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 wuestenfux wrote:
What are the commonly units and models (with armament) taken by the top lists?

According to BoLS it's "Thunderfire cannons and Invictor Warsuits" with a mix of other stuff -

Considering that CA goes to print months in advance, and if GW being suprised by IH is true, the chance of there being fixs to IH in the 2019 CA seem rather small. Unless GW is not suprised, did it all to get a quick boost to sells in second quarter, to do what ever with the models rules in the CA.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
As a genuine NooB, how much of those admitedly impressive results might be down to lists that haven't previously optimised against Mechanised Marines?

I think more than most honestly. There was a WS player the week before beat out 2 or 3 IH players (I can't remember if it was 2 or 3), and i saw a SW player beat out 2 IH players as well (I follow some SW as i'm thinking of picking them up for a side project and i think they are actually kinda good/viable, mostly cool marines)

I think it's quite the opposite.

As said, everybody who expects to win even a single tournament game needs to tech against triple Krast/Taranis Cursaders, take down Mech Tau, Mech Eldar, Tank Commanders, etc...

Most people already run lists hyper-optimized to kill mech. There's no more room to adapt. The anti-tank of most Codexes has just been out-mathhammered at this point. There's nothing more to adapt.

Also, yes, Innes Wilson won a 29 people tournament going 4-0-1 with White Scars, but he's also a long-time ETC scottish player and high-level player of reasonable renown, struggling by his own admission (and only managing a tie in one game) against random dudes that haven't played in a year or more and simply dropped 3 Repulsors for funsies. And that is him saying he went straight into Marines as soon as he saw the book, because his GSC are dead and buried and wouldn't even have managed that much (and GSC are a premiere anti-big-scary-things army).

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
As a genuine NooB, how much of those admitedly impressive results might be down to lists that haven't previously optimised against Mechanised Marines?

IMO, from a pure wound/toughnss view, they aren't bringing anymore mech than an eldar flyer list or a AM/Knight/X soup army.
However, the layered defensive buffs neuter many commonly used anti-tank weapons, any army that relies on high RoF d3 or flat 2 damage weapons has no chance of taking out an ironstone'd executioner.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
As a genuine NooB, how much of those admitedly impressive results might be down to lists that haven't previously optimised against Mechanised Marines?

Considering that most lists needed to be able to deal with knights in theory that shouldn't have been an issue.
In theory mind you.

Different level of dealing with tho, when people relay on 2D and 3D and now its not 2/3D anymore its different

Find the debate about what the forum got right and got wrong a bit dubious. There have been moments of madness (the collective cross-internet freakout over index Necrons has to be the biggest one) but these days its fairly accurate. Mainly because maths doesn't lie - and if something is mathematically good, you need a very clear reason for why it won't be good on the table. And vice versa.

If anything the forum would seem to have good collective wisdom. Orks were meant to be really hot, border on meta defining according to "the experts" a year ago, and tbh the result has been a bit of a damp squib. Turns out they are less reliable GSC and a whole bunch of bad options. Its not clear they are any better served than the index.

Back on IH - as people have said - the meta will evolve, but its not immediately obvious how it can do so in a way that will help. If you are tooled up to crack knights - and you have to be - you probably can't go much further in that direction to crack IH vehicles.

If Marines as Marines came back that could be different - but this is T6-T8 hulls, possibly with a 5++, definitely with a 6+++, with stupidly buffed up shooting stats for units that can freely gallop around the table.

Tyel wrote:
If anything the forum would seem to have good collective wisdom. Orks were meant to be really hot, border on meta defining according to "the experts" a year ago, and tbh the result has been a bit of a damp squib. Turns out they are less reliable GSC and a whole bunch of bad options. Its not clear they are any better served than the index.

Orks still have more GT wins and top 4 placements than GSC since the last big FAQ. Also note that a pretty powerful combo was taken out by nerfing mob up.
Looking at the facts, there is no reason to doubt ork competitivelness.

Yeah. Orks are a really, really good army, and have performed stronger than GSC by and far.


Also, I find Orks are a pretty good (if singular) case study on how GW's game designers at times seem to undervalue the shooty parts compared to the close combat buffs, as Orks have moved more and more towards a gun-line army the more time people had to optimize, and most serious cc-threats outside of ObSec-Objective grabbers and distraction have largely been purged from top Ork lists. No Ork player these days is taking out the big alpha threats with close combat.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
As a genuine NooB, how much of those admitedly impressive results might be down to lists that haven't previously optimised against Mechanised Marines?

Considering that most lists needed to be able to deal with knights in theory that shouldn't have been an issue.
In theory mind you.

Different level of dealing with tho, when people relay on 2D and 3D and now its not 2/3D anymore its different

Fair point, especially if you look at the mid tier gatekeeper castles.

 Eldarain wrote:
But some people were wrong about what the exact build would be so... It's ok?

That's not really the point. Its that internet rage is a misguided tool to judge issues. The list that won BFS is mobile and durable due to healing. I imagine he was zipping wounded land speeders around to get tagged by heals and with them capable of ignoring move penalties he lost no efficiency in doing so. I'd wager his list was a lot more static overall than we might envision.

