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As the title says I am certain that most people hate marines right now simply because they are GW’s main cash cow. I’d argue their rules were too good pre-9th codex, but right now people are complaining mainly because marines get disproportionate amount of release and are Omni-present in play groups. How am I certain of this? Codex deathguard.

To put it bluntly this codex is insanely OP, yet next to no one is talking about this fact. On this forum right now the main discussion surrounding the codex comes from GW stripping away deathguard options. While an important conversation that 40k consumers need to have, this is the type of board that is normally extremely first to cry “OP” instead. In fact outside of Mortarion, few have even mentioned how powerful deathguard units are. Our terminators have T5, -1 D, and a 4++, and pay little for these insane defenses as a quick example of this fact.,Yet, I have not seen a thread complaining about them.

Remember when eradicators where previewed? It was non-stop complaining thread after thread. Heck even when outrider bikes got previewed people were aghast that space marines could get a 4w, T5, bike with 6 attacks. And their only 45 points to!? How can any army compete against the terror of outrider bikes?!

Yes marines where extremely OP with the 2.0 release, but that codex is gone. So why are people still complaining about marines then? As the title suggests simply because they are the golden goose that gets showered with releases and is played by everyone. This makes marines an ideal target for...

A- Salty veterans who are tired of seeing marines get updated instead of their own army.

B) People who are forced to play marines in most of their games.

C) Casuals/new players who naturally get beaten by their friends marines because marines are a noob crusher army.

D) People who barely/never play, but enjoy complaining about 40k and therefore need a scapegoat to get triggered by.

The problem with all these viewpoints is all are biased against judging marines power level fairly. It gets especially bad once you start mixing them together. But for those of us who a want a balanced and fun 40k, these kind of viewpoints simply muddy the water and therefore hinder useful changes.

So are marines unfairly judged based on GW’s treatment of them, or am I wrong and they are as OP as dakka suggests?

Salt donkey wrote:

So are marines unfairly judged based on GW’s treatment of them, or am I wrong and they are as OP as dakka suggests?

Probably both. Marines were "Cans" well before they were considered OP, so there definitely is some general resentment towards them among the playerbase. Their stuff becoming OP is just another contributing factor that is valid on its own right.

When Marines are OP, it does impact the game more heavily since they make up more than 50% of the playerbase. So you are way more likely to end up playing against them.

I mean I don't think anyone is arguing that it is for any other reason than that. People are just sick of Marines for various reasons, and this can lead to resentment.

I used to feel like that. I don't any more, I don't care and don't follow the marine releases or anything any more.

While I personally perceive the new DG codex to be very strong, I'd like to see how the meta settles first before coming to a conclusion.

Regardless of what people might say, not everything can be derived from datasheets alone.

As for the actual question:
I do think Marines are suspect to more flakk from posters because you are confronted with them constantly when doing anything related to 40k. A completely busted faction that never makes news and that is only played by that one guy who shows up to your FLGS every other year would not generate the same responses.

OP: First off, your username is amazing. lol

So, there are a ton of things we don't know about DG yet, and yes, even when people were screaming about Eradicators, there were plenty of folks saying "Hey - how 'bout we wait until the book actually comes out". On top of that, if you haven't seen people complaining about DG being "op" you haven't been in many threads lately. Here's one of my favorites:

I'm sorry, anyone complaining about the "fairness" in the current state of Deathguard can F right off. They are seriously broken, and worse than Eradicators. Right now you need titan level shooting to remove Morty, and their Terminators basically require Eradicator level shooting to move off an objective. Now if you are complaining that your models you assembled back in 7th are no longer legal or legit, tough titty. I'm sorry, but rules change, and because you built an army over 10 years ago does not entitle you to special rules on top of an already broken ruleset. Funny thing is, I know exactly what you mean by this, My entire GK line was invalidated by 8th rules. But I don't care, time to roll up and paint a new faction. Please, go play another faction. One less DG player will make everyone happier right now.

And if I had a dime for every time in the last few days, a "Mortarion is OP" complaint popped up in a thread that had noting at all to do with anything related to him or DG, I'd be rich. So, I think we can safely put the "no one is talking about this" thing to rest. Because that is, frankly, nonsense.

As to why it's not as bad as the marines got? Well, if, in 18 months from now, we have been subjected to almost constant Death Guard releases, with more than one being OP, and if, in that same time, we see other armies thrust into a fairly deep disinvestment cycle, well, then you likely WILL see DG start to get it as bad as Marines have. That said, it seems to me like the Marine Hate has died down quite a bit lately.

