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Way back when, when 8th came out, my gaming group decided not to follow along, primarily financially because we mutually owned almost all the cool 7th books that came out, and they released a f-ing library in 7th, but also most of us, including myself, didn't like what we then perceived as drastic mechanical changes.


But I am very curious now that a bunch of time has past, do you prefer 8th to 7th? 7th to 8th? What are the pros and cons?

8th is vastly better. Sometimes we remember those clumsy rules of 7th that did nothing for the game and laugh about them. 8th just runs much more smoothly, while also being tactically far more interesting. Also balance is much better and everything has its use, unlike in 7th were every weapon that wasn't Ap2/1 was practically useless. Psychic phase is much better, morale is still useless overall, CC is much better and more engaging, being a vehicle is not a downgrade.

Edit: being able to pick Warlord traits and psychic powers alone is a vast improvement, looking back rolling for them was beyond stupid

The things that are wrong with 7th are the same things that are wrong with 8th. Size creep, power creep, Codex favouritism, slow strangling of customizability, and an endless stack of new special rules to make everything more 'unique'. The push to vehicles-with-saves/armoured-MCs in 7th and the push to T8/strong Invulnerable saves in 8th keeps the whole game built around volume and skew lists, the push to make individual psychic powers bigger and bigger and bigger while keeping a tight constraint on the ability to actually cast powers ends up making psykers not scale at all (one psyker is massively powerful in small games and sort of irrelevant in big games, and subsequent psykers are worse than the first).

I liked 7th better because once you stripped off the pile of bloat there was still a game left over; you had to worry about target priority, fire arcs and Difficult Terrain made positioning relevant, you couldn't just spam one gun and kill everything. 8th is about setting up your card-game combo and the basic gameplay has been so stripped down it might as well not exist.

I'd take 7th any day. It's better to fail making something complicated and in depth and end up with a flawed good game than it is to fail making something simple and ending up with a flawed average game.

In my experience, competitive tournament players don't like it because of balance, but narrative/ campaign style players like it because there's a lot of support for factions that haven't had any in a long time (though some will debate this); there are a lot of games of various scales that interact with each other (you can grow from Blackstone to Kill Team to 40k to Apocalypse pretty seamlessly) and there are multiple story line campaign releases.

My personal opinion is the best 40k has ever been, but I wouldn't play in a tournament if you paid me, and I play all four of the games listed above; my two favourite armies are Sisters of Battle and Genestealer Cults, so I'm pretty heavily invested and kinda biased.

7th and 8th Edition have a lot of similar pros and cons (as pointed out by AnomanderRake). The game is pretty fast these days, and some of the new mechanics have worked out well and better than the 7th core rules ever could. There are shared issues, like the power creep, the need for a library of books to play the game, and the push for everything to have invuln saves for some reason. These are traits that are the same as 7th. Then, there's the exclusive flaws that are new to the edition, such as the lack of customisation (especially with many HQs), the lack of any real terrain rules, and the codex favouritism is getting worse and worse.

Really, it all comes down to 1 thing. If you didn't like 7th edition, you'll probably really enjoy 8th. If you enjoyed 7th edition, you won't get much from 8th.

I greatly enjoyed 8th towards the beginning... but now, I honestly can't be bothered to play it anymore. Games take forever due to the amount of dice things roll, reroll, roll to wound, reroll, saves, and rolls to ignore damage.

I still love my army, and most of the 40k lore... but I have found the only 40k related game I can stand playing is Kill Team. And that is mainly because of with how fast it is, the janky rules and poor balance bug me less than wasting 2-4 hours to slog through a game of 8th.

Mainly playing other game systems now, but would likely come back to full 40k if GW implemented some of the ideas from Apocalypse into standard 40k.

Honest answer? 8th is a bloated mess. It's ended up right in the same place 7th edition was...but it's still a better/more solid rule set.

40K has never been a good rule set, but 8th has been the most enjoyable version of it since 2nd edition (and that's coming from someone who's more or less not playing 8th right now).

8th is a bloated monster of a game with no concept of what scale it wants to play.

That said, it's still less of a mess than 7E, at least thus far. Thats starting to change here over the last couple months, but I'd still play 8E over 6E/7E any day of the week without question or hesitation.

Most fun I've had since 2nd / 3rd.

Most balanced and most responsive GW has ever been despite rolling issues.

Honestly this is the worst place to ask. Go to a store and ask someone to teach you.

its functionally the same as the best and worst parts of 7th but with the added benefit of FAQs to shake up the "meta" a couple times a year.

It has the exact same rules bloat problem, the exact same need to carry many books around to play up to date, power creep (when hasnt that been a problem), armies that are clearly superior to others etc.

so far GWs promise about keeping the game simpler is about as true as when EA makes a promise about no loot boxes, we all know its coming haha.

