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Is IH stupid or the new normal? My money is on the new normal.

MiguelFelstone wrote:

Less than mid-teir. That's bad. If you haven't seen a SM list top a GT all year, it's bad. This is bad.

How many other Factions were topping GTs last year? There's like, what? A couple dozen or so Factions in the same. Maybe more? And for the most part, you only see the same 3 or 4 Factions "topping" GTs. That would imply that almost everyone is "bad".

Martel732 wrote:
Is IH stupid or the new normal? My money is on the new normal.

Ive seen the leaks for new IG. Looks pretty dang good.

So basically we are gonna have the "have" chapters and the "have not" chapters. And the xenos and such will be tuned to the haves. Wonderful.

 flandarz wrote:

MiguelFelstone wrote:

Less than mid-teir. That's bad. If you haven't seen a SM list top a GT all year, it's bad. This is bad.

How many other Factions were topping GTs last year? There's like, what? A couple dozen or so Factions in the same. Maybe more? And for the most part, you only see the same 3 or 4 Factions "topping" GTs. That would imply that almost everyone is "bad".

If you look at the history of 8th. It's had several different metas.
We had the first meta which was dominated by
Storm raven and character spam armies at index level
choas and imperial soup once armies started getting codex (also pre nerf tyranids)
Then the ynnari spears meta
Then the Castellan meta. (This overlapped with ynnari meta)
Now the Ironhands meta.

Eldar have done really well in every meta - SM have been good in only the last.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 flandarz wrote:

MiguelFelstone wrote:

Less than mid-teir. That's bad. If you haven't seen a SM list top a GT all year, it's bad. This is bad.

How many other Factions were topping GTs last year? There's like, what? A couple dozen or so Factions in the same. Maybe more? And for the most part, you only see the same 3 or 4 Factions "topping" GTs. That would imply that almost everyone is "bad".

If you look at the history of 8th. It's had several different metas.
We had the first meta which was dominated by
Storm raven and character spam armies at index level
choas and imperial soup once armies started getting codex (also pre nerf tyranids)
Then the ynnari spears meta
Then the Castellan meta. (This overlapped with ynnari meta)
Now the Ironhands meta.

Eldar have done really well in every meta - SM have been good in only the last.

Xeno, remind me, which army besides Marines was spamming Stormravens? Because Marines were, according to you, only good in the last of that.

Martel732 wrote:
So basically we are gonna have the "have" chapters and the "have not" chapters. And the xenos and such will be tuned to the haves. Wonderful.

From what I have seen - It's not Ironhands level. Russ commanders got a big buff. Also some of these new custom traits seem to make Infantry in to absolute gods rapid firing at 18"???? Some decent buffs to scions as well. Imagine a whole army of (8points?) scions shooting at ap -3?


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 JNAProductions wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 flandarz wrote:

MiguelFelstone wrote:

Less than mid-teir. That's bad. If you haven't seen a SM list top a GT all year, it's bad. This is bad.

How many other Factions were topping GTs last year? There's like, what? A couple dozen or so Factions in the same. Maybe more? And for the most part, you only see the same 3 or 4 Factions "topping" GTs. That would imply that almost everyone is "bad".

If you look at the history of 8th. It's had several different metas.
We had the first meta which was dominated by
Storm raven and character spam armies at index level
choas and imperial soup once armies started getting codex (also pre nerf tyranids)
Then the ynnari spears meta
Then the Castellan meta. (This overlapped with ynnari meta)
Now the Ironhands meta.

Eldar have done really well in every meta - SM have been good in only the last.

Xeno, remind me, which army besides Marines was spamming Stormravens? Because Marines were, according to you, only good in the last of that.

Forgive me - That was index 40k though and I think a brief period were marines had the only codex with DG and GK. I always look at that with an asterisk.

 Xenomancers wrote:
If you look at the history of 8th. It's had several different metas.
We had the first meta which was dominated by
Storm raven and character spam armies at index level
choas and imperial soup once armies started getting codex (also pre nerf tyranids)
Then the ynnari spears meta
Then the Castellan meta. (This overlapped with ynnari meta)
Now the Ironhands meta.

