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tneva82 wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:

I'm not saying anything abut cheap hordes sorry, just talking about Guardsmen

I haven't really thought about which "achetype" dominates the meta, but if I was to, cheap hordes have their place but I wouldn't say they are dominating, they implies everything else is struggling.

60 Catachan bodies for sub 250 pts probably is what you could call a "cheap" horde though. That's a lot of really cheap bodies.

But if they are so awesome why not 120 of them? 180? 240? Orks are fielding 50% more costly boyz in those numbers. If those catachans are so awesome why not more of them...Or maybe they are there just for some cheap chaff and CP rather than being so awesome on their own. They are awesome because they boost up others by CP to do the real job.

Because they still needed points for a Castellan and Assault Captains. Also, because it's difficult to fit 120 catachans in range of Straken.

 Eonfuzz wrote:

Are they "ChEaP hOrDeS" though?

iirc Rippers, Grots and Conscripts are all cheaper than them - and yet they aren't dominating tournaments.
I mean, yeah sure. This one unit is pretty good for its cost but it isn't... "dominated by cheap hordes."

Just FYI, Conscripts and Guardsmen are the same point cost... which is just weird.

 SHUPPET wrote:

ThePorcupine wrote:
Yeah, the game hasn't been dominated by hordes since... conscripts? Which was what, like, a year ago?

95% of the time every tourney lists takes the bare minimum amount of troops and loads up on as many smash captains/knights/jetbikes as possible.

Which should tell you something about the strength of Guardsmen that the top lists at NOVA all maxed out on 6 of them

Taking 6 troop choices in a brigade isn't "maxing out" on troops. They could've easily taken 12 troop choices. Bringing 6 is actually taking the minimum. Which goes to show you they took a brigade for command points, not for the troops. They brought the cheapest brigade they could to feed their knights and smash captains those tasty tasty command points.

Man, it's funny when 60 infantry is considered "maxing out" and running "hordes." Good lord. Guess nobody's seen 200 infantry/conscripts or boyz in a long time now. Probably because hordes don't work in 40k.

ThePorcupine wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:

ThePorcupine wrote:
Yeah, the game hasn't been dominated by hordes since... conscripts? Which was what, like, a year ago?

95% of the time every tourney lists takes the bare minimum amount of troops and loads up on as many smash captains/knights/jetbikes as possible.

Which should tell you something about the strength of Guardsmen that the top lists at NOVA all maxed out on 6 of them

Taking 6 troop choices in a brigade isn't "maxing out" on troops. They could've easily taken 12 troop choices. Bringing 6 is actually taking the minimum. Which goes to show you they took a brigade for command points, not for the troops. They brought the cheapest brigade they could to feed their knights and smash captains those tasty tasty command points.

Man, it's funny when 60 infantry is considered "maxing out" and running "hordes." Good lord. Guess nobody's seen 200 infantry/conscripts or boyz in a long time now.

Fair enough, they took the minimum for a brigade

You don't need to turn on the snark, it's not a true horde but it's a good chunk of bodies. Isn't that what "cheap" horde would imply? If that means something else please tell me. How on earth is 200 Boyz is a cheap horde lol that's pushing up towards 3/4's of your army.

ThePorcupine wrote:
Probably because hordes don't work in 40k.

Now your pushing it. 300+ Tyranid bodies has been seeing great success right now, and Nick Nanavati himself named it as one of his 5 strongest lists in the meta currently.

In a game where not much lives, cheaper is usually better.

Also a few are taking above the minimum, I know Brandon Grant for example likes to run 10 or so and I believe he hit top 10 at NOVA i think

 SHUPPET wrote:

Andykp wrote:
These faqs are clearly aimed at fixing the competitive scene but the problems the way people build armies and play, not the rules. For casual play the rules work well.

My opinions only. Me and my group won’t be affected at all really.

This is kind of the problem. The rules are aimed at fixing the competitive scene. They don't. From the point of a casual player you feel unaffected. That isn't exactly a great outcome that makes the patch worthwhile for anybody.

