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It must be my age, but a fair amount of the things listed are things I miss. They made the game more tactical I feel, players had to think during a game and not just rely on special rules, strategems, and re-rolls, which tends to be how 8th is going.

The things I don't miss are:

Templates.
Scatter dice.
Random warlord trait and psychic powers.
6th and 7th edition psychic phase.
Formations.
Look out sir.
5th editions wound allocation to multi wound models.
Re-rollable 2++ saves.
Deathstars.
Challenges.

Agree with most of whats been said in here, I'll add the old Weapon Skill chart though. It doesn't matter if your the single best close combat fighter in the entire galaxy, you're still only hitting your opponent on 3's and they'll be hitting you back on 4's.

35 pages of Vehicle rules, all of which combined to make said vehicles utter trash unless they were a Fast Skimmer. Heck, the majority of unit type rules were terrible all told anyway.

Charging and being forced to fight last because the model is equipped with an axe.

 IronBrand wrote:

 wuestenfux wrote:

Personally my favourite change was removing vehicle weapon arcs. Not only did they never bother to define the default arcs, telling you do go by how you physically modelled the model, but since you couldn't split fire it made sponsons a big waste of points. If they were the 90 degree Guard type, you could never fire both against small targets because they were parallel to each other pointing forward, so most likely couldn't draw LOS with both and even if they were the Predator/Land Raider 180 degree type there was still a massive dead-zone in front of you where you couldn't draw line of sight with either gun.

No more maneuvering of the vehicles.
I can see your tank chain from my tank chain and so I can shoot you.
This gives the game more the flavor of a board game.

Including facings and firing arcs when a rhino could be driving up the field spinning like a beyblade without any impact on their movement speed was always silly.

I dont think about a Rhino here, more on a bunch of LRBTs parking within range. Games of this kind are a bit silly.

2nd edition where you could load up a character with a metric ton of gear that gave them multiple saves, and they were allowed to use every save every time. So if your character had two forcefields and a special set of armor, he had three saving throws available at all times, and could take all of them every time he was attacked. Occasionally, it made for some very cinematic moments. Most of the time, it simply became the reason my group didn't outlaw vortex grenades.

I also don't miss:

re-rollable 2++
7th ed psychic phase
using % of total points to determine how your army was made up (instead of a force-org chart)
excessive modifiers - "My gun has an ap mod of -2, but I'm at medium range so -1, but you have hard cover so +2, but I moved so ..."
While I still think "Foot of Mork" should be in the game as the old green foot-shaped template, I don't miss the other templates
Stun locked vehicles

The old Tyranid "make what you want" section of the codex. One edition (I forget which, but the one that came with the launch of Old One Eye and Red Terror) allowed you to either use the standard codex rules or go to the back and totally customise the tyranids.

You could change stats, change weapon limits etc... If you wanted you could make an entire group of Venom Cannon holding warriors.

It was not only totally open to being broken, but I felt it added a layer of complexity way beyond what is healthy for a miniatures wargame of GW's general scale. If it were for 5 aside games fine, but for larger armies it was just way too much random stat changing and I'm glad it never became a standard thing within Tyranids nor within the game itself.



Otherwise a good few of the rules people dislike appear to not be " bad ideas" but bad rulings on good ideas. Having fire arcs on tanks isn't a bad idea, its a very neat idea; but it did need far better balancing so that tanks were viable and sensible.

I don't miss the single Force Organisation Chart we were stuck with in 4th and 5th editions. What do you mean, you're fielding a Tyranid swarm (or Ork horde, Eldar Warhost, Imperial Guard company, etc)? Your army must conform to the strictures of a Codex Astartes Space Marine Battle Company. The nadir of that was the contortions required to field an Imperial Guard Infantry company - how many different units did they crowbar into a single Troops choice?

Free psychic powers....oh wait...

More seriously, I feel like there are a number of changes I like to the edition but a couple stand out:

+Vehicles aren't more fragile than monstrous creatures anymore. The way vehicles worked often made them almost pointless when compared to MCs and the Rhino had to be cranked down to 35 points (including it's base storm bolter) just to be worth using. While some feel it's too expensive now, it's still got a much better profile than it used to.
+Formations are gone (I loved the concept of formations being a way to encourage people to build thematically, but the buffs were either useless resulting in them not being worth building or so over the top everyone HAD to build it to stay in the game). Strategems seem to be the much more toned down version of this by encouraging the use of certain units, or having a certain number of models in a list.

Most of 6E/7E's "innovations" (Formations, Hull Points, Jink, Challenges, Look Out Sir, etc, so many awful mechanics that were just fundamentally really bad game mechanisms, I'd add Allies but we still have that)

4E Transport rules.

