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The only mistake about supplements was not including them as part of the core rules and given every chapter, craftworld, warband, legion, etc. of note their own extensive set of rules.

 Grimtuff wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
One thing I'm happy about the supplements is it enabled GW to flesh out the various chapters more, a lotta chapters are lucky to get more then a paragrah of text detailing them. and it never changes voer editions

Must've missed all of the Index Astartes articles near 20 years ago then...

Exactly what I was thinking.

I overheard some talk about how Doctrines were supposed to work. The original concept was basically the super doctrine and the regular Doctrines weren't supposed to stack. They were totally separate. But GW wanted to turn it up to 11 so they gave us what we have now. This came from someone who spoke to some playtesters in our area. So take that for what it's worth.

Spoletta wrote:
There are surely a lot of things that could have been done better with the supplements, like being able to claim the advantages of a particular doctrine only once per game.

One thing that i'm quite happy with though, is that they made all marine chapters into full factions.

Now about 50% of the game's factions are marines of some flavour (14 in total, without counting FW or minor ones like CFs and Blood Ravens). Considering that they are the image of the game, having most of the games centered around them feels right.

Now at the table you either play against marines or against one of the many others threats of the galaxy. Somehow i like this.

I honestly thought this was a joke post. Are you serious?

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

The Newman wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Pray tell all these super broken Successor traits. I'm looking forward to it.

Weeeelll...

Ranged Marksmen with Aggressors under the UM ability to hand out their super-tactical doctrine turn-one is kind of abusive.

Tactical Withdrawl combined with the RG handing out immunity to overwatch via warlord trait and psychic powers and getting units like Cents to just outside 9" before the game starts is also kind of abusive.

I actually kind of like that none of the founding chapter traits can be fully replicated out of the successor traits, and the successor traits mostly feel a little weaker, but there are still some power-combos in there.

None of those interactions are abusive in any way, shape, or form.

I hope you're being sarcastic, because eating 228 bolter rounds out of what is supposed to be a short range unit or having 42 Thunder Hammer attacks reach the back of your deployment zone (before you get to do anything in either case) feels like something that shouldn't exist in the game.

 chimeara wrote:
I overheard some talk about how Doctrines were supposed to work. The original concept was basically the super doctrine and the regular Doctrines weren't supposed to stack. They were totally separate. But GW wanted to turn it up to 11 so they gave us what we have now. This came from someone who spoke to some playtesters in our area. So take that for what it's worth.

Wellp.

That seems great. If true then it would lend credence to :
New gw = old gw + PR department

Not Online!!! wrote:

 chimeara wrote:
I overheard some talk about how Doctrines were supposed to work. The original concept was basically the super doctrine and the regular Doctrines weren't supposed to stack. They were totally separate. But GW wanted to turn it up to 11 so they gave us what we have now. This came from someone who spoke to some playtesters in our area. So take that for what it's worth.

Wellp.

That seems great. If true then it would lend credence to :
New gw = old gw + PR department

Up until 2019 there was a definite track of improvement, in my eyes 2019 has been a backslide in balance and the community is/will suffer accordingly.

 Saber wrote:


First, every new, powerful codex dominates at first until people figure out how to handle it, and the tournament scene usually settles down after a bit. Past experience suggests that Space Marines will not continue their current winning ways.

The only times this has actually been true to the extent that nu-marines have dominated has been:

1) The very first codex release (SM) when they were the only chapter tactics in town and we saw a very brief domination of marine flyer lists

2) the release of the Guard codex, which was head and shoulders stronger than anything that came out before it.

Since there is no indication from the rules content released since the supplements that GW is interested in giving other factions buffs to that level (They have even released rules for CSM that do not include many of the things the nearly identical loyalist SMs got) the assertion that this is part of the natural meta shift/power creep is a bit unfounded.

PA1 did not bring eldar Ynnari and drukhari up to SM-supplement levels.

PA2 is not bringing CSM up to SM-supplement levels

the new rules for SOS and Inquisition are not SM-supplement levels.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
There are surely a lot of things that could have been done better with the supplements, like being able to claim the advantages of a particular doctrine only once per game.

One thing that i'm quite happy with though, is that they made all marine chapters into full factions.

Now about 50% of the game's factions are marines of some flavour (14 in total, without counting FW or minor ones like CFs and Blood Ravens). Considering that they are the image of the game, having most of the games centered around them feels right.

Now at the table you either play against marines or against one of the many others threats of the galaxy. Somehow i like this.

I honestly thought this was a joke post. Are you serious?

Quite.
I know that it comes out as a bit strange, but I play the factions I play because I want to play the NPCs. Until now the so called "main characters" were nowhere to be seen, and it felt wrong. Yes, it was a huge shift in balance, but in terms of "feel" I like it better this way.

That's fair i guess.
Yet it could have been handled better?