Back to the title of the thread - the feels to me like quite a light-touch FAQ. More of a minor tweak than a major shift. I do not think it will have a huge dramatic impact on tournaments and it will have hardly any impact on casual play.

Minor efficiency changes do matter in tournaments so there will be some switches around there. Units which can turn effectively unlimited CP into ludicrous damage output and/or durability will be less favoured over other units which depend less on CP. The game was looking worryingly like certain list approaches were becoming a fixed "solution" to the game, step one of resolving that has happened. I would anticipate points changes in CA as step 2.

happy_inquisitor wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:

Andykp wrote:
These faqs are clearly aimed at fixing the competitive scene but the problems the way people build armies and play, not the rules. For casual play the rules work well.

My opinions only. Me and my group won’t be affected at all really.

This is kind of the problem. The rules are aimed at fixing the competitive scene. They don't. From the point of a casual player you feel unaffected. That isn't exactly a great outcome that makes the patch worthwhile for anybody.

Back to the title of the thread - the feels to me like quite a light-touch FAQ. More of a minor tweak than a major shift. I do not think it will have a huge dramatic impact on tournaments and it will have hardly any impact on casual play.

Minor efficiency changes do matter in tournaments so there will be some switches around there. Units which can turn effectively unlimited CP into ludicrous damage output and/or durability will be less favoured over other units which depend less on CP. The game was looking worryingly like certain list approaches were becoming a fixed "solution" to the game, step one of resolving that has happened. I would anticipate points changes in CA as step 2.

That's my take too. The FAQ went in the right direction, but they restrained themselves a bit too much, they could have been a little more daring.

There could be many reasons for this i suppose. Guess we will have to see the second part of the film in CA before trying to understand the rationals behind these changes.

Two weeks ago we had a ITC style tournament where I lived . Second place was a guy who brought 2 Smash Captains along with 150 guardsmen. He of course had Straken and all the CP regen you can think of. CP regen to the max.

Killing this amount of Guardsmen in due time is nearly impossible unless you have that much more dakka. The Guardsmen are like glimmer: you just can't reliably remove them completely.

ThePorcupine wrote:
Probably because hordes don't work in 40k.

I don’t think it’s a question of whether hordes are dominating or not working; that can be debated around and around in circles. No, I think it’s simpler: elite armies suck hard. The horde-ier you are this edition in general the better you are. There are specific exceptions on units that are either undercosted (Castellan), can frontload an army’s worth of CP into one model in one turn (Slamguinius) or very mobile (Jetbikes). But overall, more bodies are harder to kill this edition than thicker armour.

What if your main detachment was the only one that generated CP, or allying in other detachments cost you command points?

Also, that nerf to flying assault units is complete BS

 SHUPPET wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:

I'm not saying anything abut cheap hordes sorry, just talking about Guardsmen

I haven't really thought about which "achetype" dominates the meta, but if I was to, cheap hordes have their place but I wouldn't say they are dominating, they implies everything else is struggling.

60 Catachan bodies for sub 250 pts probably is what you could call a "cheap" horde though. That's a lot of really cheap bodies.

But if they are so awesome why not 120 of them? 180? 240? Orks are fielding 50% more costly boyz in those numbers. If those catachans are so awesome why not more of them...Or maybe they are there just for some cheap chaff and CP rather than being so awesome on their own. They are awesome because they boost up others by CP to do the real job.

Because they still needed points for a Castellan and Assault Captains. Also, because it's difficult to fit 120 catachans in range of Straken.

*sarcasm*Who wants castellan when you can have the uber broken guardsmen!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Eldarsif wrote:
Two weeks ago we had a ITC style tournament where I lived . Second place was a guy who brought 2 Smash Captains along with 150 guardsmen. He of course had Straken and all the CP regen you can think of. CP regen to the max.

Killing this amount of Guardsmen in due time is nearly impossible unless you have that much more dakka. The Guardsmen are like glimmer: you just can't reliably remove them completely.

What makes 150 guardsmen harder to kill than 300+ orks? Which is quite easy to do. I bring in 320 and spare models figuring "at least I shouldn't get wiped out". Well 60-70 models a turn removed disagreed with that idea.

