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Tyel wrote:

The Newman wrote:
Sorry Sim-Life, but KurtAngle is right. If you want to know how well balanced a game system is then you look at what happens at the top of the most competitive environments where people are bringing their A game. You want to see the rules hold up there and see the top players win with a wide variety of armies and factions.

If it's well balanced and hard to abuse the rules in that environment then it's great for casual players just looking for a random pick-up game, because you don't need to have a negotiation over what kind of game you want to play.

Pefect balance isn't possible in any game complex enough to be worth playing, but in an ideal system the game should be decided on the table. A skilled player with a list picked by throwing darts should beat a bad player with a tuned tournament net-list most of the time, and 40k has never worked that way.

Can you offer some examples of games which are well balanced and hard to abuse, where somehow being balanced at the top level of play, means they are balanced at all levels of play?
Because I am drawing a blank.

I feel confident in saying that in 8th, yes, a good player with an average list will tend to beat a bad player with whatever is the currrent net deck, because they will play the mission and the bad player won't.
But sure - if you meet on planet bowling ball and its just a question of throwing dice until one side falls over, the mathematically good stuff tends to win out.
But again, struggling to think of any miniatures game where this isn't the case.

The core terrain rules don't help avoid a "planet bowling ball" situation where you need very particular terrain set ups and huge LOS blockers for them to have any real impact on the game. Also games in 8th generally seem so lethal that I've rarely seen them go to being decided by mission and instead it comes down to which army can effectively table the other first.

Backfire wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Oh, one other reason to not listen to this forum - lots of people who dont play will come tell you how awful it is.

Yes, people who think it's awful don't play it.
Surprising, really.

I think that this edition is horrible and I still play it every weekend, or at worse try to play it.

 Sim-Life wrote:

The Newman wrote:
Sorry Sim-Life, but KurtAngle is right. If you want to know how well balanced a game system is then you look at what happens at the top of the most competitive environments where people are bringing their A game. You want to see the rules hold up there and see the top players win with a wide variety of armies and factions.

If it's well balanced and hard to abuse the rules in that environment then it's great for casual players just looking for a random pick-up game, because you don't need to have a negotiation over what kind of game you want to play.

Pefect balance isn't possible in any game complex enough to be worth playing, but in an ideal system the game should be decided on the table. A skilled player with a list picked by throwing darts should beat a bad player with a tuned tournament net-list most of the time, and 40k has never worked that way.

Which is exactly why I said at high level play 40k is trash and always will be but at a casual level it's great. Armies people claim are terrible (GK, Tyranids specifically in this thread) do fine at the casual level. I know this because I've used them at that level and won games with them. My main point was that tournament data is useless for the most part because most people don't play at a tournament level, they play at a casual level.

Can I make this any clearer?

You're plenty clear, I just don't think you can call a game great if you have to negotiage/house rule/gentlemen's agreement your way to a game that either player can win.

The Newman wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

The Newman wrote:
Sorry Sim-Life, but KurtAngle is right. If you want to know how well balanced a game system is then you look at what happens at the top of the most competitive environments where people are bringing their A game. You want to see the rules hold up there and see the top players win with a wide variety of armies and factions.

If it's well balanced and hard to abuse the rules in that environment then it's great for casual players just looking for a random pick-up game, because you don't need to have a negotiation over what kind of game you want to play.

Pefect balance isn't possible in any game complex enough to be worth playing, but in an ideal system the game should be decided on the table. A skilled player with a list picked by throwing darts should beat a bad player with a tuned tournament net-list most of the time, and 40k has never worked that way.

Which is exactly why I said at high level play 40k is trash and always will be but at a casual level it's great. Armies people claim are terrible (GK, Tyranids specifically in this thread) do fine at the casual level. I know this because I've used them at that level and won games with them. My main point was that tournament data is useless for the most part because most people don't play at a tournament level, they play at a casual level.

Can I make this any clearer?

You're plenty clear, I just don't think you can call a game great if you have to negotiage/house rule/gentlemen's agreement your way to a game that either player can win.

When did I say you have to do that?

Karol wrote:

Backfire wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Oh, one other reason to not listen to this forum - lots of people who dont play will come tell you how awful it is.

Yes, people who think it's awful don't play it.
Surprising, really.

I think that this edition is horrible and I still play it every weekend, or at worse try to play it.

This is the only edition you've played and you play in a ridiculously toxic community and use a ridiculously toxic forum.

My 2 cents as a very casual player:

Been at this hobby on and off for decades. Last time I stopped playing was around the time when 7th was introduced. Didn't like it very much.

