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jcd386 wrote:
The 0-3 unit limit forces people to use a bit of variety in their lists. I don't see how anyone would think this is a bad thing. Pretty much any list with 4+ of the same unit is just straight up boring.

Although I agree with you on principle there are a few armies that have issues with the 3 unit limit due to lack of units in those slots. For me, Drukhari have only 1 HQ in each sub-faction which mean that if I want to use kabal detachments only that requires a total of 4 HQ I am stuck with picking Drazhar who is - sadly - a bit gak. Personally I think the rule isn't the end of the world, but I wish it had been more nuanced and been applied with exceptions. At least take into account that not all factions(and sub-factions) have been made equal when it comes to this rule.

AaronWilson wrote:Why not... try play testing 10-15 games using different armies, different builds and different scenarios and create a constructive topic in which we could combine successful ideas from other people that have done the same and construct a thoughtful and valuable email to GW suggesting the pitfalls of the beta change and how to implement it properly?

Too much reason here. You don't belong here.

Will be playtesting the new FAQ tomorrow with a friend who has stuff that has been affected in the current FAQ. I am really looking forward to seeing how things have changed.

A 0-4 or 0-5 would've been sufficient enough for what you would want.

Theres an old saying - "If it was gak before and it got worse, it's still gak - you don't even need to play test it."
-Some Ultramarine

 Xenomancers wrote:
Theres an old saying - "If it was gak before and it got worse, it's still gak - you don't even need to play test it."
-Angry Internet Dude

FTFY

... That may have been a little too negative, so removing.

 rhinoceraids wrote:
I'll solve your issues with gun lines:

Use some decent terrain.

You're welcome.

Some people are so melodramatic. My goodness.

How does terrain help against IG artillery which ignore LOS with no penalty?

 Xenomancers wrote:
Anyone remember conscripts before they were nerfed? They obviously needed to be nerfed. Lots of people had good ideas like...Conscripts shouldn't benefit from commissars or they shouldn't be able to take orders. What GW did to them though was just wrong.
They nerfed the commissar to actually do more harm than good.
They made them cost the same as an infantry - which it is just a worse version of.
They also made it where they could only take orders on a 4+ and reduced their max squad size to 30. (I think this fix alone would have fixed the unit and it would still be playable and strong)

Essentially - they made one of the best units in the game into something completely unplayable. Now - they are at it again. This time though - the consequence is much greater. Their fix for hive tyrants has some unintended consequences I am sure - it's basically making gun line the only way to play the game. I can attest - gunlines don't need any help right now - it's just silly to buff them.

First I'd just like to point out that GW had the right fix in mind with the deep strike/reserve deployment allowance being determined by # of points instead of # of drops. This would have been more than sufficient to stop the tyrants spam silliness (That and add a point cost to MRC - and simultaneously reducing the broodlords(he uses MRC too) cost to compensate). That fix alone would make DSing more than 4 tyrants impossible. As someone who regularly used 3 of them - it wasn't game breaking. Anyways - now deep-striking 1 tyrant is impossible because they made a beta rule that makes DS out of your deployment zone turn 1 an illegal move. Then they also made a rule that you can't bring more than 3 of any non troop or transport (I guess to prevent anything like this happening in the future).
So they hit the tyrant in basically the same way as conscripts. Too much - now the unit is entirely unplayable.
-Unable to DS turn 1
-More expensive
-unable to take more than 3 - plus smite nerf
-and just for icing on the cake - nerf it's ability to beta strike too with the swarm lord.

While they have over nerfed the tyrant - in the process they have nerfed a significant portion of the game. One of the coolest things about this eddition was the usefulness of DS. DS lost it's risk - could be used turn 1 - and you could even assault after it. For many people this was the most exciting part of the new edition. "wow I can actually use this unit now" - "wow DS isn't entirely useless now" - ect. I don't think these DS rules will become law - they are just too bad to go through. However - the fact that GW even suggested it - is deeply troubling. It suggest a complete disconnect with the game and how it works. If GW was our president and we it's people - this would be grounds for impeachment. I'm normally not about house rules and like to play by the book but at this point I am generally more interested in making modified rules for the game myself and the guys I play with are pretty much in the same place.

HBY?

I don't think you know how to critique Balance.

Thanks - that was insightful.

 Mr Morden wrote:

 rhinoceraids wrote:
I'll solve your issues with gun lines:

Use some decent terrain.

You're welcome.