Is it fun though, subjectively yeah I think so.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Also balance is much better and everything has its use, unlike in 7th were every weapon that wasn't Ap2/1

I dont mean to get argumentative but this was something about 7th that people didn't understand competitively in my circle, at least.

You load up on AP1/AP2, I can beat that gak with dakka every time. And if I load up with AP1/AP2, I will get my ass handed to me by dakka from my opponent. It is a beautiful dynamic that had held up since the beginning to the end of 7th, even with all the fancy formations and all that.

The real problem with 7th is and always has been the AP14 conundrum.

But this is tall from three years ago and no longer relevant, I suppose.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Most fun I've had since 2nd / 3rd.

Most balanced and most responsive GW has ever been despite rolling issues.

Honestly this is the worst place to ask. Go to a store and ask someone to teach you.

All of this. Expect salt if you shout a question down a salt mine.

I personally hated 7th edition and jumped ship early on to play mostly Warmachine/Hordes and later infinity. I came back with 8th and loved it.

The game is getting a little bloated as of late but I don't mind it too much. Also GW released Kill Team in 8th and is continuing to support it. I love playing kill team as well normal 40k and it is a great avenue for new players to get into the hobby. The buy in cost is much lower and the rules aren't that hard for newbies to grasp.

I also love a lot of the new models like primaris. IMO 8th is a big improvement from 7th.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Size creep

I honestly laughed when they came out with the 10 foot tall super-duper-really-this-time Space Marines, but I almost cried when I recently saw that greater daemons are now as big as the Magnus model.

And Deathguard are as big as the super-duper Marines, and it seems like maybe the source modelers are getting old and want to paint on big ass models so they can see. That's my take anyways. It's better than the reality of more plastic = more profit.




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pm713 wrote:
I'd take 7th any day. It's better to fail making something complicated and in depth and end up with a flawed good game than it is to fail making something simple and ending up with a flawed average game.

Referencing 7th, some people in my circle always complained that it was too complicated. But the complication of 7th is precisely what I personally like about it.

I much prefer 8th to 7th. The bloat is about the same, the complicated-ness is about the same, and the idea of power lists are the same... but everything else is pretty much better. Save modifiers really do make different weapons feel different, and you really do want very different numbers of units, and different kinds of units.

For example, in 7th, if you were a bike or a skimmer, the world was your oyster. If you were a basic infantry dude, you were dead or a liability. In 8th, you might want a bunch of little dudes! They can take up more space on the table, which is great because of how you can't deep strike within 9" of enemies most of the time. So, yeah, Infantry Squads, Scouts, Cultists, Termagants, etc. are all very inexpensive models, with bad stats, and bad weapons, with no AP... but they take up a lot more space, are never totally invalidated, and shots against them are shots not against stuff that's more worthwhile.

Not having to attach characters to squads is appreciated. Means that heroes feel more heroic and are more likely to get into actual combat where they excel. A number of characters together with a group of big guns/strong close combat can still make units hit far above their weight class, but they've been careful not to allow things to go too nuts. It's super SUPER rare to run into something that's a 6+ to hit, and nothing has a 2+ Inv.

Actually, speaking of toughness, there's more KINDS of toughness now. There are units with lots of models, units with high regular saves, units with high toughness, units with pretty good Inv. saves, units with lots of wounds, units that reduce damage taken, units that have feel no pain, and units that are harder to hit. And of course, you have mixes of all of these. The toughest thing in the game just recently (came up in past month, and GW came in to fix it) was a Dreadnaught with high actual toughness, high regular save, had a basic invul save, reduced the damage it took, has a very bad feel no pain, and could be healed almost to full in a turn if not killed. That's VERY different from the second-toughest thing in the game that has an average vehicle toughness, multiple penalties to hit, and reduces damage it takes by a little bit.

Also, all those toughnesses aren't always tough to the same things. Mortal Wounds from psykers exist, weapons that auto-hit (like flamers) exist, tons of low-damage weapons exist that don't get reduced, tons of multi-damage weapons exist that push through feel no pains (oh yeah, almost no units have better than a 5+ FnP, the best are 4+), high AP weapons exist to punch through high armour, things that ignore or remove invulnerable save exist to cut through high invulnerable saves. Yeah, lots of toughnesses exist, but so do lots of different ways of pushing through damage.

The speed of play is about the same, but the speed at which units start interacting is faster. You are able to get almost any unit you play with into a position of some kind of effectiveness turn 1, and are highly rewarded for doing so. GW Missions from Chapter Approved or later are also much better with many games, rewarding dynamic and smart play.

Are there issues? Yeah, of course. But the basis of the game is just so much better.