Eldar have done really well in every meta - SM have been good in only the last.

I agree with all that. What I'm saying is that if the metric for a "bad" Faction is "any Faction that has not topped (or is not topping) the meta", then not only have most of the Factions in the game been "bad" for most if not all of the edition, but Marines are far from the worst Faction in the game as they're currently having their second time in the sun (while some Factions never got a first time).

The 18" Rapid Fire is not for Scions. It's for regular Guard. 18" is their maximum range with their S3 Hellguns. They can extend their range to 24" with a trait, but that only gives them 12" Rapid Fire at AP-2.

Martel732 wrote:
Is IH stupid or the new normal? My money is on the new normal.

Among who?

Not everyone is a bandwagon-jumping meta-chasing list jumper.

I have an Ultramarine army. I don't care if Iron Hands are better. My army is an Ultramarine army.

 Xenomancers wrote:

Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

blaktoof wrote:

 Ishagu wrote:
@MiguelFelstone

Lol you can't omit what I said after that.

The point is the LVO cannot be used to judge the state of the game. No ITC event can.

No one has once said that using the CA missions creates perfect faction equalibrium, but they do show a better level of balance. Yes, Astartes still perform well.

People need to relax about Marines. 6 months of being in top, years of being rock bottom prior to that. The sky isn't falling. Go play chess if you want a perfectly balanced experience right now, and homebrew it so white doesn't always go first lol

In the meantime, 3rd party homebrew rules cannot be used to gauge game balance because they fundamentally alter the game beyond what was designed officially.

People should not relax.

The reasons Marines are OP now goes beyond ain't having a good codex, they got a version of supplement rules that for free, no extra points, no Cp, stack ontop of their already good rules for units from the codex. No faction outside of Marines has gotten that treatment, getting side grades and strange alternative choices with restrictions that give up your normal bonuses is not the same. The reason people shouldn't relax is because at this point in order for GW to make non marine codexes balanced they will have to have layered rules like Marines for free, which is completely different than the normal codex model we have seen. Otherwise it will be like 7th where either your army has a decurion option or it doesn't and that alone decided if you have any chance to be competitive.

That is clearly not the case based on the data. Only some supplements are issues. Perhaps being able to assault turn 1 automatically with assualt cents is an oversite. Perhaps Ironhands super doctrine is absurd...Every army is getting a free supplement atm like eldar and TS...you are literally complaining about the direction of the game.


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MiguelFelstone wrote:

 Ishagu wrote:
@MiguelFelstone

People need to relax about Marines. 6 months of being in top, years of being rock bottom prior to that. The sky isn't falling. Go play chess if you want a perfectly balanced experience right now, and homebrew it so white doesn't always go first lol

The sky isn't falling, the game isn't ruined, but there is a problem, and saying otherwise is

Space Marine players have definitely earned this, i never said otherwise. For years, and years and years they were the joke of the competitive scene. If any faction deserves it - they do, but other factions do need to be brought in line or some of the SM factions need adjustments.

If every SM chapter was as powerful as Ultramarines i doubt we'd even be talking about this.

No we wouldn't. I agree with that. Dakka has an anti SM bias..It is obvious.

Do you actually believe that what non sm factions are getting in pa is equal to what sm got? The internally balanced codex? Nope. Free buffs just for buying a supplement, no cp or points required? Nope.

C:sm is a change in codex design philosophy and until everyone has a codex that follows that philosophy it's not an even playing field.

And someone should tell Martel to copy that ba list in that tournament. Three squads of Sanguinary Guards and in the top ten. Sounds like ba ain't so bad after all.

Do you actually believe marines were at an even starting point? OFC not. The rules they got were a direct fix to the fact that they were terrible. Turns out the doctrines and new strats and such were s perfect fix as it puts an army like ultras/Salamnders/whitescars square in the middle. Just granted by what I have seen from DA - they will also be above the curve. If you can't acknowledge that you are blind. SM were hands down the worst army in the game. BY A LONG SHOT - with the exception of GK (who are basically just marines). You need to get used to marine armies not being a free win for once. Plus - you should really stop referring to the new supplement marines as a whole entity - each supplement is basically a different army just like TS/DG/and CSM are different armies.

