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Simple question: Do you feel your faction's current rules accurately represents how they should work according to their fluff on the tabletop? If the answer is "No", then what do you think needs to change about their rules to fix the problem? Does anyone whose faction has a 9th edition codex think it better represents their fluff than their previous codexes?

My two main factions are Sisters and DE.

I think that the upcoming codex is a massive improvement on the old in terms of providing options- the looser detachment restrictions, the Master level HQ's, the Trueborn/ Blood Bride/ Haemoxites... That's a lot of stuff we haven't had for a while, and it's great to have it back because of its connection to the background. The Crusade content looks particularly promising- the concept of territories that change hands and confer benefits to their controller is to my knowledge, a first time innovation in Crusade rules. But very appropriate to the background.

As for Sisters, they don't have their Dex yet, but we have seen some new models, and they do break some new ground for the faction. We've had two variants of somber, penitent walkers for a while now, but we've never had a righteous, blessed walker- and I think that is a niche that needed a unit. The battle tank is also a departure of sorts- less a mobile shrine than the others, and also straying from the Trinity. Personally, I don't think either of these units are out of character for the faction, but each is a step into new territory.

Main faction is Dark Angels. To me, they've always been about Deathwing Terminators and Ravenwing Bikes. In 8th Ed, whether intentional or not, they were about Plasma. That was cool and all, but the Terminators were in a bad place. Bikes with Plasma were OK as were Landspeeder characters.

The new book has put both Deathwing and Ravenwing units back to the fore. I like it!

As above, Dark Angels feel like they should.

Iyanden Eldar? Not quite..but not as bad as majority Eldar issues. With Wrath of the Dead trait, they are better. GW just needs to flesh out the faction more, especially when it comes to warlord traits and relics. Wraithknight needs work, but I still like how my ghost warriors feel.

My Aspect Warrior host suffers from outdated rules, some stat decay. I think it felt the best during the 7th edition without being completely OP like some other Eldar build of the time. The Autarch in particular lacks some punch.

My Orks operate and feel really good. They punch hard, come in drove, die in mass, are random enough and have just enouh variety to be interesting to me.

My small Militarum Tempestus army works fine, but I must admit I have not played it since 8th turned up.

In general, I do believe my army operate how they should be and if they don' it's mostly due to some stat decay that will almost certainly be corrected soon.

Overall, sure, I suppose so.
Though to be honest I haven't read the current lore for either my SW or most of my Necrons.

My primary army is Necrons, and I absolutely do think they did a great job matching the mechanics to the fluff. Reanimation Protocols is much better than it was in 8th, and it really works well on our silver tide style models. The reroll 1's on Warriors also help that horde aspect.

Living metal is a great minor mechanic that helps with the durability theme across the board, and I think Command protocols is a really great to way to emulate diffrent battle tactic adaptations for Necrons (Though in this case, it could have been executed much better, as it's probably the weakest doctrine style mechanic in the game).

The only thing I did not feel they nailed very well is our Characters don't really feel as durable as they should. They went the route of trying to make them seem durable, at the cost of our offensive output being pretty weak, but I think Characters with Living metal should have gotten some additional durability bonus.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Simple question: Do you feel your faction's current rules accurately represents how they should work according to their fluff on the tabletop? If the answer is "No", then what do you think needs to change about their rules to fix the problem? Does anyone whose faction has a 9th edition codex think it better represents their fluff than their previous codexes?

I play orkz and absolutely no. Orkz aren't as fun as they used to be as far as rules. For example, the old WAAAAAGH rule was fluffy and funny, the new one? meh. Orkz aren't choppy enough at all. In 7th 10 trukk boyz, even without a nob were able to reliably kill 4 or 5 Space Marines in close combat. Now, for orkz to get the same result they need almost 20. And its not like Boyz got cheaper while Marines got more expensive, Boyz went up 33% in price while Marines only went up 20% in the same time frame.

As far as Dakka, orkz were the dice faction, our shooting phase was hilarious just in the absurdity of how many dice you needed to roll, now several other factions get significantly more shots than us and usually with better ballistic skill.

I mean, these are orkz, why the hell don't we have a strategem that allows us to blow up our own vehicles whenever the desire hits us? Why aren't painboyz able to resurrect the dead or have some kind of half baked rule where they sew a squig brain into the orkz head etc. Honestly, I feel like GW has removed a lot of the flavor from orkz over the last decade or so.

Craftworlders:
Eh. Not really. They don't feel especially fast/agile now that initiative, skimmer rules, compared WS, move-shoot-move version of battle focus, and stacking to-hit mods have all been removed. They don't feel especially coordinated/reliant upon each other to cover their weaknesses. My Iybraesil army can't really take banshees in place of normal troops unless want to pay CP for a troopless detachment. But they could be worse off.