What makes 150 guardsmen harder to kill than 300+ orks? Which is quite easy to do.

Without having much chance to play against Orks lately I can't really say. Perhaps the access to psychic powers and stratagem that increase survivability of Guardsmen? Orks really don't have much access to either as they are still stuck with Index listings.

What makes 150 guardsmen harder to kill than 300+ orks? Nothing. Orks are harder to kill than guardsmen.

Boyz are T4 6+ while guardsmen are T3 5+. 10 guardsmen can "take cover" to increase their save to 4+, but boyz have a 9 inch kustom force field bubble to give them a fairly permanent 5++.

ThePorcupine wrote:
What makes 150 guardsmen harder to kill than 300+ orks? Nothing. Orks are harder to kill than guardsmen.

Boyz are T4 6+ while guardsmen are T3 5+. 10 guardsmen can "take cover" to increase their save to 4+, but boyz have a 9 inch kustom force field bubble to give them a fairly permanent 5++.

At which point "Killing this amount of Guardsmen in due time is nearly impossible unless you have that much more dakka. " is not that accurate. Bigger number of orks has got wiped off annoyingly fast steadily. Well except by grey knights...

Well, I have no idea how Orks play in this edition, but as I mentioned he had 150 guys and 2 smash captains(Also some sentinels, space marine scout squads with Heavy Bolters, and Mortars).

2 Smash Captains - besides doing a lot of damage on their own - are decent distraction carnifexes the first round or two while AM advances up the table with their cadre.

Now, each IG squad was 10 strong only so you are not going to get to kill a lot in each squad or through morale. Makes it at least annoying how to decide to allocate attacks. This is especially problematic if you have high yield weapons from a single source that must all target a single 10 man squad.

Thanks to orders the IG can quickly move up the table and get into your face. This is a strong move against gunline armies that have at most T3 models. When they get close enough they can start to combine the endless amount of separate squads into a larger blob to give themselves a larger CC footprint. All of this is possible because IG has a strong CP pool and regeneration to work from.

Add to that psychic powers increasing efficacy as well as stratagems/character abilities.

To be fair - and I am all about fairness - there were several things that were in the IG players favor. One, they were playing on a terrain heavy map. It was quite beautiful to be honest. Second, he managed to seize initiative giving him a strong beginning, and third: I do not play Ynnari or soup which means I was playing a regular Craftworld. It was also a very close game where he managed to eke out a victory by 2 points. Had I managed to get the first turn I imagine I could have won.

 Eldarsif wrote:

Now, each IG squad was 10 strong only so you are not going to get to kill a lot in each squad or through morale. Makes it at least annoying how to decide to allocate attacks. This is especially problematic if you have high yield weapons from a single source that must all target a single 10 man squad.

Nor is morale much of issue with orks with their LD30's or at worst d3 MW and pass.

Thanks to orders the IG can quickly move up the table and get into your face. This is a strong move against gunline armies that have at most T3 models. When they get close enough they can start to combine the endless amount of separate squads into a larger blob to give themselves a larger CC footprint. All of this is possible because IG has a strong CP pool and regeneration to work from.

That's nice but it's still just 2 squads a turn max for 20 sized squad at most. Less than what orks throw at you at 30-40 models.

ThePorcupine wrote:
What makes 150 guardsmen harder to kill than 300+ orks? Nothing. Orks are harder to kill than guardsmen.

Boyz are T4 6+ while guardsmen are T3 5+. 10 guardsmen can "take cover" to increase their save to 4+, but boyz have a 9 inch kustom force field bubble to give them a fairly permanent 5++.

When playing Tau which means death if the opponent make it into CC guard are a lot more challenging to kill than orks.
Wounding both on a 3+ and the orks rarely make a 6+, they also generally arn't shooting you to cover the oncoming CC units.
Guard save double the wounds on that 5+ and costed less ppm anyway. Have NLOS shooting and still hit like a train.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
The only people celebrating the Fly change were people who are upset their screens weren't 100% effective 100% of the time. Now Shooting armies are even more brain dead, and how dare their opponent not be forced to run into their guns if they're not playing one of the chosen few.