Some people are so melodramatic. My goodness.

How does terrain help against IG artillery which ignore LOS with no penalty?

That is not completely true, if you shoot without LOS you are pretty much always giving cover.
No LOS weapons are in a strange spot, where they like a lot of terrain elements to be able to hide, but at the same time since they handle cover bonuses like candies, they would like for the enemy DZ to be completely devoid of any terrain.

Without completely blocking midfield with terrain, it is impossible to hide your units (let alone your whole army) from all of the 3 Fire Prisms. So if you're going second you're basically just going to lose your most valuable tank/monster on the table no matter what.

It's just unfeasible to put down so much terrain that a gunline is severely hampered without making it impossible or tricky to maneuver around the battlefield. Putting down a lot of LOS blocking terrain means that an assault army needs to go around them making it even harder to reach CC, thus making the problem even worse.

I'm not suggesting open killing fields but "terrain" is only a part of the solution.

I'd say most of the issues this game had have been dealt with by now.

Now if only they started pricing IG weapons appropriately, they're oddly dodging fixes left and right so someone over at GW must really want them strong. The commissar re-fix was a nice touch tho, they should do that more often.

Sedraxis wrote:
I'd say most of the issues this game had have been dealt with by now.

Now if only they started pricing IG weapons appropriately, they're oddly dodging fixes left and right so someone over at GW must really want them strong. The commissar re-fix was a nice touch tho, they should do that more often.

It seems to be a problem for a lot of factions. Either prices to low or too high. We actually thought CA might fix this (as people yelled at me when I talked about how points need to change) but it didn't do much.

Conscripts should never have been the best unit in the game. The problem is not the casual player it is tournament player who abuses the loopholes is the system. I play GK and the new DS rules hurt alot and makes my army a lot harder to use. I have no problem with the new pp restrictions but I think a staggered drop would have been better. Having to keep my deep strikers in reserve until turn two hurts. My Avenger Strike fighter which was a SOB unit until now means I need to take a detachment of guard just to include it. In conclusion tournament player have taken advantage of a nice, quick and simplified game which most players where happy with.

What's worse is that GW refuses to stick to their ideas in a way that basically stops them making any decent balance.

At the start of 7th they gave codices a unique FOC with a small bonus and a fixed big formation with the codex dictating the units used. Then they came out with the decurions and several formations per codex. These had much more power and there was the issue that most formations were alright like Arjacs Shieldbrothers. But some like the Aspect Host were OP. But instead of continuing with formations and refining them to find balance GW decided instead to abandon the idea and give us 8th.

So now formations aren't an issue but you have things like CP and whatnot causing balance issues. My bet is GW won't stick with them. In a few years 9th will it and CP will be gone and we'll have a new problem. Or maybe I'll be wrong!

This is something that always bothered me for some reason. The Decurion Detachment was a formation from the Necron codex. When people use the term "decurion" to describe a formation from another codex, it's not accurate. GW referred to the concept as a multi-formation detachment. Not exactly important, I know, but like I said, it just bothers me.

 EnTyme wrote:
This is something that always bothered me for some reason. The Decurion Detachment was a formation from the Necron codex. When people use the term "decurion" to describe a formation from another codex, it's not accurate. GW referred to the concept as a multi-formation detachment. Not exactly important, I know, but like I said, it just bothers me.

If you said multi formation detachment to me there's no way I'd know that's what you mean. I'd think you were being all pretentious about having multiple formations. Decurion means most people know what you mean.

 EnTyme wrote:
This is something that always bothered me for some reason. The Decurion Detachment was a formation from the Necron codex. When people use the term "decurion" to describe a formation from another codex, it's not accurate. GW referred to the concept as a multi-formation detachment. Not exactly important, I know, but like I said, it just bothers me.

It was a good nickname for the precedent. Everything had specific names but Necrons started it all.

I know why people used the term, I'm just pointing out that the term isn't accurate. It's a similar situation to the fact that people in my area refer to every carbonated beverage as a "coke" regardless of brand despite Coca-Cola being probably only the third or fourth most popular beverage in the region.

 EnTyme wrote:
I know why people used the term, I'm just pointing out that the term isn't accurate. It's a similar situation to the fact that people in my area refer to every carbonated beverage as a "coke" regardless of brand despite Coca-Cola being probably only the third or fourth most popular beverage in the region.

Lots of people refer to tissues as Kleenex as well.

Spoiler Alert: nobody cares.

