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Unless GW fails to properly balance the new weapons with appropriate point costs and/or changes their design paradigm halfway through the edition. In which case it will be 6-12 months of horrid imbalance leading to 6-12 months of merely bad balance leading back to horrid imbalance again. I imagine many people will read that and think 'isn't that how 40k normally operates?' Which gets to the root of the complaint; people believe that these changes will increase lethality and worsen the current balance for no long-term gain. Is that position justified? A lot of different responses there.

BrianDavion wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Is the game balance "totally broken"?

I don't know why people are acting as if this is somehow a unique situation. An army changed, not the fundamentals of the game (that happened at the start of the previous edition).

The only significant thing that happened is that they took the time to update all the same weapons across every army that has them. That's something they would not have done in the past.

When game already had factions that have higher WR than others which now get 100% free buffs(not even paying new points) when damage output for weapons doubles or even more...yeah.

It's not even that weapons got changed. But that they got buffed significantly and stayed same price when the factions were already at the top.

I mean...objectively all the weapons that got changed were ALREADY a major balance issue because they were all almost unfixably terrible. Generic flamers were a meme weapon for new players to waste points on, multimeltas were arguably the worst weapon for the points in the game and were so bad that that crippled any vehicle that HAD to take them, and heavy bolters were mediocre at the absolute best.

So they fixed a significant balance issue at the expense of making sisters way stronger, guard and chaos quite a bit stronger, and marines a bit stronger. It's ultimately a sidegrade at the moment, but with the POTENTIAL to be a superior balance decision considering you no longer have to figure out how to cost a weapon as awful as the old multimeltas without just making it the same price as a regular melta gun.

honestly I see this whole debate as being basicly down to short vs long term thinking. the people against it are worried about their army not being as strong for 6 months to a year or however long it takes to get a new 'dex.
the people defending it understand those concerns but reckongize that in the long term this'll be benifical

Having a new rebalance/ vaugely level playing field at one specific point is a much better idea than updating some now, some in a month, some in six months, some in a year but liekly at the same time as you are updating the first lot again.

 Mr Morden wrote:
Having a new rebalance/ vaugely level playing field at one specific point is a much better idea than updating some now, some in a month, some in six months, some in a year but liekly at the same time as you are updating the first lot again.

But that's how GW always does it. The difference here is that they bothered to update all identical weapons across the other armies that use them rather than just giving the new stats to whomever got the most recent Codex. And, on top of that, they consolidated all* Marines into one book to further limit the spread of different armies having different stats for the same thing.


*Not GK.

Never mind, miss read.

I hate to say this, but:

No one cares about Forge World rules.

Now, obviously, that's not technically true. A lot of people care about the rules for their Forge World minis, but they are such a small group that doing any sort of FAQ for them at this time isn't something GW would consider, especially given that GW aren't in the business of dealing with another group's rules anymore.

Plus, they have their own separate rule compendium coming out that will cover FW units that they themselves wrote, rather than FW.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
they consolidated all* Marines

*Not GK.

** all loyalist marines

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Unless GW fails to properly balance the new weapons with appropriate point costs and/or changes their design paradigm halfway through the edition. In which case it will be 6-12 months of horrid imbalance leading to 6-12 months of merely bad balance leading back to horrid imbalance again. I imagine many people will read that and think 'isn't that how 40k normally operates?' Which gets to the root of the complaint; people believe that these changes will increase lethality and worsen the current balance for no long-term gain. Is that position justified? A lot of different responses there.

As far as specifically the weapon profiles go:

Flamers saw boosts to usability, not lethality. Heavy bolters are only better at killing targets heavy bolters don't necessarily wanna be shooting at, the multimelta finally makes sense at 25pts on vehicles(even if that may lean a bit towards the overly generous side of things). Melta in general was across the board inferior to plasma anyway so it's debatable if the +2 damage is even an increase in lethality at all when everyone not named Sisters of Battle was taking better guns anyway.

