar. The small differences add up massively by the end. I've never seen a company that has ever balanced things out within the first take on a fairly different ruleset. Chapter Approved is a big thing for me as I have always felt that the design drift between early codexes in an edition to later on seemed to be a major difference.

Now I'll be the first to say I mainly play 40k for the cool lore and to make interesting looking battles, but I've been following balance patches for competitive video games my entire life where they can change things weekly. They almost never get things down pat and when they do they accidently break not much later. This game has about as many factions as you'll find outside a Total War game. That's a LOT of variables. It's conjecture at this point, but I want to see what the game balance is like in 3 more years of chapter approved.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Earth127 wrote:
BRutus_Apex:

1 Is tied to a larger principle in 8th, they moved away from USRs and unit types and moved everyhting to datasheet in order to ease new people into the game. And no matter what else you may think of this, that worked. It is easier for new players to understand the game.
Remember the rules for 1 basic unit could be spread out over 8 pages in 7th down to 4 in 8th.

It's easier to get into, but harder to master, and not in a good way. I'm 100% fine with them having the rules spelled out on every sheet, but they should still have some universals-like Deep Strike.

If I were in charge, rules would look like this:

Deep Strike (9")-Teleportarium Chamber
[Some fluff blah blah blah about teleporting in], [rules about how it works].

That way, everyone can use the same nomenclature, even if they're new to the game, but it still has its nice fluff and the rules right there.

I mean then you'd have to do the same thing with Infiltrate, Scout, and Outflank and we're right back to what GW was trying to avoid.

Why were they trying to avoid having the same names for the same rules?

 JNAProductions wrote:


Why were they trying to avoid having the same names for the same rules?

because some rules are worth way more on some models than others. Rerolling 1's is worth a lot on space marines, but not so much on orks. A +1 to toughness is worth a lot more to a terminator than it is to a 5 man guardsman squad. Re-rolling charge distance is worth way more on a trygon than it is for telion.

By not having USR's, you can change ONE of the rules when it turns out something doesn't quite work, and not have to worry about how it affects 19 other units.

 davou wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:


Why were they trying to avoid having the same names for the same rules?

because some rules are worth way more on some models than others. Rerolling 1's is worth a lot on space marines, but not so much on orks. A +1 to toughness is worth a lot more to a terminator than it is to a 5 man guardsman squad. Re-rolling charge distance is worth way more on a trygon than it is for telion.

By not having USR's, you can change ONE of the rules when it turns out something doesn't quite work, and not have to worry about how it affects 19 other units.

That would mean more IF THEY HAD DONE THAT. But they didn't.

In addition, let me put it this way-let's say that we have a USR for rerolling charges, called Furious. All Orks have that USR normally, as do Wulfen, Fenrisian Wolves, Cyberwolves, Black Templars, etc.

BUT! They find that Furious is too strong on, say, Wulfen. So they want to change it to only let them reroll a SINGLE die on the charge, rather than both.

Here's what they do in an errata:

Wulfen no longer have the Furious rule. Instead, they have the rule Fleet of Foot, which has the following effect:

Whenever a unit with this rule makes a charge roll, it may reroll a single one of the dice used in that roll.

Boom, bam, done. They fixed one unit without borking up any others.