Whoa! Back up the hyperbole train. Did sm need some help? Yup sure did. Were they the worst army in the game? Nope. Chaos daemons, gk (who were a separate army, as you point out about other factions), and r&h were fighting over that "honor ". The problem is that gw over corrected. And now everyone else has to play catch up. And yes, ih, rg, and if are stronger than the other chapters. That doesn't make those other chapters "mid tier " compared to other factions. Just other chapters.

As to your post below (I'm not quoting it. This chain is already long enough) yes csm players don't like souping. Or relying on gimmicks like the possessed bomb. Or always playing Alpha Legion because that's our only useful legion trait. But that's the thing. Sm have options other factions don't. Csm rely on gimmicks. Eldar have flyers. Tau triptide.

I've already said this is all due to gw changing design philosophy mid edition and it'll be corrected when we get more new codexes. Till then just accept that sm are top dogs. Stop denying and start enjoying.

And as far as you playing "choas" dude you literally just proved you can't spell it.


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 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Is IH stupid or the new normal? My money is on the new normal.

Among who?

Not everyone is a bandwagon-jumping meta-chasing list jumper.

I have an Ultramarine army. I don't care if Iron Hands are better. My army is an Ultramarine army.

Same. Night Lords or bust. Feth bandwagons.

We should learn to stop talking about "SM". The only SM faction out there is the generic chapter.

UM and IH are 2 different factions, they play with hugely different rules, with hugely different lists, just like DA and BA. While they have some in common, they have different psy powers, different relics, different warlord traits, different stratagems and even some different units.

Saying "IH being OP does not make SM OP" is a correct statement. No one ever said that SW were good because BA had smash captains.

Spoletta wrote:
We should learn to stop talking about "SM". The only SM faction out there is the generic chapter.

UM and IH are 2 different factions, they play with hugely different rules, with hugely different lists, just like DA and BA. While they have some in common, they have different psy powers, different relics, different warlord traits, different stratagems and even some different units.

Saying "IH being OP does not make SM OP" is a correct statement. No one ever said that SW were good because BA had smash captains.

And that's the thing that bothers me the most as a csm player who actually likes to play to the fluff. The different chapters are different. The legions not so much, especially when the cp runs out. I'd love for my Night Lords to be as different from other legions as the loyalist chapters are from each other. But gw apparently has decided csm need to soup.

The problem with how SM were done is that in order to make any other faction balanced versus them the faction has to have layered rules options for free just like SM received.

Putting out another 2.0 codex for any faction that doesn't include that at this point is spraying a squirt gun at the dumpster fire that supplements are for SMs. Yes, a dumpster fire, because actually brining other factions up to that level will increase lethality in 8th to the point that the main deciding factors in a competitive game will be who won the roll to go first. Which is a dumpster fire for a game system.

The best thing GW could do for 40k is make the supplements narrative only rules in an erratta.

Martel732 wrote:
Is IH stupid or the new normal? My money is on the new normal.

Most likely the new norm, which makes me hate 8th even moreso, for over a year i felt 8th had WAY to much power and it should have went the other way, increase point costs and make the MEQ stat viable in general. Sadly GW is a company first and it shows.

it's kind of funny how short people's memories are. Before Codex 2.0 there was thread after thread about how to improve marines, how to make marines feel like they should in the lore. Well, you got what you wished for and then some. Marines are good, as they should be, but I think all of us (well, at least most) want to see them toned down a tad for the overall balance of the game. Not a blanket nerf, that would be bad, just some tweaking.