Now, having came back to the hobby, I like the combo of Kill Team and 8th ed 40k much more enjoyable than 7th ed 40k. For beer n pretzels type of a hangout session, 8th ed 40k (casual play) is fun and somehow feels more fluent than 7th ed. For a more cranial napoleonic tabletop experience, Kill Team is better. So our group can kind of choose which flavour of a gaming session we want. So far, I'm digging it.

Dont ask me about meta LOl. I play fluffy lists and tend to lose most of the time :p

 Daedalus81 wrote:


This is the only edition you've played and you play in a ridiculously toxic community and use a ridiculously toxic forum.

you know, I almost belived you guys about it. I really thought that maybe those flyer lists, castellans or old inari list were just our local polish things. But then new marines came out, and I suddenly find out that tons of people are doing their dudes in black to get the best set of rules. Now I think my place is no more toxic the other places, maybe different by cash limitations, and how often people can changed lists and that is all.

And the one edition argument is a rather strange one. Lets assume I played GK in 7th. If 7th was as bad as you say, and I have no grounds to claim it was not, would I have had more fun with my GK army? How about 6th? Or would I have to go to those mythical good GK times that lasted a few months, to have fun with them?

It started off very promising, but sadly morphed back into a very poor game. Some people like it, but some people also like McDonald's food.

Best advise I can give is use your 40k models to play either Apocalypse, or One Page Rules Grim Dark Future. It will be a more satisfying experience.

Its ok - its not great but its hugely better than the piece of gak that was 6th./7th

IMO The problems include:

Terrain rules
The ever increasing lethality
The constant unrelenting focuss on Marines that drains interest, resources and time on all other factions

And wierdly the seeming reluctance to use their own system - not enough use of the range of stats - so all vehicles from open topped buggies to Titans are stupidly stuck with very similar range of Toughness.

I am enjoying Appoclypse more for both 40k and Epic/AT scale games.

Karol wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:


This is the only edition you've played and you play in a ridiculously toxic community and use a ridiculously toxic forum.

you know, I almost belived you guys about it. I really thought that maybe those flyer lists, castellans or old inari list were just our local polish things. But then new marines came out, and I suddenly find out that tons of people are doing their dudes in black to get the best set of rules. Now I think my place is no more toxic the other places, maybe different by cash limitations, and how often people can changed lists and that is all.

And the one edition argument is a rather strange one. Lets assume I played GK in 7th. If 7th was as bad as you say, and I have no grounds to claim it was not, would I have had more fun with my GK army? How about 6th? Or would I have to go to those mythical good GK times that lasted a few months, to have fun with them?

GK were a high tier army through most of 6th if I remember. Not just a few months. And no you wouldn't have had fun in 7th edition because it was a terrible edition and the closest 40k has come to dying because of it.

You keep complaining about how bad your GK are but you need to realise that every army goes through this. The last time tyranids were good was 5th edition and now they're middling at best. Chaos Marines have sucked for as long as I can remember, Necrons were last only good in 6th, Sororitas were never good. You just have to wait it out or sell them up and stop acting like you're the only army this has happened to.

Necrons were one of the strongest armies in 7th, they first got their decurion (that's why that wole formation mechanic was named after them).
CSM are in a good place since the end of 7th, they suffered from 5th to 7th, though with both Codizes from that time being worse than the one in 3.5.

I never faced GK, so I can't say whether they're as bad as the internet makes them out to be (I know Necrons aren't), but I'm sure GW will have something for them at some point. They're also Space Marines, and GW loves its Space Marines more than any other faction.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Necrons were one of the strongest armies in 7th, they first got their decurion (that's why that wole formation mechanic was named after them).
CSM are in a good place since the end of 7th, they suffered from 5th to 7th, though with both Codizes from that time being worse than the one in 3.5.

I never faced GK, so I can't say whether they're as bad as the internet makes them out to be (I know Necrons aren't), but I'm sure GW will have something for them at some point. They're also Space Marines, and GW loves its Space Marines more than any other faction.

The Decurion wasn't present from the start of 7th though was it? It came later. I only played enough of 7th to try the armies I owned and the necrons were hugely disappointing when I played them.

And space marine have also been an army thats been average at best for a long time. I guess they suffer for being the first codex of every new edition, they're at the bottom of the creep scale.

 Sim-Life wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Necrons were one of the strongest armies in 7th, they first got their decurion (that's why that wole formation mechanic was named after them).
CSM are in a good place since the end of 7th, they suffered from 5th to 7th, though with both Codizes from that time being worse than the one in 3.5.

