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For most of 8th, I hated that all of the balance changes (Or nearly all of them) came in the form of stacking special rules on top of special rules and lowering point costs of units.

With 9th, I'm actually loving that GW looks much more willing to make proper changes to the stat lines of both units and weapons, making them actually worth their points, more expensive in points but better in rules.

I know many people calls this stat creep, etc... and I can see that reasoning. In my mind, I believe this is the right way to fix the game instead of making it a race to the bottom.

Of course, in my opinion, to make it perfect, alongside buffing the statlines of both models and weapons they should cut a lot of those extra sinergies and bonuses that units receive (like doctrines, the proliferance of rerroll auras, etc...) that make the game more complicated and are extremely difficult to balance.


So, whats your opinion about this? Do you like the stat changes? Would you prefer for stats to remain the same and just make things cheaper, or leave stats and points the same and remove special rules? Or maybe you want everything, etc...!

I’m all for stat changes and fewer special rules. It’s kinda frustrating that we needed a new edition for it but whatever.

Hopefully crisis suits will get a wound bump.

Take a look at warmachine and see how much they liked it. Now unlike pp, GW has a large base that doesn't care about rules but I bet after a year or two of continuous monthly updates people will be burnt out. Constant changes, erratas, and faqs are a massive turn off for me but if that's your thing then you as strong willed as the most hardcore wm player.

I don't care if they're balanced but I don't want less special rules, why fight the bloat at this point.

I like special rules because they make the armies more akin to the lore and different to the others, but I agree that nowadays some armies have a lot of them and it should be arranged.

I like the way GW is taking, but I don't like that this enormous change is made army by army, for me, that only play one Xenos army, 9th edition is not here yet and is not going to be until I get my codex. My hype has fallen down.

 Irkjoe wrote:
Take a look at warmachine and see how much they liked it. Now unlike pp, GW has a large base that doesn't care about rules but I bet after a year or two of continuous monthly updates people will be burnt out. Constant changes, erratas, and faqs are a massive turn off for me but if that's your thing then you as strong willed as the most hardcore wm player.

I don't care if they're balanced but I don't want less special rules, why fight the bloat at this point.

But that has nothing to do with stat changes? I mean, it is nothing new for 9th. In 8th we have had a TON of faqs, chapter approveds, codex, and balance changes. I actually prefer that, but probably because I'm used to videogames and constant balance changes are expected.

My problem is that GW makes you pay for them.

 Denegaar wrote:
I like special rules because they make the armies more akin to the lore and different to the others, but I agree that nowadays some armies have a lot of them and it should be arranged.

I like the way GW is taking, but I don't like that this enormous change is made army by army, for me, that only play one Xenos army, 9th edition is not here yet and is not going to be until I get my codex. My hype has fallen down.

Yeah, that sucks. I play Adeptus Custodes, Tau and Dark Angels, and in 8th I stopped playing Dark Angels and started playing Custodes when marines became OP. Now Custodes are OP so I play Tau But it will suck for most codex to come probably in maybe 1-2 years of facing two wound marines and imperials with buffed weapons. And then, the last batch of codex will face being "obsolete" in less than a year when 10 rolls around.

Updating Codex by Codex can be fine when changes are small, but now is not acceptable. When some armies are hugely updated to play into a practically "new" game, everyone should be on par. At least an Index or something similar.

The idea feels good, the execution is lacking.

Depends how it plays out. Willingness to change what doesn't work is good, but I'm not sure how many babies are going out the window with the bathwater yet.

That said, more should have been done upfront, it a Ravening Hordes booklet. Parceling it out over time is going to suck for everyone in the middle and end of the process.

Me. I just hope they can follow through and rebase the game with light/medium/heavy infantry and everything else in balance.

I think the substantial stat and weapon changes are good for the game and long over due. However if they release stuff in a piecemeal way, it’s going to create even worse imbalance until everyone gets their new codex.

They updated weapons in 8th too when a Codex released, at least for Xenos. I guess we'll see if they're willing to do that in 9th repeatedly or if it's just a big shake up for Imperial and Chaos weaponry that now stays the same up to 10th Edition.

Anybody expecting this edition to have less special rules bloat are deluding themselves.

Boil the frog slowly.

Willingness? Sure, it's nice. Absolutely idiotic, well poisoning rollout of the first change? It was complete

There should be LESS W2 in the game, not more, 90% of the D2 weapons (which in most cases got that stat for gamey, fluff breaking reasons, looking at you IG handheld gatling and GSC banged together colts) should immediately go back to D1, elite, tough infantry should be rare and not as common as chips, and anti-infantry guns shouldn't double up as best vehicle killers in the game. Period.

