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Another symptom of 8th has been: Taking the best Traits over taking a fluff list.

I play Night Lords, but prefer to play them as Alpha Legion bc - 1 to hit is just too good to pass up. And I feel guilty about that. My White Scars Biker army plays as Salamanders now because a free reroll is a better trade than fall back and charge. My Death Guard list still doesent use Plague Marines despite the biggest pts drop in all editions I've played. Now my Ork army is in shambles because I painted every unit differently, and now I'm waiting on the Codex to determine what the dominant clan will be. I use Lootaz. I have Looted vehicles. I SHOULD be a Death Skull, but another clan trait might be superior.

Do I sacrifice efficiency for Fluff? A minor gripe, but a consequential one.

Nightlord:

You only have to do that when it is for competition. I've seen really good Emperor's Children legion lists. No Cabal/Wych trait DE BNs. Biel-tan armies...

Would these lists with their sub-optimal traits be able to compete at high level events? Most likely not. But are they good enough to compete at a high level around friends who aren't building cheese and skew lists? Most definitely.

ANY time you have a selection of options, 1 will be optimal and the rest will be considered less-than-optimal. That is the nature of crunching things down to raw numbers. But sometimes in 40k, the difference can be minimized by making strong use of another trait, or provides bonuses that just cannot be quantified.

Playing my biel-tan army as Alaitoc is clearly better, but not necessary for me to play a good game of 40k while still giving my opponent a tough go at it.

Purifying Tempest wrote:
Nightlord:

You only have to do that when it is for competition. I've seen really good Emperor's Children legion lists. No Cabal/Wych trait DE BNs. Biel-tan armies...

Would these lists with their sub-optimal traits be able to compete at high level events? Most likely not. But are they good enough to compete at a high level around friends who aren't building cheese and skew lists? Most definitely.

ANY time you have a selection of options, 1 will be optimal and the rest will be considered less-than-optimal. That is the nature of crunching things down to raw numbers. But sometimes in 40k, the difference can be minimized by making strong use of another trait, or provides bonuses that just cannot be quantified.

Playing my biel-tan army as Alaitoc is clearly better, but not necessary for me to play a good game of 40k while still giving my opponent a tough go at it.

I agree with you. I personally love Sautekh and can make a kick-ass list with it. And my Nephrekh Destroyer list is brutal. But, honestly, I like all of the Dynasties and have played them all minus Nihilakh. All of my friends just play casual anyway, so I can still do very well and play all the "sub-optimal" units at the same time.

But ultimately it's down to the player what they wanna play, and most people choose the obviously "better" option.

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
Another symptom of 8th has been: Taking the best Traits over taking a fluff list.

I play Night Lords, but prefer to play them as Alpha Legion bc - 1 to hit is just too good to pass up. And I feel guilty about that. My White Scars Biker army plays as Salamanders now because a free reroll is a better trade than fall back and charge. My Death Guard list still doesent use Plague Marines despite the biggest pts drop in all editions I've played. Now my Ork army is in shambles because I painted every unit differently, and now I'm waiting on the Codex to determine what the dominant clan will be. I use Lootaz. I have Looted vehicles. I SHOULD be a Death Skull, but another clan trait might be superior.

Do I sacrifice efficiency for Fluff? A minor gripe, but a consequential one.

If -1 to hit wasn't called "Alpha Legion" but instead "Shrouded by Shadows" or something would you still feel guilty?

Use whatever you feel is mechanically most appropriate for you army. Who cares what it's called?

For the original post…

First off, 8th edition has been out for over a year so we have plenty of reason to moan.

Second, my biggest gripe is that we’re now up to edition #8 and I don’t think anyone believes that the edition changes have been made to improve upon the game.

Now, back when we went from 2nd to 3rd and Andy Chambers was open to soliciting feedback from the community to make slight improvements on the game published in Chapter Approved articles, I truly believed that GW was working towards building a better product.

But in the last 15 years since we’ve had 4th, Apocalypse, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th it is painfully obvious to me that GW is a business first and is out to sell you product, not necessarily create a great game….

Which brings me to my point: Moaning about 8th edition is pointless. GW has made 8 versions of this game. If there’s a different one you prefer playing, then go play it. If you’re someone that feels beholden to the latest edition and you’re unhappy, we’ll you’re in luck because if you wait just a short while longer you’ll probably see another edition very soon.