Iron Hands for starters needs to lose 2 of it's bonuses....one of the original 3 (how about 5+ overwatch) and then remove reroll 1s to hit on heavies. They would still have 6+++, double wounds for vehicle profile and ignore move and fire for heavies in dev doctrine, damn that's better tham most armies get as it is. Why they get 5 I have no idea...just way too much. That would be a good start. Put Chaplain dreads into legends (people aren't buying the FW one anyway), and change the keyword on the Levi dread so it doesn't benefit from the marine strats (someone else's idea).

Ravenguard....change centurions to Monster keyword or vehicle....should not be infantry. What about Aggressors (what I use, can't stand Centurions), also too powerful with Master of Ambush? maybe reword it to be a unit with infantry models of 2 wounds or less?

etc...

Small changes to the overall issue.

 JNAProductions wrote:
So what about wraith-heavy Ulthwe? They were and are pretty bad-does that make Eldar bad?

(Ulthwe is the wraith subfaction, right? I don’t know my eldar super well.)

You're thinking of Iyanden (the Yellow & Blue guys)

Ulthwe is the Black & Yellow & is more known for their Warlocks + Eldrad & Guardian heavy infantry.

 Ishagu wrote:
The LVO doesn't use the official GW mission or terrain rules. It's not the same game, to put it bluntly. It's homebrew 40k.

This data means nothing because it cannot be used to determine the power of factions under the official GW designed missions.

Run the next LVO using the latest official missions and then we can discuss the game balance.

If you want more balance under ITC, simply homebrew the game some more to change faction or unit rules. It's not up to GW to balance a homebrew variant of the game.
The recent tournaments running the official missions from CA19 have generated far more balanced results across factions.

But they do,the Heat results are showing the some issues. There was GW tournament where IH were forced to play vs each other.
And even GW are now using the first floor rule, so your claim is wrong. The assumption that SM can`t build good list in different format is wrong.

The mods should probably lock this thread. It was obvious it wasn’t going to be an actual discussion in the initial post and even on the first page we had multiple, off topic rambling about how ITC is ‘homebrew 40k’ therefore completely irrelevant to any balance discussion.

The usual, staunch Marine defenders are out in force - adding random off topic quips, posturing with each other and using bizarre metrics to justify the current state of the game.

Marines are broken, ladies and gents. And I’m going to use ‘Marines’ here instead of IH, UM or whatever because it’s exactly how we measure every other faction and there are enough varied Marine builds to show a variety of sub factions and builds can compete at the top level. I’ve listened to a number of podcasts that break the numbers down in far more detail than we have in the Goonhammer article. When you remove the mirror match Marine numbers go beyond pre-nerf Ynarri and the Castellan builds. Some marine builds (not IH, by the way) had an average first loss of 3.25 (if they had a 50/50 win rate this would be around 1.25) which is the highest ever recorded. Marines of all flavours score more points than other factions AND deny more, on average. Their first loss is high across the board. Their TWIP is disproportionately huge. If you think a few nerfs to the most common marine sub factions will do anything to change their dominance, I suggest you are wrong. Without drastic changes to all codexes in the game or a rewrite of SM codex 2.0, I don’t see how GW will fix this.

E - sp.

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 Ishagu wrote:
People can talk all they want about the ITC meta as long as that conversation remains in the context of it being a 3rd party homebrew ruleset that GW are not responsible for.

Removed - Rule #1 please

If GW had balanced their game to begin with we wouldn't need ITC or "home brew" rules, how about they don't balance the game for ITC, just balance it for something, anything, i'd be happy with better narrative missions.

Well that was true in 7th ed but as the stats show balance is even worse now in ITC so by continuing to use those house rules ITC is making problem worse. Should you continue to be problem even after you have become the problem?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 bullyboy wrote:
GW should balance 40K for it to stand up in a variety of mission sets. The fact that GW reps usually attend the LVO and take note of how armies perform let's you know about their thoughts regarding balance and ITC.

The problem is bloat tbh. You have lot of different factions with hundreds of datasheets. You then add on FW datasheets/rules, campaign supplements with additional rules, etc, and the whole thing just goes off the rails. They are always chasing balance but will never keep up. There will always be something broken. It was Ynnari, then Castellan/soup, Chaos soup interaction, now marines.