 Argive wrote:
You mean like in an unlimited immense galaxy, marines are the only playable character and everyone is just an accessory NPC?

I've recently been informed that this is actually an RPG game, which fits in to the feeling that I've been playing an NPC faction for awhile. Apparently we just need to learn to be happy with our place in the narrative.

I honestly feel like we should just make SM players play against each other for the time being. I have zero interest in wasting my time setting up models against them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 beigeknight wrote:
What will be really crazy to watch is the escalation. All the other armies will have to be buffed to be at the same level as the supplements over the next year and a half. I imagine everything in most codices will have extra hits/damage/re rolls/at least 5 extra rules for every unit. Then the Astartes codices will have to be made even stronger because "Marines will be trash by comparison" and to sell the moneymaker models.

There are a lot of mechanics in the game that will break, or at least be put under extraordinary pressure if/as/when this happens. As lethality goes up first turn becomes more crucial for example, something GW had actually been working to mitigate over the past year or so.

 Tyranid Horde wrote:
I really like supplements for the thematic content and the ability to make your chapter a real force in the game but that is where the positives end for me.

They're too powerful in what is supposed to be an edition that is relatively balanced and that won't change post CA:2019. The rules bloat is also crazy and I can't fathom why they got rid of USR.

PenitentJake wrote:

3. Regarding PA: Having seen what's in PA 2, I have to say PA 1 is weak. Because they're both campaign books, and even from the same series, the comparison is absolutely fair, and Chaos and the Templars did better than the Eldar. The trade off is that CWE and DE each got a new character and a new unit. I don't think there are plans to release models for any of the factions in PA 2. I'm not saying that the models are an excuse for the lack of rules content; GW should be able to give us both.

Just to be pedantic here but CWE and DE didn't get new characters or units, they got resculpts. Only the characters got minor rules tweaks, which really does not constitute a poor supplement/campaign book of their own. Xenos didn't get the love they need once again in favour of releasing more marines.

Thanks for adding clarity to my post, and also to the poster who pointed out the chaos sorcerer model. However Incubi did gat a HUGE rules buff; in the dex, 6's only do massive extra damage on the klaivex attacks; in PA it's the whole unit. On a lucky roll, that actually translates into a fair bit of extra damage. It doesn't make a difference against 1w infantry, but it helps with vehicle killing and multi-wound elites. It also justifies taking a unit of ten Incubi instead of five in order to get more sixes.

Eh. I think the supplements, conceptually, are a good idea. GW just went a bit too far with the added benefits, rules, etc. this time.

We had codex supplements in 6th and 7th edition also. I remember some of them caused quite a stir as well. Coincidentally, the SM's Angels of Death supplement I recall caused the most.

This time around I think, at the moment, the issue is with the Doctrines. Again, conceptually, they're great. It's a reward for playing mono-faction. The core of the issue is that the doctrines enhance the most problematic aspect of the game; the AP system.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
Definitely see what you're saying. The problem with the supplements is "okay, Space Marines get them - where's ours?"

Honestly, I don't think Marines needed the power spike they gave, and in the process made taking the custom Chapter traits (which I adore) pointless if your sole objective was to win.

I love the lore and the extra focus the supplements give that a Codex can't, but in terms of gameplay additions, I feel they go too far, to the point where I feel dirty using them. Hell, I routinely ignore the Combat Doctrines abilities for this same reason.

Uhh... you can use the custom chapter traits with the supplements.


They are broken as all hell though, and probably shouldn't work with custom chapter traits. They'd still be broken then, but uh, slightly less so.

Pray tell all these super broken Successor traits. I'm looking forward to it.

Master of artisans is pretty broken dude. It's so good lots of people take it over the iron hands tripple whammy trait which is easily the best trait ever released for an army. It just scales way to well with an army that can already natively reroll 1's and with an LT giving reroll 1's to wound. Plus like...oh - now my heros all hit like trucks too! It's dumb.


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 Insectum7 wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
There are surely a lot of things that could have been done better with the supplements, like being able to claim the advantages of a particular doctrine only once per game.

One thing that i'm quite happy with though, is that they made all marine chapters into full factions.

Now about 50% of the game's factions are marines of some flavour (14 in total, without counting FW or minor ones like CFs and Blood Ravens). Considering that they are the image of the game, having most of the games centered around them feels right.

Now at the table you either play against marines or against one of the many others threats of the galaxy. Somehow i like this.

I honestly thought this was a joke post. Are you serious?

Seems like heavy satire to me.

 oni wrote:
Eh. I think the supplements, conceptually, are a good idea. GW just went a bit too far with the added benefits, rules, etc. this time.

We had codex supplements in 6th and 7th edition also. I remember some of them caused quite a stir as well. Coincidentally, the SM's Angels of Death supplement I recall caused the most.