Popularity does affect how any new rules are received, especially when they're very powerful. I'm not sure it's some sort of anti-marine bias so much as it's just people reflecting on their own experiences. When SM are really powerful or broken you're almost guaranteed to feel the effects because almost every group of gamers will have a SM player among them. If the current broken army is Harlequins you don't get the same exposure and therefore you don't get the same amount of criticism.

Much of the complaining is also about the number of new models SM get and that seems entirely justified. IIRC, DG have received a new character model and a new piece of terrain with their new book. SM, despite already having by far the largest range of any army in the game, got many times more new models with their latest Codex release. That tends to annoy people who play other armies, especially when some of their models haven't been updated in well over a decade.

It's also worth noting that the DG Codex isn't even out yet. Yes, we have previews and some YT battle reports. I've seen a fair amount of criticism of the balance of the new Codex but given the lack of games happening right now it may take a little while before we see a large amount of criticism of the DG Codex.

I'll be optimistic and say that maybe, after making many mistakes in the past by jumping in and claiming units/armies were definitely going to be OP before the release, only to find out that those units/armies weren't that broken at all and may just have been pretty strong (example: Nightbringer), people might possibly have started to look at it with a "wait and see" attitude. As folks mentioned, the codex isn't even out yet, and reading about things in the book and seeing them on the table sometimes don't work out exactly the same.

People complain less about DG because, unlike marines, theyre not played by 50% of the playerbase so the odds of playing against them are lower.

People complain less about DG because, unlike marines, theyre not played by 50% of the playerbase so the odds of playing against them are lower.

And again - it's the time thing. It's how long the release cycle lasted for marines. You didn't actually see the kind of complaints at the launch of 2.0 that you saw around Eradicators because the following year + hadn't happened yet. Again, if we now see DG releases on an almost monthly basis through the beginning of 2022, I bet the tone changes and we see the exact same amount of complaints.

Folks have always complained about Space Marines, for being the poster boys of 40k, and getting all the attention. This has always been the case. It's one of the Pillars of the hobby.

Collecting
Building
Painting
Playing
Complaining (About Space Marines)

Tycho wrote:
That said, it seems to me like the Marine Hate has died down quite a bit lately.

That's only because people paused to rant about Plague Marines for a moment.

Its hard to weigh *toughness* without experience. Whereas anyone could look at Eradicators compared with similar units (sorry Fire Dragons) across the game and cry foul at the obvious discrepancy. Just as we can still do so with Multimeltas and say those poor unfortunates condemned forever to carry now faintly comical lascannons or missile launchers instead.

By contrast, while I think Blightlords will be very solid, if you were to compare them to say White Scars Bladeguard I'm not sure you'd come away thinking they are madly out of whack. They are tougher and have better shooting - but the Bladeguard have more and better attacks, aside from the probably obligatory flail guy. The Bladeguard are also quite a bit faster due to advance and charge, and more flexible with fall back and charge. (Other buffs are available.)

In a similar vein, I think Deathshroud are reasonable too - but at 50 points, you are starting to get reasonably pricy for those wounds, even with T5/2+/4++/DR.

Then you can wonder through the DG vehicles and its hard to really get a feel for what is and isn't right. The Blight Hauler for example seems to suffer for being the first model in the game to pay the proper points for the new MM. Bloat Drones are also quite expensive given their relative toothlessness. Synergies with flash outbreak etc have been mooted and may be true, but it doesn't scream OP.

Plagueburst Crawlers do look very good - and I think if you aren't taking Mortarion, its very hard to see why you wouldn't bring 3. (You could do as well, but thats half your army gone which... makes me a little uncomfortable.) At 175 points with the Entropies it *feels* significantly better than the Gladiator Tanks. But then everyone said they were overcosted and unplayable due the MM meta Marines have themselves unleashed.

Even Mortarion I think will have to do some work to justify his spot given he's unlikely to do much on turn 1 if you go first. My concern there is that it's meta warping - there are armies, quite reasonably designed I think, who have no prospect of killing him (given he's functionally like a Knight with 50 wounds) beyond blazing away for 3 turns. In which time the DG player should easily have disposed of you. So if he becomes integral to the tournament game (were tournaments to become a thing again), lists will have to change. Which - as was the case with the Castellan before - I dislike.

In fact my biggest fear of the DG twist to the meta, is that Plasma and other D2 weapons is now conclusively out, and we must all hail our undercosted MM equivelents. Which none of my armies yet have*. Sad face.