Wayniac wrote:
This has been a problem forever. GW knee-jerk reacts without actually understanding WHY something is too strong or too weak. 8th edition is no different. Many changes seem to come out of nowhere to quickly fix an "issue" without them seeing what the actual problem is.

Exactly, they seem rather reactionary and they like to treat the symptoms rather than cure the disease. A unit is proving too strong? Nerf it into uselessness. We already sold all those models so we don't lose much and we'll hear less complaints about that unit. It just seems a constant game of plugging leaks in a dam.

On this thread's subject; I'll resist the urge to just go and say that it is laughably obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of how games are designed and/or are familiar with non-GW games.
It's the same gak that is easier to physically play (i.e. in terms of moving models referring to rules, preforming actions, etc). I was holding out hope that 8th would be good (it is the best edition of 40k I have played), but instead I have become disillusioned and have accepted that GW games will always have crappy balance and demand more money be spent to play models I already own and to "keep up".
Terms like "competitive", "viable", "meta" and "tiers" are used, but not really applicable in the other games I play, that kind of talk was spawned for GW's lackluster rules offerings.

Rune Stonegrinder wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Anyone

In their defense they have shareholders breathing down their neck to sell more. It doesn't tend to allow for a balanced game. They may have had better rules lined up and someone said nope cant do those rules, you'll kill sales of these boxes.

40k is hands down the most popular wargame ever so maybe they are right (from a profit point of view) to do it like this. It's a bs excuse though, there are successful wargaming companies that have good rules that are well balanced (like Corvus Belli).

Ecclesiarch 616 wrote:Conscripts should never have been the best unit in the game. The problem is not the casual player it is tournament player who abuses the loopholes is the system. I play GK and the new DS rules hurt alot and makes my army a lot harder to use. I have no problem with the new pp restrictions but I think a staggered drop would have been better. Having to keep my deep strikers in reserve until turn two hurts. My Avenger Strike fighter which was a SOB unit until now means I need to take a detachment of guard just to include it. In conclusion tournament player have taken advantage of a nice, quick and simplified game which most players where happy with.

Why do people insist on playing Warhammer competitively? It's not designed for that kind of play.

I wouldn't say it's designed at all. They patch something together and plug leaks as they come up. It's like having a leaking pipe but as each leak is plugged another starts. The whole pipe needs replacing but GW would rather just plug it over and over.

When you start to build a list and try to think of how many of the same thing you can reasonably shoe-horn into a list, you know that this army may very well not be long for this world. I found myself thinking about how many enlightened, how many plague burst crawlers, how many daemon princes, how many hive tyrants, how many tau commanders, how many wierdboyz, how many brimstone, how many conscripts, how many whatever you could fit into a list. Not because it sounded cool or interesting, but because the game became how many things that are tough to deal with that you could set up across from your opponent.

If you bought 100 enlightened, 200 conscripts because 1/4th of your points made a nearly impenetrable screen, 7 hive tyrants because they were just that bananas, 20 tau commanders because they shot that darn well, 60 dark reapers because of the lulz, 15 wierdboyz because they smite armies off the table, 8 daemon princes because they are bonkers, 15 assassins because it seemed fun then I really have no sympathy for you. None.

The fact that you can't use those things the same way as before doesn't bother me one iota when people can't field a legitimate pure GK army or guardsmen are largely absent from guard armies, or tac marines haven't seen game time for quite a while, or the best thousand sons army is one without rubric marines, or DG without plague marines, or the fact that armies are only fieldable with gimmicky BS built in.

The so called 'rule of three' is a positive step in a good direction. there will always be the units that are better than others and this will ensure that they are not the alpha and omega to list building.

If the difference between assaulting turn 1 and turn 2 was enough to 'kill melee for good' then the whole dynamic was hanging by a thread to begin with. I agree that melee and ranged needs to be brought closer together, but the DS change hinders ranged as well.

I think the ranged problem lies in the fact that over the years since 3rd edition, models simply shoot twice as many shots each on average than they used to(in some cases even more), and most melee units never really got that same treatment; but that is a topic for another discussion or another post.

 Rune Stonegrinder wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Anyone

In their defense they have shareholders breathing down their neck to sell more. It doesn't tend to allow for a balanced game. They may have had better rules lined up and someone said nope cant do those rules, you'll kill sales of these boxes.