I never faced GK, so I can't say whether they're as bad as the internet makes them out to be (I know Necrons aren't), but I'm sure GW will have something for them at some point. They're also Space Marines, and GW loves its Space Marines more than any other faction.

The Decurion wasn't present from the start of 7th though was it? It came later. I only played enough of 7th to try the armies I owned and the necrons were hugely disappointing when I played them.

And space marine have also been an army thats been average at best for a long time. I guess they suffer for being the first codex of every new edition, they're at the bottom of the creep scale.

I believe the release order for 7th was Orks, GK, Wolves, Dark Eldar, and Blood Angels. All of these where very conservative releases with the Wolves being the stronger release (and the only ones to be able to compete with the madness that came later) and a race for the bottom between Orks and Dark Eldar (DE was the worst dex except the haemonculus covens saved them from being a complete dumpster fire). Then the Necrons came out with their Decurion detachment which was a huge leap in power creep. The base dex was ok but the Decurion gave so many bonuses that it completely changed the meta and started the codex arms race with most future codex releases being roughly as strong if not stronger (except the 2nd Ork supplement which was mostly a reprint and completely tone deaf to the issues plaguing the Orks).

So what you're saying is most armies were crap at a point and sometimes get better. Except orks.

 Sim-Life wrote:
So what you're saying is most armies were crap at a point and sometimes get better. Except orks.

7th wasn't a clean slate start but more like minor adjustment from 6th with most rules being wholesale copy and paste so the meta for the most part continued on as normal. Armies like Tau and Eldar where top tier even before they got their codex in 7th. It's just that the early 7th edition releases tended to not push the envelope. GK and DE definitely got nerfed with their 7th edition codex while Orks had some previously terrible units made viable but overall the army got worse due to changing mob rule. Could also say that armies like Guard who didn't even get a 7th edition codex where potentially highly competitive the entire time (thanks in part to forge world silliness).

 jasper76 wrote:
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?

I think that 8th is the best edition yet.

I started in 2nd Edition and I still have a soft spot in my heart for that time - perhaps nostalgia. I didn't love the changes that 3rd brought but I had some good gaming. I enjoyed 5th edition, but my attention started wondering with 6th. I left the game during 7th - it didn't seem to be 40K. I came back for 8th and have been having the most fun yet. I think that 8th is doing well for three big reasons, some of which have elements that could cause folks to dislike the game but overall bring/keep more people.

First, 8th Edition boiled away the massive rules-set, doing away with USRs, vehicles rules etc. This made the game more accessible and less of a rules argument. While You Make Da Call has many farcical threads, I find few rules disputes in actual games. of 40K against actual opponents. Of course, boiling away rules makes some folks unhappy. One man's chrome is another man's bloat.

Next, 8th Edition took away many of the things that led to disputes and slowed things down such as templates, scatter dice and vehicle facings. This makes games clean and fast. The terrain rules are too simple for some, but at least you can get on with the game.

Finally, throughout 8th Edition the GW team have been engaged with the community and have made adjustments. They actually seem to want to have some element of balance and are willing to admit mistake (if in a roundabout way). Whether they are successful is a hot topic but I think that they have made great progress. "Broken" Codexes see attention fairly quickly - two weeks for the latest ones. This community engagement/adjustment frustrates some who don't want to refer to FAQs etc. I think, however, that the juice is worth the squeeze.

I can understand a closed group wanting to stay with 7th Edition if they loved it (which I guess could be a thing) and don't want to mix with the wider community. Perhaps they also play 30K? I think, however, that tabletop history will judge 7th Ed harshly and find 8th Ed, for all its Dakka-Angst, a golden era in 40K.

Cheers,

T2B

Most Playtested Edition EVER.

TangoTwoBravo wrote:
Next, 8th Edition took away many of the things that led to disputes and slowed things down such as templates, scatter dice and vehicle facings. This makes games clean and fast.

Then they added in hundreds of stratagems, tons of re-rolls, and multiple layers of conditional buffs, as we steadily creep back to cluttered and slow. Yesterday I had a bare-bones Cadian infantry squad, under FRFSRF, shoot at one of my squads of Renegades. That 40pt unit shooting requires an average of 76 dice rolls to resolve. That's ridiculous.