For myself personally, I haven’t really enjoyed any edition of 40k since 5th and each one that came out after that I’ve liked less than the previous one. Thinking back, I was probably too harsh a critic on 6th edition. 7th felt so over-bloated with rules that I couldn’t wait for the end. Then when 8th came out I was so eager and I wanted to enjoy it so badly, but after a few games I felt so disconnected with the game that it actually made me miss the over-bloat of 7th.

Only now have I fully realized that the problem is me, not GW… If anything GW has shown that their games will change. However, I’d rather not punish myself by moaning and not playing the current edition when instead I can find friends that are willing to play older editions of the game that we can still enjoy. Again, there’s absolutely no reason to be held to play whatever the newest edition is. Heck, there’s a whole dedicated group of 30k players still spending hundreds of dollars to buy Forge World books to play 7th edition and I just set up time to play 3rd edition 40k with a few guys that I used to play games with 20 years ago.

On a side note, I still play Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and GW kicked that game to the curb 3 years ago.

Bottom line, play whatever you want and have fun doing it.

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
Another symptom of 8th has been: Taking the best Traits over taking a fluff list.

I play Night Lords, but prefer to play them as Alpha Legion bc - 1 to hit is just too good to pass up. And I feel guilty about that. My White Scars Biker army plays as Salamanders now because a free reroll is a better trade than fall back and charge. My Death Guard list still doesent use Plague Marines despite the biggest pts drop in all editions I've played. Now my Ork army is in shambles because I painted every unit differently, and now I'm waiting on the Codex to determine what the dominant clan will be. I use Lootaz. I have Looted vehicles. I SHOULD be a Death Skull, but another clan trait might be superior.

Do I sacrifice efficiency for Fluff? A minor gripe, but a consequential one.

If -1 to hit wasn't called "Alpha Legion" but instead "Shrouded by Shadows" or something would you still feel guilty?

Use whatever you feel is mechanically most appropriate for you army. Who cares what it's called?

Separating Guard and Space Marines has always been one of my big gripes with the way army building works in 40k that I've really loved to see fixed in 8th. Paint Job = Rules is probably the next biggest gripe I'd love to see go away.

The AP system is rather useless on a D6 system. Needs to be at least D10

40K 9th edition! Same exact ruleset, just adjusted for d10s instead of d6s! What a brilliant idea! Now if we could just produce some game-tailored d10s and profit!

ValentineGames wrote:
The AP system is rather useless on a D6 system. Needs to be at least D10

So you have a greater margin and thus better overall protection, or at least more precise? Or for some other reason? Why is that?

Nah, the game needs to be at least D100 to run smoothly and effectively. Every attack, save, and wound roll should use percentile dice - imagine the joy you'll feel when after a long hard day of rolling the melee attacks of a single unit of ork boyz and you know you've achieved randomness to a nice satisfactory average curve.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:

ValentineGames wrote:
The AP system is rather useless on a D6 system. Needs to be at least D10

So you have a greater margin and thus better overall protection, or at least more precise? Or for some other reason? Why is that?

Now, this may sound incredibly gatekeepy, but I'll proceed.

Have you ever played Void 1.1? I have, and as much of a great game as it was rolling large amounts of D10's is fething unwieldy and slows the game down by simply having to read the results ("Is that a 6 or a 9?"). I agree it provides a greater degree of granularity and a more variable statline, but using them in the large amounts GW uses D6's is just no viable for a fast game.

 Grimtuff wrote:

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:

ValentineGames wrote:
The AP system is rather useless on a D6 system. Needs to be at least D10

So you have a greater margin and thus better overall protection, or at least more precise? Or for some other reason? Why is that?

Now, this may sound incredibly gatekeepy, but I'll proceed.

Have you ever played Void 1.1? I have, and as much of a great game as it was rolling large amounts of D10's is fething unwieldy and slows the game down by simply having to read the results ("Is that a 6 or a 9?"). I agree it provides a greater degree of granularity and a more variable statline, but using them in the large amounts GW uses D6's is just no viable for a fast game.

The "6 or 9" is not an issue. They have lines for that.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Anyway my point stands that I didn't feel like covers were particulary useless. Again I personally liked the system, in fact I wonder whether that system that is maybe inherited from WHB is not that suited to the kind of weaponry that rules the ables with that game. Mst units still get little to no save anyway and the heavily armoured ones look cardboard built. I believe the binary system was better, although it could validly be argued that low ap weapon were too widespread.

What army are you playing?

For my orks cover rules might as well not exist. It would have made no difference in the 20+ game I played with them in 8th.