*Waiting on my 2 shot flat damage 4 Dark Lances, come on GW, you know it makes sense.

That's only because people paused to rant about Plague Marines for a moment.

But ... according to the OP no one is doing that .... lol/jk

As far as the "it has always been this way, everyone always hates on marines", that's not been my experience. People hated on Ultras in a joking way during the years when "Roboute Guiiliman was every marine's spiritual liege", and people disliked certain things at certain times (like Gladius in 7th for example), but I don't think I've ever seen a general, blanket marine hate until we sat through 12-18 months of marines on marines because marines and marines! I still maintain most of the recent issues stem from starting out with Iron Hands cheese leading into how long their release cycle has been imo. Without all that time, I don't think you get that much "hate".

Also, to a lesser extent, when marines could win with their eyes closed and were an almost legendary "easy button" there were far too many marine players saying "they're fine, you're just a hater"

I think a lot of it is just hyperbole that eventually snowballs online. I've already seen discussions about how Mortation is now impossible to kill (from a Custodes group ironically), but from my experience, this hyperbole builds up and up and dissipates very quickly once the Codex is out. I saw massive rages when the Castellan went up in points, and equally massive rages when the next go-to unit the Poryphion went up a bit. I suspect once it's out and people have had a good chance to digest its contents and play a few games (assuming we can in the short-term), it'll likely die out soon as well.

The Marine Codex does seem OP in some regions, I'm more annoyed about the unnecessity of a lot of it. Did we really need a whole new Melta weapon for the Primaris Speeder? Were we so lacking in bolt weapons we needed another one for the Gladius Reaper? I didn't realise our infantry firepower was lacking enough to warrant Heavy Intercessors. They do seem like unnecessary toys and gimmicks that GW have given their poster-children, and the effort could have gone towards upgrades for other, more-necessary armies.

I've played Marines since 4th Edition and my overall feeling is while I can deal with the OP-feeling the Codex gives, it'll balance out quickly enough when the other Codexes are released, as for now my Marines have been shelved as I've gone off them a bit.

as for now my Marines have been shelved as I've gone off them a bit.

That's interesting. I shelved mine at a certain point in 8th. Recently, I've been toying with getting them back off the shelf as I haven't been enjoying the new Necron codex as much as I thought I would. What would it take for you to pick your marines back up again?

Tycho wrote:

as for now my Marines have been shelved as I've gone off them a bit.

That's interesting. I shelved mine at a certain point in 8th. Recently, I've been toying with getting them back off the shelf as I haven't been enjoying the new Necron codex as much as I thought I would. What would it take for you to pick your marines back up again?

I just think they are a bit of an easy win option at the moment. I think Eradicators do personify the redundancy of a lot of the new Marine stuff. They're T5 3W, Melta weapons with Bolter ranges and the ability to double-tap, and all for 45pts. Same with the Heavy Intercessors, T5 3W for some reason, and they've just taken the Primaris bolter stats and added an extra bit of range and Ap to it. These more recent Primaris releases are just fixing problems that didn't exist, and I feel myself and my opponent would have a more enjoyable experience without them.

My main hope for the recent releases was GW to release a PDF errata updating the other power armour forces to match the Marines

ie; Chaos Space Marines, Chaos Havocs, Khorne Berzerkers: Change this units Wounds characteristics to 2, and so on...

At least this would level out the playing field a little until the full Codexes are released.

 Da Boss wrote:
When Marines are OP, it does impact the game more heavily since they make up more than 50% of the playerbase. So you are way more likely to end up playing against them.

I mean I don't think anyone is arguing that it is for any other reason than that. People are just sick of Marines for various reasons, and this can lead to resentment.

I used to feel like that. I don't any more, I don't care and don't follow the marine releases or anything any more.

But doesn't that automaticly means that, if marines are good with various way to play, like we have it right now, there are more people in the game who are haivng fun. no idea what % of gamers the soup castellan or inari players make up in the game, But I have my doubts if it is anything even comperable to the number of marine players. And by marines players, I mean people that have a marine army as their main or only army, not people who once had bought a marine army and have not played it in 3 editions.

It is as if people playing non marines were full okey, if they have fun and their armies are good, but were totaly against others having fun at their cost. Which is again really funny to me, considering all that talk how winning is unimportant and how the hobby is the core of everything. But IH having a win rate % highe rthen eldar makes eldar players lose their minds online, with claims of GW killing the game etc

For sure, you make a good point - the marine players might be having a great time being powerful, and in a strictly utilitarian view, that might be good.