You then have to address what is broken. I have a Ravenguard force, is my army broken if I don't take a single Centurion in my army and rely mostly on vanguard marines? So should Ravenguard get a full nerf, or just elements that make it OP? Same with IH, same with Imp Fists.

GW right now are just spinning plates, but overall, the game is in a pretty decent state. It looks bad right now because the most popular faction is also now the most pwerful....that's going to make results really skewed. If harlequins were the best army, you wouldn't see it dominate too much because they are not highly collected.

Except when you radically change mission you can't have lists that are balanced for every. You cannot make codexes that are balanced for both CA and ITC. You can pick up one and do it for that. For other it's pure random luck.

Should GW balance game for their missions or house rule ones?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Ishagu wrote:

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 Ishagu wrote:
People can talk all they want about the ITC meta as long as that conversation remains in the context of it being a 3rd party homebrew ruleset that GW are not responsible for.

Who the does this guy think he is? Buddy, you are not the arbiter of what can and can't be discussed.

If GW had balanced their game to begin with we wouldn't need ITC or "home brew" rules, how about they don't balance the game for ITC, just balance it for something, anything, i'd be happy with better narrative missions.

GW have balanced the game now.

We did need ITC rules. We no longer do.

If you want to remain in a 3rd party, unofficial, home-brew meta you go right ahead. Just don't complain about the game balance or the official rules. You aren't using them!

I agree that the ca2019 missions are far superior to ITC. But if you actually think the game is balanced with stuff like iron hands running around you may need drug counseling.

Crack kills.

It's more balanced than ITC "if you aren't marines don't bother trying to win" compared to CA "marines still do good but at least there's more non-marines at the top and even top-4 non marine is possibility".

Nobody claims CA is perfect. But it's more balanced than ITC.

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
The mods should probably lock this thread. It was obvious it wasn’t going to be an actual discussion in the initial post and even on the first page we had multiple, off topic rambling about how ITC is ‘homebrew 40k’ therefore completely irrelevant to any balance discussion.

The usual, staunch Marine defenders are out in force - adding random off topic quips, posturing with each other and using bizarre metrics to justify the current state of the game.

Marines are broken, ladies and gents. And I’m going to use ‘Marines’ here instead of IH, UM or whatever because it’s exactly how we measure every other faction and there are enough varied Marine builds to show a variety of sings Fiona and builds can compete at the top level. I’ve listened to a number of podcasts that break the numbers down in far more detail than we have in the Goonhammer article. When you remove the mirror match Marine numbers go beyond pre-nerf Ynarri and the Castellan builds. Some marine builds (not IH, by the way) had an average first loss of 3.25 (if they had a 50/50 win rate this would be around 1.25) which is the highest ever recorded. Marines of all flavours score more points than other factions AND deny more, on average. Their first loss is high across the board. Their TWIP is disproportionately huge. If you think a few nerfs to the most common marine sub factions will do anything to change their dominance, I suggest you are wrong. Without drastic changes to all codexes in the game or a rewrite of SM codex 2.0, I don’t see how GW will fix this.

Some factions are officially at 2.0 allready so tough luck and secondly why fix what ain't broken, remember, they sell books just as much then models.

Not Online!!! wrote:
Some factions are officially at 2.0 allready so tough luck and secondly why fix what ain't broken, remember, they. Dell books just as much then models.

Who, apart from SM, have had an entire Codex rewrite recently? Sisters I guess as I write this. But apart from them??

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
The mods should probably lock this thread. It was obvious it wasn’t going to be an actual discussion in the initial post and even on the first page we had multiple, off topic rambling about how ITC is ‘homebrew 40k’ therefore completely irrelevant to any balance discussion.

The usual, staunch Marine defenders are out in force - adding random off topic quips, posturing with each other and using bizarre metrics to justify the current state of the game.