For my death guard cover from terrain just sometimes applies to some plague marines holding objective all other units either don't get cover due to type/size or gain cover from a blight crawler anyways.

So yeah, to me the cover rules feel very useless.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:

ValentineGames wrote:
The AP system is rather useless on a D6 system. Needs to be at least D10

So you have a greater margin and thus better overall protection, or at least more precise? Or for some other reason? Why is that?

Now, this may sound incredibly gatekeepy, but I'll proceed.

Have you ever played Void 1.1? I have, and as much of a great game as it was rolling large amounts of D10's is fething unwieldy and slows the game down by simply having to read the results ("Is that a 6 or a 9?"). I agree it provides a greater degree of granularity and a more variable statline, but using them in the large amounts GW uses D6's is just no viable for a fast game.

The "6 or 9" is not an issue. They have lines for that.

When you're rolling 20-30 of them it is. They are pain to read quickly unlike D6s.

I really don't like going down the gatekeepng route, but you really have to have played a game that uses large amounts of D10s to see why using them in large numbers like GW does is a bad idea.

D8 would honestly be a big improvement.

The issue with a D6 is you have a very small useable band to work with and there are a lot of places where the probability curve breaks down if you shift across even if you decide to use it. A D6 is realistically a 7 point system, with 1+ (100%) and 7+ (0%) representing extremes that you shouldn't use, so you're really only working with 5 valid values.

The thing is, of those 5 values, 3+, 4+, 5+ are the only ones that you can really move between and not have a massive impact on the results. This gets into a bit of lies, dirty lies, and statistics territory, but if you break something down into "number of attacks required to kill" a shift from 5+ to 6+ on opposing accuracy or 3+ to 2+ on saving throws will double the durability of a target. That's just not something that you can really value appropriately.

This isn't something unique to 40k. Warmachine's numbers start to break down if you shift them by more than 2 or 3, for example, but that's enough to be able to include stat variation and mechanics that alter them. The crux of the problem with the D6 is that its really only healthy to have one or the other. With the system breaking down beyond 3+/5+ you really only have room to give different units different stats OR have the ability to have rules that modify them. Having both is just really hard on the dice curve, and would function better on something with a bit larger viable range.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:

ValentineGames wrote:
The AP system is rather useless on a D6 system. Needs to be at least D10

So you have a greater margin and thus better overall protection, or at least more precise? Or for some other reason? Why is that?

I think it gives AP more weight.
As it stands once you reach AP-5 you cannot go higher. Or very little reason to go higher.
Yes that's not factoring in cover. But I'm noticing more and more games with less and less cover.
So it's irrelevant to take it into account.

With a D10 or heck even easier a D12 system the AP system actually means you can scrap STR and T from the game.
Roll to hit.
Roll your save.
Done.

And now you can have weapons like assault cannons and heavy bolters with -2 or -3 AP instead of the same as a bolt pistol.
Battle cannons can actually have some weight behind them.
Heck look at the new Siegebreaker Cannons on the big Knight.
Str 7 and AP-1....really? Minus one?
What siege are they breaking?
And that's only because the D6 is so limited.

So yeah...I say go D10 or even better D12.
And if people struggle to read 6 and 9...well...preschool isn't a great place for gaming.

You also don't need as many dice.
Why roll 20 D6 when you can roll 10 D12?

ValentineGames wrote:

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:

ValentineGames wrote:
The AP system is rather useless on a D6 system. Needs to be at least D10

So you have a greater margin and thus better overall protection, or at least more precise? Or for some other reason? Why is that?

I think it gives AP more weight.
As it stands once you reach AP-5 you cannot go higher. Or very little reason to go higher.
Yes that's not factoring in cover. But I'm noticing more and more games with less and less cover.
So it's irrelevant to take it into account.

With a D10 or heck even easier a D12 system the AP system actually means you can scrap STR and T from the game.
Roll to hit.
Roll your save.
Done.

And now you can have weapons like assault cannons and heavy bolters with -2 or -3 AP instead of the same as a bolt pistol.
Battle cannons can actually have some weight behind them.
Heck look at the new Siegebreaker Cannons on the big Knight.
Str 7 and AP-1....really? Minus one?
What siege are they breaking?
And that's only because the D6 is so limited.

So yeah...I say go D10 or even better D12.
And if people struggle to read 6 and 9...well...preschool isn't a great place for gaming.

You also don't need as many dice.
Why roll 20 D6 when you can roll 10 D12?