I dunno, man. I really liked how 8th started. I liked how much simpler and cleaner it was than 7th (never liked templates), and I don't mind the comparative lack of depth in things like casualty removal and vehicle facings if it makes for a significantly faster and cleaner game. But just replacing meaningful core gameplay concepts with gotcha stratagems and endless dice rolling, for no time or complexity benefit, doesn't feel like a positive change.

I have three friends who got into 40K this edition, and all have given up on trying to really understand each other's armies. They understand just their own, and then get blindsided by abilities and stratagems they didn't see coming. At least they're not arguing over scatter dice, I guess.

I really like the core 'idea' of 8th, if you will, but I feel like GW is drifting away from that and back into bad habits.

 jasper76 wrote:

 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.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

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.

99% of that "complication" didn't add anything though, so it's not really depth, just book keeping and meaningless detail. As a side note, the reduction of meaningless detail has also been accompanied with an increase in tactical and strategic depth, [not a small part of it forced], which is in my opinion better than knowing how many men bailed out of the M13/40 when it was hit in the upper left forward hull by a 40mm borfors gun.

I like big models, they're nice to paint and I sure as hell don't want to make any more guardsmen.


As for 8th, 8th is way better than 7th. 7th is, IMO, the worst edition of the game I played in. Unfortunately, they're going back that way with the Space Marine codex supplements, but up until recently 8th was really good. The unification of the profiles did away with monstrous creatures just being always better than tanks, and they've done a really good job on balance until recently, with even the most maligned factions doing fairly decently and the gap between the best and the worst being the shortest it's been in like forever.
Unfortunately, there's the new Space Marine codex supplements, which are very much a throwback to 7th, so it's going back down the hole.

If there was an old edition I'd go back to, I'd go back to 5th. That at least could give 8th a run for it's money, but 7th is pretty much the worst edition yet.

 catbarf wrote:

TangoTwoBravo wrote:
Next, 8th Edition took away many of the things that led to disputes and slowed things down such as templates, scatter dice and vehicle facings. This makes games clean and fast.

Then they added in hundreds of stratagems, tons of re-rolls, and multiple layers of conditional buffs, as we steadily creep back to cluttered and slow. Yesterday I had a bare-bones Cadian infantry squad, under FRFSRF, shoot at one of my squads of Renegades. That 40pt unit shooting requires an average of 76 dice rolls to resolve. That's ridiculous.

I dunno, man. I really liked how 8th started. I liked how much simpler and cleaner it was than 7th (never liked templates), and I don't mind the comparative lack of depth in things like casualty removal and vehicle facings if it makes for a significantly faster and cleaner game. But just replacing meaningful core gameplay concepts with gotcha stratagems and endless dice rolling, for no time or complexity benefit, doesn't feel like a positive change.

I have three friends who got into 40K this edition, and all have given up on trying to really understand each other's armies. They understand just their own, and then get blindsided by abilities and stratagems they didn't see coming. At least they're not arguing over scatter dice, I guess.

I really like the core 'idea' of 8th, if you will, but I feel like GW is drifting away from that and back into bad habits.

Beyond the fact that i agree with that sentiment,
How excactly does a cadian infantry squad get to roll 76 shots? 1 for sergant, 9 x 2 for rapidfire 2x for FRFSRF that is 37 shots? Asuming he rerolled 1 's that would be statistically be about 43 shots?

TangoTwoBravo wrote:

Next, 8th Edition took away many of the things that led to disputes and slowed things down such as templates, scatter dice and vehicle facings. This makes games clean and fast. The terrain rules are too simple for some, but at least you can get on with the game.

This isn't my experience, unfortunately. It feels like there are waaaaaaaaay more gameplay-slowing elements in 8th than I ever recall experiencing in 3rd, 4th, or 5th (6th was starting to bloat a bit, and I skipped 7th). Especially with Space Marines and Chaos, the number of rules you need to remember is immense, and these rules are scattered across multiple rulebooks. The games of 8th that I've played have dragged on much longer than I would have expected based on the points size and model count because my opponents keep forgetting their rules and having to look them up again. I don't verify, so I'm sure that they're getting some of their rules wrong too. Heck, I know I'm getting my rules wrong sometimes. In my last battle I forgot about my Kommandos' +1 to wound against models in cover and I mis-remembered my Warboss's warlord trait as being another one (I accidentally played it as +1 S and +1 A instead of re-rolling failed hit rolls and adding +1 D to weapons). Oops. When every single unit has its own special unique rules, it's just so hard to remember all of them. And then the endless re-rolls add time to every phase of the game. Overwatch adds time to assaulting while almost never actually doing anything. The whole psychic phase adds time (it didn't exist in 3rd-5th IIRC). And so on. Sure, templates and scatter dice and vehicle facings are gone now, and that does speed things up. But they've just been replaced with other elements that slow the game down again as much or more IMO.

zerosignal wrote:
Most Playtested Edition EVER.