Marines are broken, ladies and gents. And I’m going to use ‘Marines’ here instead of IH, UM or whatever because it’s exactly how we measure every other faction and there are enough varied Marine builds to show a variety of sings Fiona and builds can compete at the top level. I’ve listened to a number of podcasts that break the numbers down in far more detail than we have in the Goonhammer article. When you remove the mirror match Marine numbers go beyond pre-nerf Ynarri and the Castellan builds. Some marine builds (not IH, by the way) had an average first loss of 3.25 (if they had a 50/50 win rate this would be around 1.25) which is the highest ever recorded. Marines of all flavours score more points than other factions AND deny more, on average. Their first loss is high across the board. Their TWIP is disproportionately huge. If you think a few nerfs to the most common marine sub factions will do anything to change their dominance, I suggest you are wrong. Without drastic changes to all codexes in the game or a rewrite of SM codex 2.0, I don’t see how GW will fix this.

Marines are overly good yes but nowhere near as bad as ITC makes it out to be.

Win rate of about 60% in relevant data(non-ITC) isn't world ending.

ITC data is irrelevant and if you balance game around ITC then in the relevant meta(non ITC) game is suddenly totally broken. That's just simple fact

If you use ITC data as arqument you have already lost the arqument. Back it up with some REAL data

Only SM and SoB are 2.0 compliant. Then you have CSM at 1.5 technically.

2.0 is usually indicated by an army ability that rewards a pure faction army. So far only SM and SoB have that.

tneva82 wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
The mods should probably lock this thread. It was obvious it wasn’t going to be an actual discussion in the initial post and even on the first page we had multiple, off topic rambling about how ITC is ‘homebrew 40k’ therefore completely irrelevant to any balance discussion.

The usual, staunch Marine defenders are out in force - adding random off topic quips, posturing with each other and using bizarre metrics to justify the current state of the game.

Marines are broken, ladies and gents. And I’m going to use ‘Marines’ here instead of IH, UM or whatever because it’s exactly how we measure every other faction and there are enough varied Marine builds to show a variety of sings Fiona and builds can compete at the top level. I’ve listened to a number of podcasts that break the numbers down in far more detail than we have in the Goonhammer article. When you remove the mirror match Marine numbers go beyond pre-nerf Ynarri and the Castellan builds. Some marine builds (not IH, by the way) had an average first loss of 3.25 (if they had a 50/50 win rate this would be around 1.25) which is the highest ever recorded. Marines of all flavours score more points than other factions AND deny more, on average. Their first loss is high across the board. Their TWIP is disproportionately huge. If you think a few nerfs to the most common marine sub factions will do anything to change their dominance, I suggest you are wrong. Without drastic changes to all codexes in the game or a rewrite of SM codex 2.0, I don’t see how GW will fix this.

Marines are overly good yes but nowhere near as bad as ITC makes it out to be.

Win rate of about 60% in relevant data(non-ITC) isn't world ending.

ITC data is irrelevant and if you balance game around ITC then in the relevant meta(non ITC) game is suddenly totally broken. That's just simple fact

If you use ITC data as arqument you have already lost the arqument. Back it up with some REAL data

Stop derailing the thread with this off topic rubbish of the legitimacy of ITC events.

"ITC is irrelevant" is probably one of the most stupid things I've ever heard considering it's the fastest growing competitive format that seems to have (as far as all data shows) the largest competitive playerbase.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Eldarsif wrote:
Only SM and SoB are 2.0 compliant. Then you have CSM at 1.5 technically.

2.0 is usually indicated by an army ability that rewards a pure faction army. So far only SM and SoB have that.

To be fair, I don't think Sisters had a codex 1.0, only a beta codex right?

The pure faction army ability indication is something that we as a community have created, it's not something GW have ever stated AFAIK.

Time for a friendly, fiery red reminder. Being polite is not an optional extra, it is a rule. Abide by it.
Thanks,
ingtær.

The Salt Mine wrote:

 Ishagu wrote:
Look up the Caledonian and the recent GW tournament, and the one prior.