He was also capable of beating the Repulsor / IFF / Ironstone list. A list that has been claimed to be nearly impossible to beat. So, how exactly did he do so with minimal S8 shooting and no S9 or strong melee?

Getting caught up in the internet bs harms our ability to think through the problems even IF the netlist is still an issue.


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Marin wrote:

 Nitro Zeus wrote:
It's an incredible and exciting time that we live in when someone could read that post, and somehow think it was saying that Iron Hands aren't broken.

Hardly the point of the post, it was against the repeated non-stop opinion that you need to experience and test everything to know something.
After all we are not kids and you don`t need to be burnt 3 times to understand something so obvious.

Clearly there are lists well outside the internet designation of the issue. So, you DO need to experience it to understand the broader issues at hand. Otherwise we're just pissing in the wind and unable to fix the real problem.

If GW fixes IFF, and the Ironstone, and Dread shenanigans we're STILL going to be in deep gak with IH based on these results.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

He was also capable of beating the Repulsor / IFF / Ironstone list. A list that has been claimed to be nearly impossible to beat. So, how exactly did he do so with minimal S8 shooting and no S9 or strong melee?

Because the claim itself was bs. As multiple folks have been stating, we just got drowned out by hysterical blathering.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

If GW fixes IFF, and the Ironstone, and Dread shenanigans we're STILL going to be in deep gak with IH based on these results.

Citation needed.

Sunny Side Up wrote:
Also, I find Orks are a pretty good (if singular) case study on how GW's game designers at times seem to undervalue the shooty parts compared to the close combat buffs, as Orks have moved more and more towards a gun-line army the more time people had to optimize

True. To be fair, the ork codex has more shooting units than close combat units, even if you count units that could be either towards melee.

, and most serious cc-threats outside of ObSec-Objective grabbers and distraction have largely been purged from top Ork lists. No Ork player these days is taking out the big alpha threats with close combat.

Right now successful ork players are moving back towards bringing evil suns boyz, and the Gorkanaut does occasionally make an appearence. There is also the odd case of an ork player placing third in this IH mess with Goff boyz and nobz.

The issue is that everyone with half a brain knows how to screen valuable units with less valuable units. So the only way to get into combat without FLY is shooting the screen first.
In addition, since orks aren't exactly durable, the only way to survive is taking out threats starting turn one, and close combat simply can't do that.

So without shooting, there is no close combat, but if your shooting is good enough to enable melee, you might as well just keep shooting, because melee has little to no advantage over shooting - you lose models from fighting and overwatch, half the game can just leave combat with no downside, the charge roll itself has a non-trivial chance to fail and you need to get there by casting powers, spending CP or by moving across the board for multiple turns.

Sterling191 wrote:


Citation needed.

The winning BFS list.

Note that I'm not claiming its unbeatable (I would much rather play that list than Repulsors), but it clearly has some strong advantages. Those advantages could potentially be overcome as people adjust their lists to deal with it, but until we get first hand reports of how his opponents think they screwed up fighting it we don't really have the full picture.

 Daedalus81 wrote:


The winning BFS list.

Note that I'm not claiming its unbeatable (I would much rather play that list than Repulsors), but it clearly has some strong advantages. Those advantages could potentially be overcome as people adjust their lists to deal with it, but until we get first hand reports of how his opponents think they screwed up fighting it we don't really have the full picture.

The amazing thing is how you go from "WE'RE TOTALLY SCREWED" to "Well...maybe we should see what happened and get more data", while at the same time calling out your own original statement (that 8th is broken due to people facing armies with capabilites they've never faced before). I love it.

Sterling191 wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:


The winning BFS list.

Note that I'm not claiming its unbeatable (I would much rather play that list than Repulsors), but it clearly has some strong advantages. Those advantages could potentially be overcome as people adjust their lists to deal with it, but until we get first hand reports of how his opponents think they screwed up fighting it we don't really have the full picture.

The amazing thing is how you go from "WE'RE TOTALLY SCREWED" to "Well...maybe we should see what happened and get more data", while at the same time calling out your own original statement (that 8th is broken due to people facing armies with capabilites they've never faced before). I love it.

Huh? Are you assigning statements from other people to me? I've never been of the opinion that we're screwed or that IH is unbeatable.

Sterling191 wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:


The winning BFS list.

Note that I'm not claiming its unbeatable (I would much rather play that list than Repulsors), but it clearly has some strong advantages. Those advantages could potentially be overcome as people adjust their lists to deal with it, but until we get first hand reports of how his opponents think they screwed up fighting it we don't really have the full picture.

The amazing thing is how you go from "WE'RE TOTALLY SCREWED" to "Well...maybe we should see what happened and get more data", while at the same time calling out your own original statement (that 8th is broken due to people facing armies with capabilities they've never faced before). I love it.