This time around I think, at the moment, the issue is with the Doctrines. Again, conceptually, they're great. It's a reward for playing mono-faction. The core of the issue is that the doctrines enhance the most problematic aspect of the game; the AP system.

The problem is twofold imo. First GW lacks the ability to moderate their own rules writing so they very easily take things off the rails. More concerning is that they don't seem to play test or listen to their play testers because very obvious balance problems come out of almost every single release. That being said, looking at formations in 7th, there was a ton of extremely cool formations that made some really interesting gameplay opportunities but the only stuff that got played was the extremely broken ones. Great ideas and concepts in there (for some armies) but almost zero concern for balance.

Second its once again apparent that GW shot themselves in the foot with the core rules for 8th which has necessitated the need for rapid power/feature creep because the core mechanics are so limited. There isn't a whole lot they can really do with the base rules other than +/- modifiers to rolls/profiles or adding more dice. A more fleshed out core rule set with more mechanics would give more design choices and variety to units and allow for more opportunities to tweak units or give more utility bonuses instead of just stacking on more raw power.

 oni wrote:
Eh. I think the supplements, conceptually, are a good idea. GW just went a bit too far with the added benefits, rules, etc. this time.

We had codex supplements in 6th and 7th edition also. I remember some of them caused quite a stir as well. Coincidentally, the SM's Angels of Death supplement I recall caused the most.

This time around I think, at the moment, the issue is with the Doctrines. Again, conceptually, they're great. It's a reward for playing mono-faction. The core of the issue is that the doctrines enhance the most problematic aspect of the game; the AP system.

The problem is fundamentally with the fact that the supplements are not exclusive with the benefit of the 2.0 codex.

If taking the special Iron Hands devastator doctrine swapped out the standard, and taking the Iron Hand supplement swapped out your standard psychic power list, or swapped out your stratagems, or swapped out your WL traits/Relics, it'd be perfectly fine.

The problem is that they add another layer on top, giving marines twice as many psychic powers, stratagems, relics, wl traits, etc of other factions to work with, AND they get to pick their chapter tactics, AND they get doctrines nobody else gets.

Eldar custom chapter traits don't get to pick a craftworld to emulate, giving them the strat/trait and relic of that craftworld. Neither do drukhari - you have to give up the best relic and stratagem from Black Heart if you want the dubious benefit of maybe a very slightly better army trait combo, so nobody is ever going to use that.

It is the exact same problem Decurions had: the layering of the buff from formations with the buff from decurions shoved those factions with good combos into over-the-moon OP territory.

 Vankraken wrote:
More concerning is that they don't seem to play test or listen to their play testers because very obvious balance problems come out of almost every single release.

Big organizations don't act of one mind. Executives that are focused on returns have very different priorities than designers or playtesters.

As long as knights don't get doctrine-esque buffs I'm ok with that.

Yoyoyo wrote:

 Vankraken wrote:
More concerning is that they don't seem to play test or listen to their play testers because very obvious balance problems come out of almost every single release.

Big organizations don't act of one mind. Executives that are focused on returns have very different priorities than designers or playtesters.

That is what a project lead or doing a design by committee is for as it helps create a more unified end result. Problem is that the process GW uses has resulted in fairly major balance issues for a LONG time. End of the day GW is an organization that sells game rules and have been historically bad at writing said game rules. It doesn't matter which cog in the machine that you want to blame as the end result is the same.

They absolutely weren’t a mistake in concept, but they’re clearly a smidge too strong.

Space marines were pretty terrible before and they just went a bit too far with some of the doctrines to compensate.

 skchsan wrote:
As long as knights don't get doctrine-esque buffs I'm ok with that.

even if they did you'd never see them in use. Doctrines only come into play if you're running a pure army. how many people do you figure run pure knights?

The new preview article I think highlights one little beautiful gem.

It's the Word Bearers preview. The rule that they chose to highlight as the special thing that the Word Bearers get is to upgrade a Dark Apostle to "level 2" letting him cast 2 litanies per turn.

in the exact same book, they went ahead and gave every single loyalist marine chapter that ability, not just on Chaplains, but on librarians and techmarines as well. AND gave them chapter-specific litanies. AND gave them special relics for the Lv2 characters.

So if you play Word Bearers, you have as your special chapter tactics and chapter specific stratagems LESS than a loyalist space marine player who decides to bring a Chapterless Adeptus Astartes detachment.

Huehuehuehuehuehuehue.

Like at this point, I cannot help but think someone at GW is deliberately trolling with the word bearers' rules.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Quasistellar wrote:
They absolutely weren’t a mistake in concept, but they’re clearly a smidge too strong.

Space marines were pretty terrible before and they just went a bit too far with some of the doctrines to compensate.

I hope you make a note for yourself to never again complain about any new rules released into the game as broken if you're calling this supplement release that completely demolished the competitive meta as a smidge too strong.