That's a bit generalist. I will agree that shooting did get some teeth back, but we're not moving back into 5-7th's shooting only thing just yet. 8th still pushes you to be doing damage basically every phase to be effective (because in a game were everything dies fast the best defense is a strong offense to weaken the opponent's offense). Flying based melee units took a hit, but honestly there were some legit issues with those units that had to be addressed (0+" charges from atop buildings for example) and while that means you'll need to take two turns to charge something behind a screen which makes things like the Smashcaptain less BS in terms of being on the table.

The units who got hit by this who didn't deserve it were units that very few people were using and need a massive overhaul even before the Fly change happened. Or does someone want to tell me that without changing Fly that Assault Marines and the +1 versions of Assault Marines were really that good without sinking massive amounts of points into them (like DCA with a crap ton of good weapons mixed into a blob).

It's not really about shooting "getting teeth back", since that somehow implies that Shooting was weak (it wasn't and isn't) and that the problem is power related (it's not). the problem is the specific removal of a tool to deal with a very effective and easy strategy that now has no counter. The "answer" of shooting the unit first ignore that armies like orks or chaos tend to have much less effective shooting, which creates a double negative where those armies need to remove their effective units to take ineffective units (where as shooting units can just shoot over the screen). As an ork player I'm already taking Tankbustas because of how bad melee anti-tank weapons is, but they're still worse than other anti tank. But now I also need to take anti infantry to replace stormboyz, but surprise: Lootas/Shootboyz still suck. or just Take more boyz, as if that'd somehow make the game more interesting.

I also fail to see the problem with charging from off a building. A squad of, say, raptor blasting through the air to take perch on the ruins of some bombed out cathedral, glancing down to see infantry units slowly moving through the streets before descending on their foes seems like the kind of cinematic thing GW should be encouraging.

Also, you're making your Space Marine bias pretty clear . Just because you don't like how Assault marines works doesn't mean everyone else need to suffer. There's plenty of harlequin players disappointed by the change and I just got these stormboyz.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. I'm not mad about the change to first turn DS, since I can understand how problematic that was (although I do wish they'd at least made the "count as destroyed" thing at the end of turn 4 rather than turn 3 at this point) and I would not have been upset if they just required you to also measure the vertical distance (say, you still need to roll 6 to get over that 6 inch wall even if the enemy behind it is 4 inches away). but this was fix that punished a lot of units just to hurt one and made screening even more powerful.

 Eonfuzz wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

glados wrote:
Am I the only one OK with the prevalence of so many troops on the battlefield now?

It was something sorely missing from 7th. If someone had said then that IG infantry, cultists, Kabalite Warriors etc we’re going to be a great choice next edition we would have all been thrilled.

Troops should be a 100% auto pick in any list and this edition widely does that. The only thing left to do is fix a few of the subpar troops like Tac’s and CSM squads and we’re golden.

...in a game dominated by cheap hordes.

Why do people say this? The game is dominated now by Knights (Which is the complete opposite of hordes).

I guess it was a simplification. Do you see BAs and a knight taking the top spots? What's the missing ingredient? When I say hordes, I refer to cheap troops great for screening and that bring massive command points to the elite segments of a list. It allows the elite portion to mitigate it's primary weakness. So what I should have said was "cheap hordes protecting elite power units and providing wealth of CP" dominating. The thing is, the elite portion of the list isn't half as powerful without that horde chaff to bring the command points and screens that the thirsty elites need.

 Eldarsif wrote:
Two weeks ago we had a ITC style tournament where I lived . Second place was a guy who brought 2 Smash Captains along with 150 guardsmen. He of course had Straken and all the CP regen you can think of. CP regen to the max.

Killing this amount of Guardsmen in due time is nearly impossible unless you have that much more dakka. The Guardsmen are like glimmer: you just can't reliably remove them completely.