Are you talking about https://tabletop.to/caledonian-uprising-2020? Not sure if this is the one but I don't think it proves what you think it proves since 4 out of the top 8 were some form of space marine. 9 out of the top 16 were space marines. I mean one of the top 16 was an imperial list with a solid space marine detachment as well so you could probably say 10 out of the top 16 had space marines in them. Props to the tzeentch guy who won though Id have like to seen some of his games to see how he uses it.

About half of the top lists have marines although they did not win, from about 1/3 of the entries which had marines. This is a fairly normal level of imbalance in the game after a really big codex drop that is actually good - we see this level of imbalance all the time and it usually levels out with further releases.

That is different to the LVO which had 75% marines at the top and marines winning. That is beginning to be a rather exceptional level of imbalance and we have seen that in ITC format tournaments for at least a month running into the LVO. The thing is that if you try to balance to fix the LVO/ITC then you would probably overcompensate for games played with missions that GW publishes. We all agree that marines are very strong right now but the level of imbalance we see in ITC is not seen elsewhere and that is consistent enough that really the ITC need to balance their missions first before any data coming out of ITC should be taken very seriously when talking about balance of the game itself.

I fear, your discussion completely misses the point here (and to be honest, that happens in most of the similar topics).

The LVO uses ITC Rules?
Wether those rules are house rules or not, isn't the point that should be discussed here, but what we can read out of the data, the LVO gave us. Maybe some of the users here play ITC regularly / occasionally, so let them talk about it.

Could you please stop the almost omnipresent ranting about the usage of that ruleset?
We had loads of threads, that revolved around the influence ITC is taking on GWs balancing, but that's not the question OP is trying to talk about...

edit: sorry, if my reaction came a bit late or almost out of context....

Nibbler wrote:

Could you please stop the almost omnipresent ranting about the usage of that ruleset?
We had loads of threads, that revolved around the influence ITC is taking on GWs balancing, but that's not the question OP is trying to talk about...

edit: sorry, if my reaction came a bit late or almost out of context....

I do agree, this thread is about the LVO which uses ITC There is currently a thread that is arguing is against the ITC ruleset/format so that discussion can take place there rather than here.

 Ishagu wrote:
@Martel

Lol that's utter rubbish. They have access to the exact same re roll auras and the same ranged units, with a few exceptions.

Do you even play BA?

We actually dont. We do not have access to the Faith and Fury upgrades, CM stratagem or any good relics/WL traits/psychic powers to help shooting units. So our character support for ranged units are much worse than the other marine chapters. We can get reroll 1s to hit and wound but thats about it unless we start spending lots of points on named melee characters that are mainly for buffing melee units to help out our ranged units.

We do not have Thunderfire Cannons, centurions or chaplain dreads which are 3 of the best ranged units in the marine book.

But what is the largest downside is that none of our chapter tactics, doctrine and stratagems buff ranged unit and we have lack luster character support for ranged combined with the lack of the 3 best ranged units make our shooting half or less than half as effective as IH/IF/Successors.

An IF whirlwind will have +1 ap and ignore cover always and do twice the damage to vehicles and since artillery is good with IF you will probably have many of them and thus have support characters nearby to buff them even further. Those IF whirlwinds will against most enemy units be twice or more as effective as the same BA whirlwind.. If comparing a IH/IF TFC to a BA whirlwind then its just a bad joke especially if you take in to account the double shooting and tremor shells that normal marines have that BA lack. If I could get a IF or IH TFC in my BA list I wouldnt mind paying at least a 120pts for it, maybe even up to a 150pts.

We might have mostly the same units but as with most SM units it not the base units themselves that are broken or people complain about. The SM 2.0 book without supplements are fine. Its just when you add all the extra rules that make them so damn good. BA also adds a lot of rules to the base units but its 99% melee rules and those do nothing for shooting.

When you add +1 ap to everything(BA cant build well around a single doctrine unlike IH/IF), get good and cheap rerolls to everything, have more effective base units, chapter tactics/doctrines that buff even more, some stratagems and additional character support you arent really comparing the same units. It isnt apples to apples any longer. Its like comparing wild tiny ponies before human started to breed them and the largest most powerful horses we have now. They started the same once but they arent really any longer.