Bigger dice would provide a wider range of stats, which I do think would be good for the AP issue, but the S vs T mechanic is still important IMHO because it adds another dimension of durability to the game.

I think this would be fine for a simpler game, or a new game, but for current 40k it would be a step in an odd direction.

D10 works well in smaller model count or smaller die roll games than 40k. If we're embracing d10 we're going with a wildly different rule set, otherwise folks like me are trying to figure out how in the balls they're rolling 100 d10 for a good charge.

D6 is simple, small and easy to read as long as you don't futz about with the faces. Which is real important when you need to roll a hundred of them and then likely another 80 immediately following and then your opponent needs to roll 40 or more.

D10 might work in kill team, but it would require a complete re-write of all model rules to suit it, which I seriously doubt. If it's going to be it's own distinct thing, maybe, if it's going to be a smaller scale 40k, not so much.

ValentineGames wrote:

You also don't need as many dice.
Why roll 20 D6 when you can roll 10 D12?

My 100 attack flight of the genestealers asks how you intend to completely re-write close combat to suit this thought of yours.

ValentineGames wrote:
You also don't need as many dice.
Why roll 20 D6 when you can roll 10 D12?

Try rolling a 7 with d12. Then try rolling a 7 with 2d6. See which one is happens more often.

The more dice you roll, the more likely you are to roll average or close to average.

 Jidmah wrote:

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Anyway my point stands that I didn't feel like covers were particulary useless. Again I personally liked the system, in fact I wonder whether that system that is maybe inherited from WHB is not that suited to the kind of weaponry that rules the ables with that game. Mst units still get little to no save anyway and the heavily armoured ones look cardboard built. I believe the binary system was better, although it could validly be argued that low ap weapon were too widespread.

What army are you playing?

For my orks cover rules might as well not exist. It would have made no difference in the 20+ game I played with them in 8th.

For my death guard cover from terrain just sometimes applies to some plague marines holding objective all other units either don't get cover due to type/size or gain cover from a blight crawler anyways.

So yeah, to me the cover rules feel very useless.

I play guard and necrons. My IG needs cover all the time because otherwise they die too fast, and my necrons do as well in my opinion because those low ap blast weapons were a thing. With orks well you're quite right, covers are less useful although advanceing being hidden half from a barricade or something can sometimes save lives in the process. The advantage of binary was that cover was more reliable in my opinion, apart from ignore cover weapons, you were sure to get your save if you had made the effort of putting your troops in cover.

Glad someone brought up the D12 - the king of dice! Base 12 mathematics for the win!

YeOldSaltPotato wrote:
D10 works well in smaller model count or smaller die roll games than 40k. If we're embracing d10 we're going with a wildly different rule set, otherwise folks like me are trying to figure out how in the balls they're rolling 100 d10 for a good charge.

D6 is simple, small and easy to read as long as you don't futz about with the faces. Which is real important when you need to roll a hundred of them and then likely another 80 immediately following and then your opponent needs to roll 40 or more.

D10 might work in kill team, but it would require a complete re-write of all model rules to suit it, which I seriously doubt. If it's going to be it's own distinct thing, maybe, if it's going to be a smaller scale 40k, not so much.

ValentineGames wrote:

You also don't need as many dice.
Why roll 20 D6 when you can roll 10 D12?

My 100 attack flight of the genestealers asks how you intend to completely re-write close combat to suit this thought of yours.

Works for disposable heroes. And that can go to Company sized games with relative ease.
So that's 150-200 models per side.
Piece of piss considering 40k is stupid at that size in 8th really.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
Glad someone brought up the D12 - the king of dice! Base 12 mathematics for the win!

Unfortunately players today are terrified of change and trying new things.
We've been playing the same tired old game now for 6 editions.
But repetitive boring game play is exactly what people want I guess. And it's a huge shame.

ValentineGames wrote:

Works for disposable heroes. And that can go to Company sized games with relative ease.
So that's 150-200 models per side.
Piece of piss considering 40k is stupid at that size in 8th really.

Not the slightest bit familiar with that system, does it do any of what 40k does beyond the shooty bits? We talking giant alien walkers, close combat life forms, demons, massive armored dudes who are massively overproduced?

I've been looking over the bolt action rules, and while they are solid rules for what they do, they aren't going to be able to cover even a small fraction of the scale 40k tends to cover. The rules are reasonably clean but the actual power scale is pretty narrow band and thus a bit easier to contain in a simpler rule set. What works for another game may well be piss in 40k.