Termagants with Devourers can come in squads of 30 and use their fire-twice stratagem to manage 180 shots in a turn. The squad costs 240 points, but averages 46.5 GEQ kills a turn. That's one squad killing 150 GEQ in three turns.

Jeesh!

Just when you thought it was safe to play RG again...

IF screw your cover CT is looking better and better.

ThePorcupine wrote:
What makes 150 guardsmen harder to kill than 300+ orks? Nothing. Orks are harder to kill than guardsmen.

Boyz are T4 6+ while guardsmen are T3 5+. 10 guardsmen can "take cover" to increase their save to 4+, but boyz have a 9 inch kustom force field bubble to give them a fairly permanent 5++.

5++ costs 75 point minimum, it foot slogs and can be killed by a sniper. it adds a 1/3 chance to survive ap-1 or more weapons and 1/6 more against ap-0 weapons than the tshirt save.

Also one must keep the entire unit within 9 inches meaning it slows your movement signifigantly. as you have to cautiously play in case the kff cannot keep up.

realistically one could keep 1 kff to cover 1 30 man blob or 2 20 man blobs, but since it costs more than 12 boys in points it is really not worth it. also once you make that first charge the kff cannot keep up and becomes useless.

 G00fySmiley wrote:

ThePorcupine wrote:
What makes 150 guardsmen harder to kill than 300+ orks? Nothing. Orks are harder to kill than guardsmen.

Boyz are T4 6+ while guardsmen are T3 5+. 10 guardsmen can "take cover" to increase their save to 4+, but boyz have a 9 inch kustom force field bubble to give them a fairly permanent 5++.

5++ costs 75 point minimum, it foot slogs and can be killed by a sniper. it adds a 1/3 chance to survive ap-1 or more weapons and 1/6 more against ap-0 weapons than the tshirt save.

Also one must keep the entire unit within 9 inches meaning it slows your movement signifigantly. as you have to cautiously play in case the kff cannot keep up.

realistically one could keep 1 kff to cover 1 30 man blob or 2 20 man blobs, but since it costs more than 12 boys in points it is really not worth it. also once you make that first charge the kff cannot keep up and becomes useless.

Not to mention those Guardsmen are backed by a ton of firepower generally, whether it be Knights, Tanks, or Mortars.

Seriously, my Chaos Cultists are 4 PPM, but have a 5+ BS and 6+ armor save... imagine the QQ if they had guardsmen stats! Guardsmen are super points efficient, especially now that anything can hurt anything else. If we still had the "double +1 makes you immune" of old Guardsmen would be far less common.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Eldarsif wrote:
Two weeks ago we had a ITC style tournament where I lived . Second place was a guy who brought 2 Smash Captains along with 150 guardsmen. He of course had Straken and all the CP regen you can think of. CP regen to the max.

Killing this amount of Guardsmen in due time is nearly impossible unless you have that much more dakka. The Guardsmen are like glimmer: you just can't reliably remove them completely.

Termagants with Devourers can come in squads of 30 and use their fire-twice stratagem to manage 180 shots in a turn. The squad costs 240 points, but averages 46.5 GEQ kills a turn. That's one squad killing 150 GEQ in three turns.

18" range so they need to spend more points on a transport to DS to do that with any sort of reliability. They can't do this till turn 2 now.

Then by some miracle if they go untouched for the next 3 turns, by your forth turn and 6 CP spent, they can kill 150 Guardsmen assuming they didn't move.

Killing those Guardsmen becomes a lot harder when they are shooting back. Those 100 remaining Guardsmen will overkill those Gants in a single turn

I feel they should up the shots fired from Flamers/Heavy Flamers/Flamer equivalents from 1D6, to 1D6 per 5 models in the target unit.

This would fix the Hordes being the most durable unit in the game, and lessen the value you get from cheap guys like Guardsmen.

Reemule wrote:
I feel they should up the shots fired from Flamers/Heavy Flamers/Flamer equivalents from 1D6, to 1D6 per 5 models in the target unit.