 Valkyrie wrote:


I just think they are a bit of an easy win option at the moment. I think Eradicators.

I don't really get the eradictor over focus. Sure they are a good unit, but MM attack bikes are faster and more point efficient. Cheaper and easier to buy too, specialy in those places where Indominatus was delivered in large enough numbers for people to field them.

But lets say spring FAQ kills eradictors. What then? nerf MM attack bikes too, and how will marines deal with DG rules style armies in 9th then. Or is it just nerf the heck out of marines now, so that when other people books come out, they are even more powerful vs marines, because with how how fast GW operates, the rules for the non marines armies would have been tested and optimised to deal with the non nerfed versions of marines.

Subject: Re:Let’s be real here, space marines receive a disproportionate amount of hate simply for being popular

I'd say it's proportionate to the amount of people who play them

Karol wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
When Marines are OP, it does impact the game more heavily since they make up more than 50% of the playerbase. So you are way more likely to end up playing against them.

I mean I don't think anyone is arguing that it is for any other reason than that. People are just sick of Marines for various reasons, and this can lead to resentment.

I used to feel like that. I don't any more, I don't care and don't follow the marine releases or anything any more.

But doesn't that automaticly means that, if marines are good with various way to play, like we have it right now, there are more people in the game who are haivng fun. no idea what % of gamers the soup castellan or inari players make up in the game, But I have my doubts if it is anything even comperable to the number of marine players. And by marines players, I mean people that have a marine army as their main or only army, not people who once had bought a marine army and have not played it in 3 editions.

It is as if people playing non marines were full okey, if they have fun and their armies are good, but were totaly against others having fun at their cost. Which is again really funny to me, considering all that talk how winning is unimportant and how the hobby is the core of everything. But IH having a win rate % highe rthen eldar makes eldar players lose their minds online, with claims of GW killing the game etc

Marine players i know were still having fun before they became OP with the codex 2.0. They weren't trash-tier even then.
The thing is that when 50% of the playerbase plays marines, that means at least 50% have to play against them and endure a stronger codex.
Castellan meta and Ynnari (not "inari", please learn how to spell it) meta didnt have 50% playrate, so you had less people stuck playing against unfun armies than you have now.
Plus, the fun from the new SM codex doesnt come from its power, it comes from the fact that every chapter is clearly distinct from one another and you feel it on the tabletop, reigning in the outliers with a nerf (like the eradicators got) would still make the codex fun to play, but now it would also be fun to play against.

the second part of your comment seems to assume you can only have fun if your army is OP, thats just false and a gakky way of approaching the game.

So pretty much everyone here just agreed to the OP that people hate on SM because its a popular army ("makes up for 50% of player base"), and not because it's actually overpowered faction.

No, I think the argument is that a big faction that is OP will get more hate than a small faction that is OP.

 Da Boss wrote:
For sure, you make a good point - the marine players might be having a great time being powerful, and in a strictly utilitarian view, that might be good.

I had, probably my only person close to a friend, quit w40k because he was bullied for playing IH in 8th. And he started to play IH at the very start of 8th, just like. Had not bought any recasts leviathans, no FW stuff, no chaplain dreads or primaris tanks. Just two halfs of a DI and 2 primaris dreads. No one had problems rolling over him with their armies till 2.0. 2.0 started and suddenly it became socialy unacceptable to play against him. I found this attrocious, specialy coming from people that played really top armies like a week or two before. Even worse I then noticed that the same was happning here and on other forums. All the say no to people playing IH, really opened my eyes to the whole play what you like and we care about hobby, and not win things. Till then I thought I was strange, playing in a place where w40k is played in a wierd, maybe even wrong way, after I realised that the differences are minimal, and mostly monetary.

And in the end it wasn't even a bad thing to know that. I stopped to think about balance. I just want my stuff to be good and fun to play, and even with all the bad and unfun things in 9th, it is still way better then 8th ed. In fact if I started the game now, with the same army and and same money cost, I probably would have saved myself a lot of headache and visits to the doctor.

Karol wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
For sure, you make a good point - the marine players might be having a great time being powerful, and in a strictly utilitarian view, that might be good.

I had, probably my only person close to a friend, quit w40k because he was bullied for playing IH in 8th. And he started to play IH at the very start of 8th, just like. Had not bought any recasts leviathans, no FW stuff, no chaplain dreads or primaris tanks. Just two halfs of a DI and 2 primaris dreads. No one had problems rolling over him with their armies till 2.0. 2.0 started and suddenly it became socialy unacceptable to play against him. I found this attrocious, specialy coming from people that played really top armies like a week or two before. Even worse I then noticed that the same was happning here and on other forums. All the say no to people playing IH, really opened my eyes to the whole play what you like and we care about hobby, and not win things. Till then I thought I was strange, playing in a place where w40k is played in a wierd, maybe even wrong way, after I realised that the differences are minimal, and mostly monetary.