What will happen with this change is that thanks to stupid D2 proliferation W2 will feel like W1 did before, while rendering armies saddled with W2 garbage due to points costs not taking into account their paper "durability" (it was already case with Primaris against some armies in 8th) while at once rendering armies that didn't get their own round of D2 creep completely pointless because they are rock to W2 paper and can't even really count on D2 scissors not slicing through them too in most cases. Then we will see W2 creep into W3 to "fix" the above incompetency, rinse and repeat.

I don't know, maybe GW can pull this off, but seeing man behind this change is the clown who gutted Codex: DW (which took special skill, given making it garbage 5 times in a row while copy-pasting 95% of the contents took real talent) and a lot more besides in past editions I won't be holding my breath.

I like the idea that they have taken a serious look at the game and decided to make changes to rebalance the game. We just need to hope it is more than a bunch of changes to weapons. The armies need more comprehensive changes to go along with those changes. We have hints that there are such changes coming, but did they go big enough on them?

Problem is that 40k reached the limit of the scope for a D6 game a good few editions ago and fudging the numbers now wont really fix that, and the intent of maintaining interest via dribbling out info nuggets has gone somewhat poorly

Most of the changes so far are great in my opinion. Will come down to points though in the end.

I like it because GW historically leaves statlines alone, even to their own detriment (e.g. models that don't sell because of bad rules), which can leave those units behind the curve and in many cases unusable competitively.

On the other hand, if they nerf your favourite unit when they shake things up, you won't be happy - especially if it wasn't that great beforehand

 Irbis wrote:
Willingness? Sure, it's nice. Absolutely idiotic, well poisoning rollout of the first change? It was complete

There should be LESS W2 in the game, not more, 90% of the D2 weapons (which in most cases got that stat for gamey, fluff breaking reasons, looking at you IG handheld gatling and GSC banged together colts) should immediately go back to D1, elite, tough infantry should be rare and not as common as chips, and anti-infantry guns shouldn't double up as best vehicle killers in the game. Period.

What will happen with this change is that thanks to stupid D2 proliferation W2 will feel like W1 did before, while rendering armies saddled with W2 garbage due to points costs not taking into account their paper "durability" (it was already case with Primaris against some armies in 8th) while at once rendering armies that didn't get their own round of D2 creep completely pointless because they are rock to W2 paper and can't even really count on D2 scissors not slicing through them too in most cases. Then we will see W2 creep into W3 to "fix" the above incompetency, rinse and repeat.

I don't know, maybe GW can pull this off, but seeing man behind this change is the clown who gutted Codex: DW (which took special skill, given making it garbage 5 times in a row while copy-pasting 95% of the contents took real talent) and a lot more besides in past editions I won't be holding my breath.

I'm not sure you appreciate the stratification this allows.

W2 creates a desire for D2, which is less efficient versus W1.

A twin heavy bolter does 1.3 to a T7 3+ for 30 points. A multimelta does 3.1 for 25. A TAC does 1.3 for 40.

Multimelta is clearly the winner. THB in second.

A THB does 2.7 to Primaris. Multimelta is 2.2. TAC is 2.7, but 10 extra points.

THB wins vs W2. MM in second for point efficiency.

And finally I'm sure you could see that the TAC would be the clear winner vs GEQ with THB second.

The other end of this is how armies can field these weapons and the cost of those platforms.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Spoiler:

 Irbis wrote:
Willingness? Sure, it's nice. Absolutely idiotic, well poisoning rollout of the first change? It was complete

There should be LESS W2 in the game, not more, 90% of the D2 weapons (which in most cases got that stat for gamey, fluff breaking reasons, looking at you IG handheld gatling and GSC banged together colts) should immediately go back to D1, elite, tough infantry should be rare and not as common as chips, and anti-infantry guns shouldn't double up as best vehicle killers in the game. Period.

What will happen with this change is that thanks to stupid D2 proliferation W2 will feel like W1 did before, while rendering armies saddled with W2 garbage due to points costs not taking into account their paper "durability" (it was already case with Primaris against some armies in 8th) while at once rendering armies that didn't get their own round of D2 creep completely pointless because they are rock to W2 paper and can't even really count on D2 scissors not slicing through them too in most cases. Then we will see W2 creep into W3 to "fix" the above incompetency, rinse and repeat.

I don't know, maybe GW can pull this off, but seeing man behind this change is the clown who gutted Codex: DW (which took special skill, given making it garbage 5 times in a row while copy-pasting 95% of the contents took real talent) and a lot more besides in past editions I won't be holding my breath.

I'm not sure you appreciate the stratification this allows.