The last time a faction went from basically zero percent of winning competitive lists to 60-75% of them in a single release was Necrons in 7th with the release of the decurion. And even then, the releases that followed very clearly were intended to shift the meta up a peg and were made to compete with the new necrons.

I hate jumping on the complain-train while I'm enjoying the new rules, but I kind of agree with the sentiment.

I never thought Marines needed more hitting power, I wanted their rules to match up to their fluff better. Marine Codex 1.0 with twice the wound count on everything (add damage tracks where needed) with no other changes, now you have something that feels like a Marine army in the fluff. They aren't depicted obliterating the field, they're depicted as weathering the worst that can be thrown at them while surgically destroying the targets that matter.

Other than some brutal combos, of course, I think the biggest issue is probably properly costed units.

Given how much more powerful some units are when fielded as a different chapter but they pay the same regardless, this makes balancing a bunch of these units nigh impossible.

The chapters should absolutely not pay the same costs for all of these units.

The Newman wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

The Newman wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Pray tell all these super broken Successor traits. I'm looking forward to it.

Weeeelll...

Ranged Marksmen with Aggressors under the UM ability to hand out their super-tactical doctrine turn-one is kind of abusive.

Tactical Withdrawl combined with the RG handing out immunity to overwatch via warlord trait and psychic powers and getting units like Cents to just outside 9" before the game starts is also kind of abusive.

I actually kind of like that none of the founding chapter traits can be fully replicated out of the successor traits, and the successor traits mostly feel a little weaker, but there are still some power-combos in there.

None of those interactions are abusive in any way, shape, or form.

I hope you're being sarcastic, because eating 228 bolter rounds out of what is supposed to be a short range unit or having 42 Thunder Hammer attacks reach the back of your deployment zone (before you get to do anything in either case) feels like something that shouldn't exist in the game.

Dude - aggressors are still bad lol. They can't advance and shoot twice even with the stratagem and only with ultramarines super doctrine can you move and shoot twice with them. That is somewhat a powerful combo BUT it is still pretty short ranged. even with the +3" range. 21+5 = 26.

So really - most deployments the closest you can start is 24" so you deploy 3 inches off the front line and they can't shoot you. Typically if I am going second I am deploying at least 6" back for actually threatening things (like assault units that can charge turn 1 like shinning spears) . For their point aggressors still die pretty easy so just kill them first and they will never shoot if you are smart. I hate to say if but if you are losing to aggressors it's because you aren't playing against them right.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

tulun wrote:
Other than some brutal combos, of course, I think the biggest issue is probably properly costed units.

Given how much more powerful some units are when fielded as a different chapter but they pay the same regardless, this makes balancing a bunch of these units nigh impossible.

The chapters should absolutely not pay the same costs for all of these units.

Dude you are almost there...You realize the abilities of these chapter traits are not balanced yet you want to blame the units for some reason. The problem is the abilities. A few units got point drops in the codex but other than assault cents...nothing dropped meaningfully in price. Suppressors (no one uses them) and a few other units no one cares about. The issue is unbalanced abilities. Units like Centurions should not have the ability to deep strike turn 1 - it is legit broken as they pay less points per model for being slow and short ranged with limited transport options. There is no reason why a super-doctrine that starts active on the first turn should be more powerful than one that has to wait until turn 2 or 3 to be useful. Plus honestly - the devastator doctrine is way to powerful to begin with.

Pre-supplements, Space Marines were horribly weak. GW's best seller is Space Marines. People realized how bad Space Marines were and stopped buying them. GW creates and releases Space Marine Supplements which makes Space Marines viable on the battlefield. Space Marines begin selling again.

I'm very confident that the above reasoning was the only motivation for the Space Marine supplements.

SG

If 40k is selling better than ever, and Space Marines are the best selling faction for 40k, how do you reason that Space Marines stopped selling?

If you're deploying 6" back to avoid the Aggressors and your opponent isn't using the other UM strat to redeploy them he's playing them wrong, and you're also giving up objectives.

Also, the Raven Guard version of that trick has a 37" threat range, so there's that too.

I'm not going to try to claim they don't have significant weaknesses, but if you're not building your list to mitigate those weaknesses why are you even using them?

 Saber wrote:
The Space Marine supplements, and the codex, are obnoxious primarily because they add rules upon rules upon rules. They're bad, clumsy game design that force you to reference multiple sources to figure out what your army can do.

It also makes those of us that have been awhile start suspecting there is a new edition coming around.

1. Paperback expansion? *Check
2. Overpowered rules for popular faction? *Check
3. Sloppy rules generation? *Check

Put money on it, we are going to hear about "9th edition" in the next couple months to "fix" the issues in 8th.

I have no doubt about the rumour of a new edition coming next summer being at least somewhat accurate. They won't call it a new edition, but it's what it will be.