And in the end it wasn't even a bad thing to know that. I stopped to think about balance. I just want my stuff to be good and fun to play, and even with all the bad and unfun things in 9th, it is still way better then 8th ed. In fact if I started the game now, with the same army and and same money cost, I probably would have saved myself a lot of headache and visits to the doctor.

yeah but your gaming group is fething stupid and toxic, for the rest of the world, thats not how people behave.

No, I think the argument is that a big faction that is OP will get more hate than a small faction that is OP.

Agree, but with the caveat that it also has to do with how long it's been happening. I would actually argue that if marines were weak to middling, people would still be super annoyed to watch the marine release train roll on endlessly for well over a year while armies like DE have only lost models since 5th ed ... As a marine player - I don't need 36 different versions of the same data sheet. As a marine player, I don't really feel like it was necessary to to give us d2 weapons on 3w TROOP models just in time for CSM to get 2 wounds ... there's just a lot that gets galling after a while. I mean, if GW says you are stuck with what's in the box for Blightlords, than surely this will also apply to Devastators right? Nope. Not so far. Now multiply that by what feels like an eternity and there's the frustration.

It also doesn't help that when this gets pointed out, there's always a few people who say "Hey! Mechanicus got a release in there, and you Xenos got Necrons so quit complaining"

Naturally, it's possible that COVID just utterly wrecked everything with the release and manufacturing schedule, so it's possible they could only release for one line and they went with the one that would make the most money. Fair enough imo. It doesn't change everything that was already happening well before COVID ...

 Da Boss wrote:
No, I think the argument is that a big faction that is OP will get more hate than a small faction that is OP.

You don't think SM is gauged to be more OP than it actually is because its a big faction? I think there is an undeniable bias against SM simply because you are exposed to it more often than others.

Ok, so the ravenguard shenanigans pre-nerf was pretty silly, but this was largely due to how the game was structured at the beginning of 8th ed and how ravenguard rules interacted with the rule. Apart from that, there has been some highly competitive lists, but nothing gaming breaking.

We did have a few broken UNITS, but the entire faction? that's a bit of a hard sell if you ask me. You know what WAS game breaking? FW LeviDread. But its a single unit, wombocombo'ed into oblivion. Another one? BA smash captain, but again, single unit, wombocombo'ed into oblivion. The faction as a whole was never "OP" no matter how you spin it.

The only time any SM flavor of the month was TRULY OP was back in 5th ed with GK and wound allocation. You literally couldn't kill them.

What is OP in your opinion then?

We did have a few broken UNITS, but the entire faction? that's a bit of a hard sell if you ask me. You know what WAS game breaking? FW LeviDread. But its a single unit, wombocombo'ed into oblivion. Another one? BA smash captain, but again, single unit, wombocombo'ed into oblivion. The faction as a whole was never "OP" no matter how you spin it.

The issue though, is that it's super easy to say "One or two things may have been OP but not EVERYTHING", and then forget how good a lot of our base stuff actually is. Marines 2.0 was op at every level. It was like bringing an NBA team in to beat up on the local highschool team. I shelved my marines because of this. EVen the weak stuff was just so much better than what almost everyone else had.

I think it's fair to say people are probably over-reacting to the new book and that it is still carrying a bit of left over hate from the Iron Hands debacle of yesteryear, but yeah, 2.0 was insane as a book, and even in the new codex, we still got a lot of things no one else will get.From how CORE works for us (because let's face it, they didn't apply the "fluff" approach in the marines book that they apparently took for crons) to the fact that we still get to ignore an awful lot of the game. Again, think about it from someone else's pov - CSM Player; "Nice! My CSM will get 2 wounds!", Marine Player; "Nice! I'm getting a 3w TROOP unit with a D2 weapon!". It doesn't stack up well does it? There are a ton of examples of this too ...

Marines are just a bit much right now, and have been for a REALLY long time.

 Da Boss wrote:
What is OP in your opinion then?

I think factions themselves can never be OP per se. It's always certain outlier units that synergize really effing well within the given faction ruleset that typically lends to the label.

So, units within specific factions can be considered "OP", but the faction itself shouldn't be considered OP by the virtue of it having said broken units within.