This would fix the Hordes being the most durable unit in the game, and lessen the value you get from cheap guys like Guardsmen.

not all hordes are durable... orks die like flies. the issue with guard is you have the 5+ with 4+ in cover and they can disengage and fire, GW removed any penalty to getting out of stuck in combat and then getting wasted.

on the d6 though flamers I really wish my ork flamers were d6, we pay the same points as imperium players but get d3 hits :( hopefully the codex rectified this, give us cheaper flamers or d6 hits.

Reemule wrote:
I feel they should up the shots fired from Flamers/Heavy Flamers/Flamer equivalents from 1D6, to 1D6 per 5 models in the target unit.

This would fix the Hordes being the most durable unit in the game, and lessen the value you get from cheap guys like Guardsmen.

I think flamers should probably do something more than just straight up damage. Facing a giant gout of flame is pretty scary - why not impact the morale phase harder when that happens? Or maybe bring back pinning with flame weapons.

 SHUPPET wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Eldarsif wrote:
Two weeks ago we had a ITC style tournament where I lived . Second place was a guy who brought 2 Smash Captains along with 150 guardsmen. He of course had Straken and all the CP regen you can think of. CP regen to the max.

Killing this amount of Guardsmen in due time is nearly impossible unless you have that much more dakka. The Guardsmen are like glimmer: you just can't reliably remove them completely.

Termagants with Devourers can come in squads of 30 and use their fire-twice stratagem to manage 180 shots in a turn. The squad costs 240 points, but averages 46.5 GEQ kills a turn. That's one squad killing 150 GEQ in three turns.

18" range so they need to spend more points on a transport to DS to do that with any sort of reliability. They can't do this till turn 2 now.

Then by some miracle if they go untouched for the next 3 turns, by your forth turn and 6 CP spent, they can kill 150 Guardsmen assuming they didn't move.

Killing those Guardsmen becomes a lot harder when they are shooting back. Those 100 remaining Guardsmen will overkill those Gants in a single turn

Winning a shootout point for point wasn't the challenge, simply showing you could kill 150 Guardsmen was. And there's 1760 more points in a 2000 point army to do it with. 1/9th of the army gets you 1/3rd the way there in a single turn.

Honestly whenever I fight Guard, the Guardsmen themselves are the least of my worries, and in general are part of the "cleanup" phase of the battle. The tanks and allied Shield Captains (or whatever) are the things I have to look out for.

Oof, a lot to unpack here. I'll try to not make my reply so word heavy mainly because I don't feel like lecturing people over something I don't agree with.

 Luke_Prowler wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
The only people celebrating the Fly change were people who are upset their screens weren't 100% effective 100% of the time. Now Shooting armies are even more brain dead, and how dare their opponent not be forced to run into their guns if they're not playing one of the chosen few.

That's a bit generalist. I will agree that shooting did get some teeth back, but we're not moving back into 5-7th's shooting only thing just yet. 8th still pushes you to be doing damage basically every phase to be effective (because in a game were everything dies fast the best defense is a strong offense to weaken the opponent's offense). Flying based melee units took a hit, but honestly there were some legit issues with those units that had to be addressed (0+" charges from atop buildings for example) and while that means you'll need to take two turns to charge something behind a screen which makes things like the Smashcaptain less BS in terms of being on the table.

The units who got hit by this who didn't deserve it were units that very few people were using and need a massive overhaul even before the Fly change happened. Or does someone want to tell me that without changing Fly that Assault Marines and the +1 versions of Assault Marines were really that good without sinking massive amounts of points into them (like DCA with a crap ton of good weapons mixed into a blob).

It's not really about shooting "getting teeth back", since that somehow implies that Shooting was weak (it wasn't and isn't) and that the problem is power related (it's not). the problem is the specific removal of a tool to deal with a very effective and easy strategy that now has no counter. The "answer" of shooting the unit first ignore that armies like orks or chaos tend to have much less effective shooting, which creates a double negative where those armies need to remove their effective units to take ineffective units (where as shooting units can just shoot over the screen). As an ork player I'm already taking Tankbustas because of how bad melee anti-tank weapons is, but they're still worse than other anti tank. But now I also need to take anti infantry to replace stormboyz, but surprise: Lootas/Shootboyz still suck. or just Take more boyz, as if that'd somehow make the game more interesting.