W2 creates a desire for D2, which is less efficient versus W1.

A twin heavy bolter does 1.3 to a T7 3+ for 30 points. A multimelta does 3.1 for 25. A TAC does 1.3 for 40.

Multimelta is clearly the winner. THB in second.

A THB does 2.7 to Primaris. Multimelta is 2.2. TAC is 2.7, but 10 extra points.

THB wins vs W2. MM in second for point efficiency.

And finally I'm sure you could see that the TAC would be the clear winner vs GEQ with THB second.

The other end of this is how armies can field these weapons and the cost of those platforms.

Kind of makes those five heavy bolters on a quad sponson guard super heavy look nice doesn't it? As long as you can keep it away from all that high strength high AP firepower they're adding in.

I like this change. I've been saying for a while that one of the problems with 8th was that they didn't change the stats for older units and weapons to work with the new rules. It looks like they're finally addressing that. Hopefully we'll start seeing anti-tank weapons being used against tanks instead of anti-heavy infantry weapons, which instead will be best against actual heavy infantry. We'll have to see what else they change, things like those guard super heavys will need some help, maybe make them T9. We'll see.

Going to be nice throwing those 2W Chosen and Warp Talons into intercessors too.

Stat inflation doesn't have a good history in wargames. It especially doesn't have a good history when it's done piecemeal, army by army, on a rotation.

If they were going to redo stats, the logical, least problematic thing to do would have been to do it all at once at the start of the edition. Doing it piecemeal has the potential to be an absolute disaster, and at best it will be merely very disruptive.

And let's be clear: this is stat inflation. It isn't a rebalancing. Every single change we've seen so far is inflationary, and their PR spin is also 100% on the "this will be more powerful! that will be more powerful! everything will be more powerful!" inflationary train.

And the idea this is necessary to create a stroner rock-paper-scissors dynamic is odd. The game doesn't need stronger rock-paper-scissors. That just exacerbates skew lists and increases the changes that match-ups are determined by comparing lists rather than by who plays the better game on the table. What 40k did not need was even more emphasis placed on list-building and skewing.

Obviously we need to wait and see how it shakes out. But this has all the hallmarks of a balance disaster. It's the sort of thing that an extremely competent company might be able to pull off. It's not something a company with a track record like GW's is likely to nail.

Ever since they changed the wounding chart and how AP works, it was actually stupid they didn't change anything in 8th. However, this is one of the times I'll give GW praises on taking that risk. HOWEVER, inflating EVERYTHING keeps everything even. Look at D2 Heavy Bolters as a sign of probably having unintended consequences. Personally I'm predicting it to be a baaaaaad move.

Well, for starters Heavy Bolters just got way better against vehicles. Better than Autocannons vs. T8 and about equal vs. T7. That feels weird.

I suppose autocannons could go to 3d. Is there an autocannon sneak peek?

It's funny how people lose their crap for this w2/d2 change. I think it's great that there's a better distinction between humans/superhumans/uberhumans.

Also funny because nobody knows the big picture yet. Vehicles might be getting wound bumps across the board for all we know to make heavy bolters less appealing as anti-tank etc.

What I do agree with is that it's a huge sweeping change and they should errata each faction's statlines at the same time codex Space Marines lands (they might even do this, who knows?) It's unbearable for xenos to be left waiting for their respective codex for who knows how long before being able to compete.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Stat inflation doesn't have a good history in wargames. It especially doesn't have a good history when it's done piecemeal, army by army, on a rotation.

If they were going to redo stats, the logical, least problematic thing to do would have been to do it all at once at the start of the edition. Doing it piecemeal has the potential to be an absolute disaster, and at best it will be merely very disruptive.

And let's be clear: this is stat inflation. It isn't a rebalancing. Every single change we've seen so far is inflationary, and their PR spin is also 100% on the "this will be more powerful! that will be more powerful! everything will be more powerful!" inflationary train.

And the idea this is necessary to create a stroner rock-paper-scissors dynamic is odd. The game doesn't need stronger rock-paper-scissors. That just exacerbates skew lists and increases the changes that match-ups are determined by comparing lists rather than by who plays the better game on the table. What 40k did not need was even more emphasis placed on list-building and skewing.

Obviously we need to wait and see how it shakes out. But this has all the hallmarks of a balance disaster. It's the sort of thing that an extremely competent company might be able to pull off. It's not something a company with a track record like GW's is likely to nail.

It isn't across the board inflation. It also often comes with point increases. To say something is inflation without talking about the other end of it is disingenuous.

It also is not cyclical as your words seem to imply ("on a rotation") or do you think once they're done they'll put marines to 3 wounds?