There are tons of ways to solve the issue better than with regular d6.

There is this tabletop game which simply has d6 with different sides for each type of weapon. An axe would use 1 red, one white and one yellow dice, a bow would use a green, and two white dice, and so on. Red dice would have more damage and power results, yellow dice had all one and two damage results but no misses, white and green dice would have a lot of misses on them put also a lot of power. In the end this made the axe do more damage and the bow miss more often, but the bow could shoot from across the dungeon and use more power skills while the guy with the axe had to stand in front of the dragon and was limited to just dealing a ton of damage.

The elegant part about this was that one roll of dice handled everything was to hit, to wound, AP and damage do for WH40k does. IIRC there were four "special" dice plus the two white dice. Between them two-handed axes, magic swords, short bows, longbows, wands, whips and whatnot could be easily be done.

So, do I want to roll four colored dice for each bolter I shoot?
Feth, no.

However, rolling a few specialized dice could easily have same effect as rolling a 150 attacks for a unit of orks - do we really need to roll an average of 212 dice to find out we did 6 damage to a knight?

 Jidmah wrote:
There are tons of ways to solve the issue better than with regular d6.

There is this tabletop game which simply has d6 with different sides for each type of weapon. An axe would use 1 red, one white and one yellow dice, a bow would use a green, and two white dice, and so on. Red dice would have more damage and power results, yellow dice had all one and two damage results but no misses, white and green dice would have a lot of misses on them put also a lot of power. In the end this made the axe do more damage and the bow miss more often, but the bow could shoot from across the dungeon and use more power skills while the guy with the axe had to stand in front of the dragon and was limited to just dealing a ton of damage.

The elegant part about this was that one roll of dice handled everything was to hit, to wound, AP and damage do for WH40k does. IIRC there were four "special" dice plus the two white dice. Between them two-handed axes, magic swords, short bows, longbows, wands, whips and whatnot could be easily be done.

So, do I want to roll four colored dice for each bolter I shoot?
Feth, no.

However, rolling a few specialized dice could easily have same effect as rolling a 150 attacks for a unit of orks - do we really need to roll an average of 212 dice to find out we did 6 damage to a knight?

Agreed, but hadnt 2nd a bunch of different dices?

If they brought them back in a good way it could actually speed up the game and/or make it more accurate and subtle, in the maths part. They could also replace some charts maybe.

I think the rapid fire dice were on top of your regular dice. Model count was much lower then though, and the game was more like D&D miniature than the full fledged battles they are now.

Anyway the implementing of any new dices would need a complete revamp of the game's design.

 Jidmah wrote:
There are tons of ways to solve the issue better than with regular d6.

There is this tabletop game which simply has d6 with different sides for each type of weapon. An axe would use 1 red, one white and one yellow dice, a bow would use a green, and two white dice, and so on. Red dice would have more damage and power results, yellow dice had all one and two damage results but no misses, white and green dice would have a lot of misses on them put also a lot of power. In the end this made the axe do more damage and the bow miss more often, but the bow could shoot from across the dungeon and use more power skills while the guy with the axe had to stand in front of the dragon and was limited to just dealing a ton of damage.

The elegant part about this was that one roll of dice handled everything was to hit, to wound, AP and damage do for WH40k does. IIRC there were four "special" dice plus the two white dice. Between them two-handed axes, magic swords, short bows, longbows, wands, whips and whatnot could be easily be done.

So, do I want to roll four colored dice for each bolter I shoot?
Feth, no.

However, rolling a few specialized dice could easily have same effect as rolling a 150 attacks for a unit of orks - do we really need to roll an average of 212 dice to find out we did 6 damage to a knight?

Star Wars Legion does a pretty good job with this. They have three colors of attack dice - white, black and red. They are d8s, which allows for more granular results than d6s. Generally speaking, regular troopers roll 1 die each. Special weapon dudes and characters tend to roll 2-3, with rare exceptions for more. I think the largest possible die pool right now is 11 dice. I'm not going to get into the mechanics, but I'd be ecstatic if 40k switched from buckets of d6s to a handful of specialized dice.

Now you just need to find a GW sales rep and tell him how he could earn billions by making everyone buy new dice

 Jidmah wrote:
Now you just need to find a GW sales rep and tell him how he could earn billions by making everyone buy new dice

Well, it's true that we'd had to buy new dice but still we could afford billions of them if they reduced overpricing