The only factions that saw a very significant bump as a result of this are Guard, Chaos, and Sisters. Guard got more powerful sponsons and some of their vehicles with built in mandatory weapons but most of their gains were in flexibility, not in lethality. Same with Chaos who have some optional weapons that are now useful and some vehicles with built in guns that got a power boost.

Sisters were, if we're being honest, a nearly pure CQC army before these changes. Being stuck with meltas, multimeltas, flamers, and heavy bolters as the VAST majority of your weapons meant that the most shooting you saw in sisters lists was Deadley Descent seraphim and MAYBE 2 exorcists. I'm not gonna lie and pretend these aren't HILARIOUSLY powerful boosts to sisters as a shooting army but it's still debatable if this actually represents an increase in lethality. A sisters of battle CQC force is still likely stronger than a sisters shooting army, it's just a little less ridiculous to bring shooting support than it was before when all of their guns were utter, utter, trash. Again, even in the faction that benefits more from these changes than any other it STILL represents more of a boost to FLEXIBILITY and your number of viable options than it does raw increase in output.

TLDR: If you account for the opportunity cost associated with the weapons you're giving up to be able to use the new profiles, the overall increase in lethality is very small and nowhere near as significant as the increase in flexibility.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I hate to say this, but:

No one cares about Forge World rules.

Now, obviously, that's not technically true. A lot of people care about the rules for their Forge World minis, but they are such a small group that doing any sort of FAQ for them at this time isn't something GW would consider, especially given that GW aren't in the business of dealing with another group's rules anymore.

Plus, they have their own separate rule compendium coming out that will cover FW units that they themselves wrote, rather than FW.

Well, that's quite a reaction for a statement that I retracted immediately after making. I don't expect major changes, just the ones for the weapons covered by all the other FAQs: 2D heavy bolters, 2 shot multi-meltas, etc. If fw units have to pay the points for those rules they should get them. And gw cared enough to write FAQs for fw for every big errata so far in 9th.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Well, that's quite a reaction for a statement that I retracted immediately after making.

To be fair, I made it before you retracted it. I thought it would be dishonest to suddenly delete my entire post (especially with the jackals who post here to nickpick every minor detail and split every possible hair they can, looking for every 'gotcha!' moment they can manage to find, no matter how far outside the realms of context and common sense it takes them).

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
I don't expect major changes, just the ones for the weapons covered by all the other FAQs: 2D heavy bolters, 2 shot multi-meltas, etc. If fw units have to pay the points for those rules they should get them. And gw cared enough to write FAQs for fw for every big errata so far in 9th.

Your right about everything except that last part. The reason they don't care now is because, as I said, they're about to release a FW book, and updating someone else's rules moments before releasing that just isn't worth their time.

Remember that there's a real weird relationship between GW proper and FW, and it's not a healthy one.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Well, that's quite a reaction for a statement that I retracted immediately after making.

To be fair, I made it before you retracted it. I thought it would be dishonest to suddenly delete my entire post (especially with the jackals who post here to nickpick every minor detail and split every possible hair they can, looking for every 'gotcha!' moment they can manage to find, no matter how far outside the realms of context and common sense it takes them).

Ok, cool. And dang, you're a fast reader/typer.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
I don't expect major changes, just the ones for the weapons covered by all the other FAQs: 2D heavy bolters, 2 shot multi-meltas, etc. If fw units have to pay the points for those rules they should get them. And gw cared enough to write FAQs for fw for every big errata so far in 9th.

Your right about everything except that last part. The reason they don't care now is because, as I said, they're about to release a FW book, and updating someone else's rules moments before releasing that just isn't worth their time.

Remember that there's a real weird relationship between GW proper and FW, and it's not a healthy one.

I can agree with that, but speculating earlier that the lack of a FAQ for fw meant that the Imperial Armour Compendium was close at hand caused a negative reaction, so I thought I should drop that line of thought. Agreed on the gw/fw relationship.

This wait for the CSM book is going to feel like aeons. Ah well, at least DG are dropping soon