Something I've said a few times in this thread and the other FAQ reaction thread is that shooting is weaker in this edition than previous editions, particularly against Horde units since most basic weapons lost AP meaning that it takes more to kill off a unit than it used to. The only ones feeling the bite against the AP value are MEQ and TEQ who suffer more for every AP they get hit with due to how much they pay for that save.

And that tool was breaking the game. You can argue it however you want, but as much as people argue that people just "need to screen" to balance against turn 1 deep strike charges and other nonsense that we've seen taken back, single model units who could pull the same stunts (Smash Captains, Solitaire or Troop Master backflipping over a screening unit to stab your Warlord in the face) it was punishing players in ways that weren't balanced. Due to shared rules or wargear that means some units got dragged into the mix, but it makes for a more consistent experiance than say units with fly can still do it but individual character models with fly can't.

And let's not forget about the Rune Priest with a Jump Pack who can Heroically Intervene with 20 attacks over a unit or terrain without you being able to do anything about it other than stay more than 6" away at all times. This stuff was broken and it needed to go. Yes, I will gladly admit some units who didn't need to be punished got hit too, but I'll take a more consistent game that treats the same wargear, you know, the same, than one that has to make one off rules to nerf individual models in ways that don't line up with how other models work.

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
I also fail to see the problem with charging from off a building. A squad of, say, raptor blasting through the air to take perch on the ruins of some bombed out cathedral, glancing down to see infantry units slowly moving through the streets before descending on their foes seems like the kind of cinematic thing GW should be encouraging.

As cool as that would be, the way it was usually being played was to deep strike onto terrain and despite being nearly 12" sometimes you never had to make a charge longer than 3". Paired with single models (like Smashcaptians) and it was breaking the game in a lot of ways. It was never really used cinematic, it was used in the most broken way possible. So yeah balanced game mechanics > cinematic game mechanics.

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
Also, you're making your Space Marine bias pretty clear . Just because you don't like how Assault marines works doesn't mean everyone else need to suffer. There's plenty of harlequin players disappointed by the change and I just got these stormboyz.

I mentioned why Flip Belts likely saw a change (to keep models like the Troop Master and Solitaire from negating actual tactics and cheesing out your opponent's warlord on turn 1 or 2 in a game GW seems to be trying to balance to go to turn 3 or 4 at minimum). And using examples from the most commonly played faction in the game isn't bias, it's just the thing everyone knows because they have them or play against them all the time. And I never said Assault Marines were the problem, I said they're broken pieces of garbage that barely function at their job and you have to drop a lot of points into their +1 versions to make them work. So while this hurt them further, no one can really argue that Assault Marines are the ones who were hurt the most by this because no one was really using them in that manner to win games. You might have seen some DCA do stuff like that, but honestly those never made it into the top tables so outside of local meta I don't know how well that works when screens can block units more effectively than a single model.

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. I'm not mad about the change to first turn DS, since I can understand how problematic that was (although I do wish they'd at least made the "count as destroyed" thing at the end of turn 4 rather than turn 3 at this point) and I would not have been upset if they just required you to also measure the vertical distance (say, you still need to roll 6 to get over that 6 inch wall even if the enemy behind it is 4 inches away). but this was fix that punished a lot of units just to hurt one and made screening even more powerful.

It's clear that the vertical distance thing was only part of the problem and after listening to Frontline Gaming's take on how single models were basically the problem because they negated anyone's attempts at having their movement phase mean more than "get closer so I can hit it with my sword". A thought that I heard raised is that the game seems to be pushed towards lasting at least 3 (possibly 4) turns so that it's not just a turn 1 or turn 2 tabling because someone just janked the important stuff out of your army without you being able to stop it.

About the only way I'd say they should have left this unchanged is that if Flying units had to declare charges against the unit they jump over as well so they'd at least eat Overwatch from a larger number of models to give the defending player a chance to not get screwed out of a game by what is ultimately a cheap tactic.