Yep. Too bad they have discarded the results and gone back to their old practices.

The indexes had promise that GW was trying to balance the game, but as the Codexes came out, they moved further from balancing the game to adding creep and untested options and units. By the time they reached the Custodes codex, GW had apparently seen that its customers don’t want balance, they want power - and they want it piled on. And GW intends to go where the money is.

Not Online!!! wrote:
Beyond the fact that i agree with that sentiment,
How excactly does a cadian infantry squad get to roll 76 shots? 1 for sergant, 9 x 2 for rapidfire 2x for FRFSRF that is 37 shots? Asuming he rerolled 1 's that would be statistically be about 43 shots?

76 rolls in total.

He rolls 37 shots. On average he gets to re-roll about 6 of them. 43 rolls and counting.

On average he winds up with about 22 hits. So then he rolls 22 to wound. 65 rolls so far.

Average 11 wounds. So now I make 11 saves. 76 rolls total.

To resolve all the shooting for a 40pt unit with an army-wide trait and the most basic order, he rolls an average of 65 dice and I roll an average of 11 dice. That's absolutely nuts.

The same interaction in Apocalypse requires less than a tenth as many dice rolls, with no re-rolling, and ultimately I find the granularity afforded by removing individual models doesn't make the slowness worth it for 40K.

Nevermind, he beat me to it.

I'll add that some armies throw FNP saves on top of all that though.

The Newman wrote:
Nevermind, he beat me to it.

I'll add that some armies throw FNP saves on top of all that though.

You're right. In fact, last week I ran my renegades (using Catachan rules) against my buddy's Nurglites. So let's recreate when I shot my Catachan battle cannon at those Plague Marines.

I'm using Grinding Advance, so I get to shoot twice. I'm a TC so I'm using the order to re-roll 1s, too.

So I roll two dice for my number of shots, and then I'll probably choose to re-roll one. 3 rolls so far to establish that I will be firing an average of 9 shots.

I make my 9 attack rolls. 1 or 2 roll 1s, so I get to re-roll. We're up to about 13 rolls at this point, around 7 hits.

I roll to wound. It'll be about 5 successes. 18 rolls so far.

He gets his armor saves. Maybe one succeeds. 23 rolls.

I make four damage rolls and average 8 damage. 27 rolls.

Now he gets to roll Disgustingly Resilient against every point of damage. Except, since each multi-damage wound is allocated to an individual model, he has to roll them individually. So he makes four separate rolls of an average of two dice each, to determine who ultimately dies.

We have, to resolve a tank shooting some Plague Marines, thrown 35 dice over eleven different 'throws', as a fairly typical outcome.

I've never played another game that sucks up so much time just throwing and counting and re-throwing dice. I really think that ultimately any attempts to streamline the game will fall flat on their face so long as basic combat resolution remains so stubbornly complex, time-consuming, and contingent upon a whole host of situational abilities that are easy to forget in the course of gameplay.

 catbarf wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Beyond the fact that i agree with that sentiment,
How excactly does a cadian infantry squad get to roll 76 shots? 1 for sergant, 9 x 2 for rapidfire 2x for FRFSRF that is 37 shots? Asuming he rerolled 1 's that would be statistically be about 43 shots?

76 rolls in total.

He rolls 37 shots. On average he gets to re-roll about 6 of them. 43 rolls and counting.

On average he winds up with about 22 hits. So then he rolls 22 to wound. 65 rolls so far.

Average 11 wounds. So now I make 11 saves. 76 rolls total.

To resolve all the shooting for a 40pt unit with an army-wide trait and the most basic order, he rolls an average of 65 dice and I roll an average of 11 dice. That's absolutely nuts.

The same interaction in Apocalypse requires less than a tenth as many dice rolls, with no re-rolling, and ultimately I find the granularity afforded by removing individual models doesn't make the slowness worth it for 40K.

Ah, well yea that makes sense, as for the comparison to your 11 shots. Welcome to 8th index R&H, population? IG proxxy only.

And yes the whole reroll and wound and rerolls on top of that are an issue, especially paired with exploding hits and exploding wounds.

Actually I think Aggressors with the right traits get worse.