7th was the worst game I've ever played by the end.

Not the worst wargame, the worst game. Videogame, board game, sport, miss mary mack, i spy, the crazy calvinball things you make up as a little kid, didn't matter, 7th was the absolute worst.

8th is fun.


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 jasper76 wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Also balance is much better and everything has its use, unlike in 7th were every weapon that wasn't Ap2/1

I dont mean to get argumentative but this was something about 7th that people didn't understand competitively in my circle, at least.

You load up on AP1/AP2, I can beat that gak with dakka every time. And if I load up with AP1/AP2, I will get my ass handed to me by dakka from my opponent. It is a beautiful dynamic that had held up since the beginning to the end of 7th, even with all the fancy formations and all that.

The real problem with 7th is and always has been the AP14 conundrum.

But this is tall from three years ago and no longer relevant, I suppose.

Also the fact that literally none of that matters because I can make a 50pt unit of blue horrors so resilient it would laugh off an entire riptide wing.

And that's not getting into ACTUAL deathstars.

By the end no one was bringing high ap weapons. You brought D weapons, grav, or a feth ton of S6+ or you didn't bother with shooting. Heck, post Tsons, even eldar massed S6 and SM grav weren't enough to keep up with the things you could do in a daemon psychic phase.


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pm713 wrote:
I'd take 7th any day. It's better to fail making something complicated and in depth and end up with a flawed good game than it is to fail making something simple and ending up with a flawed average game.

I forget how 'complicated and in depth' unlimited 2++ rerollable invuls with a 2+ FNP were.

I'll assume you meant Pink Horrors. I dont know what they did with Chaos Daekons after 7th but in the 6th/7th codex Blue Horrors are a rule you can represent with models, but not a unit you can buy.


And there was such a simple solution to any of those issues that came up with power creep.

"Hey dude. I dont want to play against that army. It's not fun, I dont stand a chance."

If your opponent is a decent wargamer 8n any sense of the word "decent", and you cry Uncle, that player wont use the same army next go around. He or she wont even want to.

I know that basic civility never stood up in pick up games at game shops., but if you think about it for a moment, that has everything to do with gamers and nothing to do with the platform you are gaming on. In any system I've ever played, you have to plan games with your opponents to at least some degree in order for them to be fun, balanced, immersive, etc

If 8th was able to remove this element from gaming, I'd live to know how, but I know no system can. Not even a simple game of chess is in any way whatsoever balanced.

 jasper76 wrote:
I'll assume you meant Pink Horrors. I dont know what they did with Chaos Daekons after 7th but in the 6th/7th codex Blue Horrors are a rule you can represent with models, but not a unit you buy.

They were released late 7th in the Warzone Fenris books.

I feel like 8th had a strong start. Flawed? Very, but by GW standards the game was in a good place. I think it was strong coming into 2019, but has been going downhill throughout the year with the new Marine dex accelerating the trend.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 jasper76 wrote:
I'll assume you meant Pink Horrors. I dont know what they did with Chaos Daekons after 7th but in the 6th/7th codex Blue Horrors are a rule you can represent with models, but not a unit you buy.

They were released late 7th in the Warzone Fenris books.

OK.. I never played with Daemons and the only time I face them is against the summoning chart, so noone I know has ever popped out a unit of Blue Horrors.


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 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I feel like 8th had a strong start. Flawed? Very, but by GW standards the game was in a good place. I think it was strong coming into 2019, but has been going downhill throughout the year with the new Marine dex accelerating the trend.

I remember the big selling point to 8th was you'd ever have to buy another codex. All of us called BS, because we know a significant chunk of the GW business model it to produce and sell books ina perpetual cycle of updates. I mean, this business model is self apparent to any consumer of theirs, it not a secret or anything.

Maybe one day they really will give rules out for free, and just make their cash off cool models. Not going to hold my breath of course

I will say, even though I dont play 8th, it is an absolutely GREAT idea of putting a print of the appropriate rules within the box of models you buy. I always wished they would have done that during 7th. That's a kind of a middle ground and I appreciate they started to do that




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Just to say, it was very interesting reading everyone's ideas about the state of 8th.

Whenever 9th hits, my group will stay with 7th, but I might get a copy to see how they do the 8th 2.0

The basic 8th edition core rules are reasonable enough. They do have some problems, like a lack of terrain rules. But for the most part they're serviceable for fun fast games with the index army lists, and work fine as long as what you pile on top of them in the later codices isn't completely insane.

So of course, that's what GW did. The codices are getting crazier and more complicated as time goes on, to the point where a very fast and simple ruleset now takes forever to play a game with due to endless re-rolls and people forgetting their rules and having to look them up in half a dozen supplements and FAQs.

8th Is just as bad as 7th, just in the opposite direction.