We are not screwed, the only think screwed is the game balance. What data will show is how much exactly and will players adapting will increase the damage control.
No list is unbeatable, but it`s stupid to put yourself in disadvantage, that is the reason so many players switched so fast to SM.
One list losing couple of games don`t mean it`s not broken, the Castellan list also did not had 100% WR.
Also SM is the army, that probably have the biggest chance to beat other SM, that is real problem for the game.

Daedalus81 wrote:

Huh? Are you assigning statements from other people to me? I've never been of the opinion that we're screwed or that IH is unbeatable.

Daedalus81 wrote:

If GW fixes IFF, and the Ironstone, and Dread shenanigans we're STILL going to be in deep gak with IH based on these results.

Emphasis mine.

Sterling191 wrote:

Daedalus81 wrote:

Huh? Are you assigning statements from other people to me? I've never been of the opinion that we're screwed or that IH is unbeatable.

Daedalus81 wrote:

If GW fixes IFF, and the Ironstone, and Dread shenanigans we're STILL going to be in deep gak with IH based on these results.

Emphasis mine.

Ok, I get why you see it that way. My intention was to state that there is something about IH making them strong. People being flabbergasted about potentially the wrong things makes it hard for us to see the issue and find ways around it.

My words weren't meant to be a tone of defeat.

shogun wrote:

Looking at my own 'chaos knight' army I think I should go full thermal cannons and moirax lightning locks. Either go big on the d6 damage output and/or cheap 1 wound shooting (lightning lock). Also dreadblade 'no -1 ap' pact could also help against various space marine shooting. One knight rampager with as much movement bonuses could go in for the kill or be a giant bullet magnet.

So one could face a IH dreadnought/repulsor/hawks castle combi, most likely, right?

Spam the melle wardog 1 lighting lock and the vheical killer fist. I think those fists are d6 +2 against vehicals lol. They are also pretty cheap.

GW just added too much to marines too fast. Even 3rd wasn't quite like this. Marines became good because of base rules changes in that case.

Martel732 wrote:
GW just added too much to marines too fast. Even 3rd wasn't quite like this. Marines became good because of base rules changes in that case.

It is one of GW's biggest hurdles. They're just not taking enough time to test the updates properly. In some respects they should open it up, but then we'd potentially be testing rules 6 months before the book goes to print, which devastates the hype machine (which I do enjoy).

I'm using the base marine book to simulate BA and it works pretty well. The add-on books just seem like piling on.

I'm not sure hurried playtesting can be blamed here. Giving a faction free access to half a dozen powerful always-on abilities, largely pulled from other faction specific traits, shouldnt exactly have required extensive playtesting to recognize balance issues.

I can even make a pseudo smash capt with the base marine book. I haven't even started thinking about the new models. The Impulsor will empower a lot of new tactics, including usage of null zone in a meaningful way.

 Vaktathi wrote:
I'm not sure hurried playtesting can be blamed here. Giving a faction free access to half a dozen powerful always-on abilities, largely pulled from other faction specific traits, shouldnt exactly have required extensive playtesting to recognize balance issues.

Yep. So freaking obvious.

How more obvious can it get? Every unit has a 3++ save for free? Would we need to test to figure out that is broken?

3++ is bad enough on gak like Wulfen and Wraiths.

 Vaktathi wrote:
I'm not sure hurried playtesting can be blamed here. Giving a faction free access to half a dozen powerful always-on abilities, largely pulled from other faction specific traits, shouldnt exactly have required extensive playtesting to recognize balance issues.

If rumors are to be believed there was mis-communication between testers and GW. Not sure how valid that may be, but when you have the crazy schedule like GW does right now everything gets rushed.

Martel732 wrote:
3++ is bad enough on gak like Wulfen and Wraiths.

I wasn't being serious but if it did...there would be 50% of people coming out of the woodworks to suggest we wait and see how broken it is....


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 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
I'm not sure hurried playtesting can be blamed here. Giving a faction free access to half a dozen powerful always-on abilities, largely pulled from other faction specific traits, shouldnt exactly have required extensive playtesting to recognize balance issues.

If rumors are to be believed there was mis-communication between testers and GW. Not sure how valid that may be, but when you have the crazy schedule like GW does right now everything gets rushed.

How exactly is it possible to have a miscommunication with your rules team and play testesters? "These Ironhands rules are broken to a level we have never seen before"...."Gotcha"..."Print the rules they are well balanced"..."WTF"..."Sorry I thought you said not broken to totally broken"...

Oh I thought IH were getting the 3++ somehow. I'm a bit out of the loop on the IH supplement. I've been busy for a couple of months. I've played a few games with fake BA from the marine codex and it went much better than with BA codex. Good enough for me.

Martel732 wrote:
Oh I thought IH were getting the 3++ somehow. I'm a bit out of the loop on the IH supplement. I've been busy for a couple of months. I've played a few games with fake BA from the marine codex and it went much better than with BA codex. Good enough for me.

To be honest they have worse. They have a -1 damage aura (relic) and a 5++ cheap aura (special character who autro heals 3(6 with stratagem)). Overall its ass effective as a 3++ and its guaranteed mitigation of multi damage. You can fail saves.