3E/4E vehicle damage table & Skimmer rules.

Vehicle arcs & facings (made sense for a skirmish game, not so much for the scale 40k came to play at, and definitely made no sense when it did not apply to MC's as well)

Blast Templates & Scatter dice

5E-7E Wound Allocation, all 3 did it terribly and the people involved in writing those rules should feel bad.

Having an entire edition go by with only half the armies getting an updated codex.

Invisibility.

Complete lack of a Damage stat.

No pre-measuring.

Reserves that can possibly not enter the game and then count as destroyed if they don't. (if you just kept rolling a "1" for reserve rolls in 3E or 4E).

Missions that forced certain unit types to start in reserve.

3rd edition's Deep Strike rules where everyone needed to fit under a large blast marker and if anyone stuck out past the edge of the marker they died.

God that rule was dumb. Thematic considering how bad teleporation tech is supposed to be in the setting, but dumb.

Consolidate into combat (though with the fall back rule it might not be so bad now) from 4th ed.

Phase Out (necron 3rd ed)

6th-7th ed style Formations (pay to win. Prior to 6th formations you paid for the formation rules in points. In 6th and 7th you got the rules for free, you just needed the models. Which of course required really specific combinations that you may already have. Also free transports)

5th: Wound allocation shenanigans, 0 communication from GW about anything. Typos in FAQ never being fixed. FW being super powered.

6th: Fliers everywhere, invisibility. Allies table. Death stars.

7th: formations all day every day

All of the above: firing arcs, vehicle AV angles, vaguely worded rules that were impossible to decipher.

- Ogryn stupidity
- Wraithguard “stupidity”
- Tyranid instinctive behaviors
- Rolling for psychic powers
- Rolling for warlord traits
- The vehicle damage table in 6th & 7th
- Vehicle hit location template from 2E

Rolling for psychic powers and warlord traits, I always found that bizarre.

2+ rerollable saves. Those were stupid.

Granted, now we have 2+ rerollable to hit auras, which gets a little silly at times, but it's still WORLDS more fair than 2+ rerollable saves.

Otherwise a good few of the rules people dislike appear to not be " bad ideas" but bad rulings on good ideas. Having fire arcs on tanks isn't a bad idea, its a very neat idea; but it did need far better balancing so that tanks were viable and sensible.

I would rephrase this as "Good idea, bad execution". Which, imo, is a hallmark of GW rules writing. Lots of really really good ideas, that end up very poorly executed.


Something else that I really liked at the time, but, in retrospect am glad it's gone, is the Tyranid pre-game table from the 2nd ed book. The table where you would roll on a chart for multiple units on your opponent's side and those units could suffer problems/disadvantages right out of the gate with no way to mitigate them. I get he fluff behind it, but it's a sloppy game mechanic that can become un-fun very quickly.

There are 2 things that I am SO GLAD are gone.

1 - Invisible Rerolling 2+ save Deathstars
2 - Formations giving Arbitrary buffs just for takings specific units.

Formations.

All shots in a unit having to be directed at the same target.

Removing casualties from the closest model first.

Attaching 3 dozen characters to small units to confer special rules.

Hull points.

The 7e Psychic Power system

Custom Rules.

Seriously - ever since 4th/5th every tournament had this 20 page packet of custom rules that had started as an attempt to 'fix' the game but inevitably became slanted to favor the existing meta versus newcomers about halfway through the packet.

I remeber one tournament not only had a 'permitted models' list that pretty much banned anything produced after 2010, but included a mini-codex so the squats player could keep playing. I gave up.

I just want to take a moment to appreciate the fact that ITC now consists of 3-4 rules, a couple notes on optional rules in the book being enforced (datasheets, beta rules), and everything after that is missions. That's a half-page worth of notes that can be memorized easily. Even ETC can be summarized in a page. It's not a perfect edition, but damn if it isn't the best one so far.

Weird on firing arcs, for the first time we have a "data card" for each unit where a little diagram could easily show weapon arcs and variations in toughness/saves and they have dropped it.

personally not missing "RANDOM!!!!" everything and templates

leopard wrote:
Weird on firing arcs, for the first time we have a "data card" for each unit where a little diagram could easily show weapon arcs and variations in toughness/saves and they have dropped it.

personally not missing "RANDOM!!!!" everything and templates

They brought it back in Titcanicus though.