I don't think it practical for sweeping structural changes out of the gate, because stratagems, wl traits, etc matter. This isn't a clean state like 8th. A lot of prior material exists and pretending they could update everything without breaking several armies is kind of absurd.

 Weazel wrote:
It's funny how people lose their crap for this w2/d2 change. I think it's great that there's a better distinction between humans/superhumans/uberhumans.

Also funny because nobody knows the big picture yet. Vehicles might be getting wound bumps across the board for all we know to make heavy bolters less appealing as anti-tank etc.

What I do agree with is that it's a huge sweeping change and they should errata each faction's statlines at the same time codex Space Marines lands (they might even do this, who knows?) It's unbearable for xenos to be left waiting for their respective codex for who knows how long before being able to compete.

Well, a lot of folks can't play right now, and have a lot of stress in their lives. We'll have to see where the chips fall with xenos.

 Weazel wrote:


Also funny because nobody knows the big picture yet. Vehicles might be getting wound bumps across the board for all we know to make heavy bolters less appealing as anti-tank etc.

We have some leaks for those now and no marine vehicles increased. I think one necron did? Either way - nothing down that avenue.

Still, by virtue of the current weapon costs even IF would find meltas useful. At this point I'm curious about lascannons.

I for one am glad that they've readjusted the baseline. Yes Astartes bumped to 2 differentiates them from reg humans even more, I hope that boys get the bump as well. Warriors being t5 w RP makes them feel like an unyielding menace, I cant wait to see what the do to nids.

I like it, two super factions (Chaos and Imperium) using an incredible amount of the same weapons makes implementation a difficult task, releasing all codexes at the same time was never going to happen I think. At best we could have gone back to the index model and have the Indexes for Chaos, Imperium and Astartes come out at the same time and then have Xenos release either next year or over the course of the next two years. I definitely think 9th was released 6 months early, a beta 9th edition running from Feburary to August would have been a great idea, let a wider pool of players test out the massive list of changes and suggest new ones before sending things to the printers. Did frag missiles need a change perhabs? WIth Devastator Doctrine they are not too bad, but they needed 2 damage a lot more than heavy bolters did, at least it will be more obvious when I tell people why they should use krak against MEQ.

Cynista wrote:
I like it because GW historically leaves statlines alone, even to their own detriment (e.g. models that don't sell because of bad rules), which can leave those units behind the curve and in many cases unusable competitively.

On the other hand, if they nerf your favourite unit when they shake things up, you won't be happy - especially if it wasn't that great beforehand

There are no bad rules, only bad pts. Why spam Infantry Squads when you can spam Warhound Titans? Well, because you cannot spam as many Warhound Titans as you can Infantry Squads. It doesn't matter if a unit has the most amazing rules, perfect for the meta, all the right abilities and stats, if it is twice as expensive as what it is worth it will see little use, that counts for a screening unit with bad stats and a killy unit with amazing stats. Who said that Infantry Squads needed better stats in 8th? So why did multi-meltas and firstborn need it? There are two good answers, either because the unit did not perform in a fluffy manner, Marines turned from punching bags of mid 8th to glass cannons in late 8th and now they're going to become both durable and killy which is more fluffy than making them ever cheaper. The second good answer is because the weapon was not fun to use, your Devastator Marines pops out from a Rhino, gets -1 to hit and makes two hits, 1 wound goes through and does 4 damage. That unit could have been standing in the back and firing lascannons being safer and not suffering the -1 to hit for moving and firing a heavy weapon. Going from Heavy 1 to Heavy 2 seems like too big a change given that 8th suffered a lot with some armies being too killy and I would have preferred multi-meltas being cheaper such that the question wasn't whether to hit on 4+ with AP-4 or 3+ with AP-3 with a lascannon, but instead the question was whether to have a cheaper more aggressive unit or try to protect a more expensive defensive unit. Now multi-meltas will become expensive suicide weapons.

I'll take stats creep over stratagem/doctrine creep any day of the week. About time those stats got a makeover, they've been stagnant for how many decades now?

Don't really care. It's not the first time stats (model or weapons) have changed & it won't be the last. So I'm not concerned with it.

Heavy bolters having D2 is flat out wrong.

The purpose of giving 2W to some armored infantries like old marines is to reduce the spam of mid strenght weapons which are currently good against anything: troops, elites and tanks.

If damage is going up to these kind of weapons, like heavy bolters, they'd be even more common and outlcass the anti tank even more than now.

If wounds on vehicles and mosters are also going up, by a significant percentage, it could have been a good move. But it's not gonna happen, the sad reality is that weapons like heavy bolters will double their effectiveness against vehicles, which is extremely bad game design.