They really did away with terrain rules? I mean, is there still a functional point to having scenery?

Did they at least maintain Line of Sight requirements?

 jasper76 wrote:
They really did away with terrain rules? I mean, is there still a functional point to having scenery?

Did they at least maintain Line of Sight requirements?

Terrain doesn't slow you down anymore, generally provides a blanket +1 to armour saves if you're standing on it, and can still block line of sight. The line of sight rules allow you to draw LOS from any point on one model to any point on another, so if the tip of your Leman Russ' antenna wants to shoot the plume on my Autarch's hat it has all the firepower of the tank behind it.

So technically there are still terrain rules, but not really.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 jasper76 wrote:
They really did away with terrain rules? I mean, is there still a functional point to having scenery?

Did they at least maintain Line of Sight requirements?

Terrain doesn't slow you down anymore, generally provides a blanket +1 to armour saves if you're standing on it, and can still block line of sight. The line of sight rules allow you to draw LOS from any point on one model to any point on another, so if the tip of your Leman Russ' antenna wants to shoot the plume on my Autarch's hat it has all the firepower of the tank behind it.

So technically there are still terrain rules, but not really.

Worst part is needing to have the entire unit in the area terrain to benefit from it. If your Boyz are partially in the ruins and have a few lads outside (say moving up the field into the piece of terrain) then you can't take the bonus to your save unless the Boyz not in the ruins are killed off. The concept of cover from terrain or units being inbetween the shooter and the target is basically non existent.

If you are interested in more detailed terrain rules you play Cities of Death. But the base rules also provide you with rules for ruins, woods, barricades, tank traps and so on, though their effect usually isn't as relevant as in 7th, I agree with that.

People have mentioned rules bloat in 8th, which I'm not really seeing. Or at least not in the way 7th had it where the base rules were already flawed with pointless special rules, vehicle rules that didn't matter due to hullpoints, and things like soulblaze. Or rolling randomly for your equipment like Daemons had to. In 8th I can evade the bloat easily by simply not playing Space Marines I guess
I agree that 8th has less customization of models and it's a real downside compared to 7th (the only one in my view). However I'd also say the options you have are more relevant, due to the better AP system every weapon has its use. Yes, Melter are still overpriced and should be fixed in CA, but oh well.

 Vankraken wrote:

Worst part is needing to have the entire unit in the area terrain to benefit from it. If your Boyz are partially in the ruins and have a few lads outside (say moving up the field into the piece of terrain) then you can't take the bonus to your save unless the Boyz not in the ruins are killed off. The concept of cover from terrain or units being in between the shooter and the target is basically non existent.

What's even stupider is what happens when the bulk of the models are out of sight completely rather than being in cover. In this case, your tank with a 20-shot gatling cannon can shoot at a single visible model and put wounds on all the models in the unit that are completely out of line-of-sight and they get no cover bonus. Whereas, if the other models were visible in or on a piece of terrain rather than being completely out of line-of-sight, then they would get a +1 to their save once the first guy standing out in the open gets blown away.

Yes that's right folks, it's now more protective to be visible but in or on of terrain than it is to be completely unseen behind it!

Also hilariously, If you have models in or on terrain, they get a cover bonus, but if they're behind it (i.e. there are more things between them and the shooters), they get no cover bonus.

Basically terrain and cover have no real effect in 8th edition, except for units of 5 or fewer infantry models which are small enough that all models can occupy ruins and are occasionally capable of being completely out of line of sight. Other than that, forget it: just assume the unit can be targeted and doesn't get a cover save bonus.

Minus some units that were obviously broken, I think the initial 8th edition BRB (only three stratagems for everyone to use) + Indexes was a step in the right direction to attempt to simplify and speed up the gameplay in order to expand the audience of the game. It has been very successful based on GW's sales. However, IMO 8th edition has now become bloated by rules errata, faqs, supplements, too many stratagems, and codex power creep. I'm now playing 1500-2500 point casual 40k games using the new Apocalypse rules (inspired/stolen from old Epic Armageddon) as well as Kill Team with just the main rulebook and and finding them both more enjoyable, primarily due to alternate activation rules. When "normal" 40k does away with its outdated IGOUGO turn system I will consider coming back.

I dont need any details on this, because I probably wont understand them anyway, but do Tyranids play good or bad in 8th? Necrons? (My two "big" 40k era armies are these) Did they get shafted or are they good armies in 8th?


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 Gnarlly wrote:
When "normal" 40k does away with its outdated IGOUGO turn system I will consider coming back.

Have you ever tested the back-and-forth style in 40k? It ends up being sheer madness, of the unfun variery, before you end Turn 1 every time I've tried, but I cant say I've tried with 8th rules.