Honestly firing arcs really feel like an "all or nothing" sort of thing. Like it should matter where models are facing when they shoot on all levels of the game or it shouldn't because it creates a disparity in the rules against one type of unit over another.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

leopard wrote:
Weird on firing arcs, for the first time we have a "data card" for each unit where a little diagram could easily show weapon arcs and variations in toughness/saves and they have dropped it.

personally not missing "RANDOM!!!!" everything and templates

They brought it back in Titcanicus though.

Honestly firing arcs really feel like an "all or nothing" sort of thing. Like it should matter where models are facing when they shoot on all levels of the game or it shouldn't because it creates a disparity in the rules against one type of unit over another.

We now have an edition where it would be painfully simple to do it on a case by case basis, e.g. perhaps T-1 on the rear 90 degrees on some vehicles, or a modified save in the fron 180 or whatever, but its on the card so nice and clear

leopard wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

leopard wrote:
Weird on firing arcs, for the first time we have a "data card" for each unit where a little diagram could easily show weapon arcs and variations in toughness/saves and they have dropped it.

personally not missing "RANDOM!!!!" everything and templates

They brought it back in Titcanicus though.

Honestly firing arcs really feel like an "all or nothing" sort of thing. Like it should matter where models are facing when they shoot on all levels of the game or it shouldn't because it creates a disparity in the rules against one type of unit over another.

We now have an edition where it would be painfully simple to do it on a case by case basis, e.g. perhaps T-1 on the rear 90 degrees on some vehicles, or a modified save in the fron 180 or whatever, but its on the card so nice and clear

Same arguement could me for base sizes, but GW never seems to put their foot down on that either.

I'm not saying it can't be done (and I'd be all for it if everything followed the same rule of having a front and rear arc at least) but chances are it was dropped because the way vehicles work changed so drastically it didn't make sense to keep that one rule distinct from all others.

 Nym wrote:
CHALLENGES !!

Whoever thought it was a cool idea should rot in Nurgle's garden. I hated everything about them, so much that it heavily contributed to my 3 years break of Warhammer.

If they'd only think of bringing them back, I'd quit again without a second thought.

God this, X1000. My favorite memory of how much I hate challenges is when a Chaos marine character challenged my IG sergeant, obviously won, and then turned into a Daemon prince for the grand victory of pummeling a lowly human into the ground.

40k is in an odd place. It's tried to shed some of the skirmish game mechanics, but can't quite take the last couple of steps. They drop fire arcs and facings as unnecessary, but cling onto other features that belong in a smaller game (per-model LOS, for example).

Just treat the unit as the thing, rather than worrying about each individual model and the fact that the guy with the flamer is over there and not here.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

leopard wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

leopard wrote:
Weird on firing arcs, for the first time we have a "data card" for each unit where a little diagram could easily show weapon arcs and variations in toughness/saves and they have dropped it.

personally not missing "RANDOM!!!!" everything and templates

They brought it back in Titcanicus though.

Honestly firing arcs really feel like an "all or nothing" sort of thing. Like it should matter where models are facing when they shoot on all levels of the game or it shouldn't because it creates a disparity in the rules against one type of unit over another.

We now have an edition where it would be painfully simple to do it on a case by case basis, e.g. perhaps T-1 on the rear 90 degrees on some vehicles, or a modified save in the fron 180 or whatever, but its on the card so nice and clear

Same arguement could me for base sizes, but GW never seems to put their foot down on that either.

I'm not saying it can't be done (and I'd be all for it if everything followed the same rule of having a front and rear arc at least) but chances are it was dropped because the way vehicles work changed so drastically it didn't make sense to keep that one rule distinct from all others.

very true on base sizes...

 vonjankmon wrote:

 Nym wrote:
CHALLENGES !!

Whoever thought it was a cool idea should rot in Nurgle's garden. I hated everything about them, so much that it heavily contributed to my 3 years break of Warhammer.

If they'd only think of bringing them back, I'd quit again without a second thought.

God this, X1000. My favorite memory of how much I hate challenges is when a Chaos marine character challenged my IG sergeant, obviously won, and then turned into a Daemon prince for the grand victory of pummeling a lowly human into the ground.

Maybe it was his 888th challenge and Khorne was pleased with his offering of skulls and promoted him on the spot for that reason?

I mean, it doesn't make much sense in a single game, but in a larger narrative in the greater setting it could work. Especially since characters were always having this cinematic punch ups in the novels but you couldn't do that on the table in the same way.

That said, it wasn't done on the table because it doesn't work properly on the table and it's good that it's gone.

From 7th edition?

Pretty much everything at this point.

Man, I forgot that before, Warlord Traits and Psychic powers where random...

What a travesty that was.

I would say invisibility but it's still alive and well.