This might bet the most accurate and deliberately truthful thing in this thread. LOL

I am not really prepared to debate or defend the intent of GW but unless the majority of players actually want the game to be about Alpha strike and a tyrant-spamming meta, a serious FAQ Errata course correction was needed. I posted the rest of this mess elsewhere, and take it with a grain of salt, or a 50 pound bag if you will, but nothing in GW history suggests their priority is anything but selling models. Don't be too hard on them. Despite the cost of their rulebooks, selling miniatures is their bread and butter.

Remembering the days of the rhino rush and SW scouts deploying behind basilisks with a meltagun, I have to admit my perspective is antiquated relative to newer players and metas. But looking at what GW has done is fascinating, but I doubt it can ever be truly understood without grasping GW's motive. And that is a tricky business at best.

If their sole objective is to sell models, the advent of expensive flying gunships and titanic models seems proof to a skeptic like me. If I needed further proof, a year of allowing the spamming of power units and allowing the running of patently unpleasant and unbalanced armies really appeals to the GW cynic in me. If their goal was to speed up the game, the endless rerolls and bigger tournament armies pointwise did not seem like a good path. But they accounted for this by creating a gunline meta and an alpha strike meta for a few melee armies that pretty well guaranteed half of one army would vanish by the end of turn one or two. Then perhaps melee combats seemed too slow for GW magi, so they decided to effectively nerf the alpha strike for melee armies, but make gunlines even more of a thing. With the exception of certain armies, the FAQ didn't totally destroy melee, but it didn't help it much either. The success of gunlines in the first year of 8th demonstrates, that AP changes and increased shooting was more than enough for gunline armies. Add in endless rerolls and you get the gunline meta. You guys figure out why GW did this. It's beyond me. If I think too deeply on their motives it makes me like GW even less than before, and again I have a good bit of their stuff. Even the most dedicated GW apologist, though, ought to wonder at tournament meta that encourages bringing 7 hive tyrants, gunships, etc. to a game that is supposed to be fun. Save the lecture about tournament meta is different. I get that. But should it really be that different for a power player? Isn't an enjoyable, strategic game a worthy goal?

Again, play the game you want, but how many of you really enjoy destroying half of your opponent's army before turn 2 is even over, as your opponent looks on in dismay and thinks about switching to Mantic games? And spare me the nonsense about effective use of terrain...

So if balance is the REAL goal, not JUST selling models or faster games or feeding the crazed meta wonks their fix how about this?

1) Do whatever you can to reduce the role of list building in determining battle outcomes. Yes, severely limit power spamming by bring back core unit requirements and elite and heavy unit restrictions...you would have to be mental to want to face three flyrants much less seven.

2} Toss out the power levels or point system. I would say stick to the point system that everyone knows, but it looks like that ship is sailing in GW's mind anyway. And actually make an effort to balance out the codices so you're not constantly pushing gullible consumers into the next big thing before you yank the rug out from under them again.

3) if you really care about your customers, loosen up the melee rules and perhaps allow Overwatch hits on a 5+ to be fair. Really, the object is BATTLE, not hiding behind buildings.

4} If you really, really care about your customers, and you want them have fun, institute alternate activation rules and initiative rolls for at least the first two or three turns. I cannot see how an the Alpha Strike meta has made the game better except for the handful of crazed individuals who don't grasp that it is just a game, not life or death and the person you are playing with should have fun. Besides, in what world do you get to shoot at your opponent without getting return fire? Gun free zones, I suppose. And just think of the fun trying to decide how to respond to incoming fire? Do you take it and send in the deepstrike unit or expose your heavy to eliminate the threat? This mechanic works quite well in the game of Infinity (a skirmish game) and should help GW introduce a measure of balance, fairness and fun to the game that is lacking in the current list building meta. I admit I am not sure how this would work under the time constraints of a tournament, but people are already talking about chess clocks anyway, so...It shouldn't even have a serious effect on model sales, except to draw in more players if the game is fun. Imagine a tournament marked by closely contested battles ending in a photo finish on turn 4, 5, or 6, with happy players who don't leave the table feeling like they've been had. Seems reasonable, if not totally possible given human nature, and certainly worthwhile.

Call me an apostate, but there it is. About the only way you will ever mitigate GW codex/rule nonsense is alternate unit activation each turn. Flame away, if you must, and certainly play the game you want. I still plan on dragging out my Ultramarines and Tyrannids when time permits, but you know somewhere deep inside GW could do better with the rulesets. But, by all means, buy all the models you want. I am a strong believer in capitalism.