A minimum squad of 3, standing close enough and under Chapter Master, Lieutenant, and IF rules:

006 rolls just to determine number of shots
057 rolls to hit
019 rerolls
063 to wound rolls (38 initial hits + 12.67 reroll to hits + 12.67 hits generated by trait)
010 rerolls to wound
155 rolls total before a save is made for a 111 point unit.

034 wounds to save on a marine target
017 fnps for IH
207 total

45 wounds to save vs guard
200 total.

 catbarf wrote:

The Newman wrote:
Nevermind, he beat me to it.

I'll add that some armies throw FNP saves on top of all that though.

You're right. In fact, last week I ran my renegades (using Catachan rules) against my buddy's Nurglites. So let's recreate when I shot my Catachan battle cannon at those Plague Marines.

I'm using Grinding Advance, so I get to shoot twice. I'm a TC so I'm using the order to re-roll 1s, too.

So I roll two dice for my number of shots, and then I'll probably choose to re-roll one. 3 rolls so far to establish that I will be firing an average of 9 shots.

I make my 9 attack rolls. 1 or 2 roll 1s, so I get to re-roll. We're up to about 13 rolls at this point, around 7 hits.

I roll to wound. It'll be about 5 successes. 18 rolls so far.

He gets his armor saves. Maybe one succeeds. 23 rolls.

I make four damage rolls and average 8 damage. 27 rolls.

Now he gets to roll Disgustingly Resilient against every point of damage. Except, since each multi-damage wound is allocated to an individual model, he has to roll them individually. So he makes four separate rolls of an average of two dice each, to determine who ultimately dies.

We have, to resolve a tank shooting some Plague Marines, thrown 35 dice over eleven different 'throws', as a fairly typical outcome.

I've never played another game that sucks up so much time just throwing and counting and re-throwing dice. I really think that ultimately any attempts to streamline the game will fall flat on their face so long as basic combat resolution remains so stubbornly complex, time-consuming, and contingent upon a whole host of situational abilities that are easy to forget in the course of gameplay.

FNP needs to be removed from Nurgle and Drukhari IMO, replace it with more T or a better Sv. That said there's a neat trick for getting FNP over with more quickly for 1W models. Roll damage all at once, let's say two 1s, three 2s and one 3. You roll FNP for the first damage on the 3, if failed you put it in failed pile, if succesful the damage has been reduced to 2 and you add it to the 2s pile, next you roll three FNP for the 2s (and possibly another one if you passed the 3), you take the failed ones and put them in the failed pile, move all the successful ones over the 1s pile and roll them again, the failed ones go to the failed pile. The number of dice in the failed pile is the amount of dead Plaguebearers. But the game isn't designed around fast dice which is a real shame, I think that's something GW should consider working on for the matched play games. Balance so you can play fairly matched pick-up games. Rules that promote a fast game so you can reach a conclusion and don't have to pack up because you run out of time. Removing most re-rolls and replacing them with more utility related or stat-related things would be better.

As a Necron player, I don't appreciate the Overlord's buff one unit ability from a design standpoint, it's pretty good but it also incentivises me to pack several Overlords into my list which is very unfluffy. Captains shouldn't be spammed, I know they are occasionally spammed for their effectiveness in melee, but the incentive for spamming them is only as big as the unit is undercosted compared to Elite and FA alternatives. If you changed their aura into a targeted ability you'd have to have multiple to get coverage on several units, this would be negative for the thematics of the game. Replacing re-rolls with a +1 to hit aura with some sort of caveat would be an option, otherwise granting additional S, T, A, WS, BS, LD or what have you, just not a targeted spammable ability. For Lieutenants, it'd be more okay since each Company is supposed to have two of them. But 50 Marines led by 3 Captains is too much.

Are people really bad at reading their dice or something? Even rolling like 90 dice picking out misses takes about 5-10 seconds tops for most people in our group.

Or is this one of these non-issues Dakka likes to act are mountains when they're really just molehills?

 Sim-Life wrote:
Are people really bad at reading their dice or something? Even rolling like 90 dice picking out misses takes about 5-10 seconds tops for most people in our group.

Or is this one of these non-issues Dakka likes to act are mountains when they're really just molehills?

I think if you can spot and remove 5-9 dice every second, then you are probably in the running for a Guinness world record in knucklebones/jacks.

You are welcome to search through my post history and decide for yourself whether I'm one of those perpetual complainers. I will absolutely die on the hill that says rolling an average of 76 dice across four trials to resolve a standard attack from a unit that represents literally two percent of the value of my army is utterly ridiculous.