Drukhari:
Mostly pretty okay. My buff characters have to job around on the ground to hand out buffs. My beatsticks lose to marine beatsticks pretty consistently. The newer primaris vehicles more or less match me for speed and maneuverability. PFP rules currently encourage me to wipe out my foes in one fell swoop rather than playing with my food. A lot of the juiciest special rules have gone away over time. But overall they're okay.

I've been avoiding the recent leaks from the new book, so maybe some of this is already fixed.

Necrons:
Seem to be about right. My tech feels advanced. My army feels notably tougher than my opponent's. I haven't played them a ton yet, but I haven't encountered any major fluff/crunch disparities. Robots being susceptible to poison and leadership debuffs is a bit odd, I guess.

Marines:
Yeah. The extra wound and wide array of playstyles (I use the chapter rules that sound fun on a given day) make them feel about as tough and skillful as I'd expect them to be.

Chaos Marines (Slaaneshi):
Feel... okay. The lack of a 2nd wound makes them compare weirdly to loyalists, but the basic bones are mostly okay. I wish I could customize my aspiring champions and characters more. Give them more supernatural powers, spooky mutations, etc. They do feel a bit like more limited marines. I wish I had a mechanic to represent my favor with Slaanesh or something.

Thousand Sons:
Eh. I haven't gotten a game in yet, but they feel a bit off. In the novels, the army is built around crazy-talented psykers who use their powers to augment in unique ways, and their powers more or less correspond to the psychic disciplines from the 7th edition rulebook. When I've been going to build my list, it feels like I end up with a couple moderately powerful psykers, a bunch of baby psykers that desperately want to avoid using the smite power, and hordes of tzaangor. Tzaangor are cool, but I kind of wish my psykers felt like bigger deals, and I wish the powers felt more varied. So many of them are just variations on beefing up defenses and doing mortal wounds in slightly different ways.

Nobody's rules reflect their fluff. Psykers forget how to use their powers depending on how many of them there are on the battlefield. Knives are strong anti-tank weapons if the people using them get shouted at by the right people. The top-level officers from every faction are in every single battle. Space Marines are better at every specialist task than the people who are supposed to specialize in that thing. Flamers are effective anti-aircraft weapons, blasts are effective anti-tank weapons, units can't shoot characters because they might confuse them with the unit on the other side of a wall that they can't see, every battle has a 100% casualty rate for someone, everyone walks to point-blank range before they remember how to fire their weapons, indirect fire suffers no loss of accuracy, anti-tank grenades have vanished without explanation, tanks are tissue paper, Deep Strikers are consequence-free alpha strike machines that appear exactly where you want when you want them...

If you want specifics about the armies I play the Mechanicum has lost track of all their 30k units for no reason despite the fact that the SM still have theirs, the Corsairs no longer exist, the Deathwatch have lost all their SIA for no reason and the Primaris still haven't figured out how to use any of their defining weapons (perhaps the classic HQs set an example for them by having no idea how to use the phase blades available to sergeants), the Alpha Legion have half the wounds of the loyalist Marines because GW couldn't be bothered to do a PDF update, and the Custodes have been pretty badly left behind by the damage/wound creep in the latest army books (plus all the d3 damage melee is badly screwed by -1 damage abilities).

The game's so far removed from the lore right now that I have no idea how to try and make it represent it again without burning it all and starting over.

Imperial Guard? Existing only to eat **** and die in droves?


...yeah...

Speaking for Tyranids, the answer is unfortunately a big no.

Game wise they are sort of fine at the moment, but fluff wise they really miss the mark.
The more fancy nid life forms should be much more powerful than they are depicted. In the fluff Warriors are a though match for a terminator, and lictors eat Sanguinary guards for breakfast.
But I would be fine if stuff like that was not depicted correctly. The problem is that right now we miss the most important aspect of fighting nids, which is the impossibly long attrition.
In the fluff, nids are a durability based foe like necrons and Death Guard. Death guards won't go down, necrons won't stay down and there is always one more nid.
This aspect is simply missing. Acolites can come back, boyz can come back, even breachers can come back! Yet, guants cannot!
My ideal nid dex is one where the bugs are not ultra fast killers or ultra deathly shooters, but you simply can't kill them fast enough and the nid player keeps putting new models on the field each turn.

Edit: On a similar note, while I don't play guards, I think that they should follow the same concept. More problems --> More guards.

Marines I think are in a good place, fluff vs. mechanics wise. Their rules are a bit over the top, but so is their lore.

Craftworld Eldar are not. Stat creep has not been kind to them. And has not for a while (back to 3rd, when the nerfing began). While they may have always been competitive, this is normally due to poor internal balance, and the ability to spam whatever FOTM unit is broken to victory. Sometimes this aligns with the fluff (scatbike spam is a very Saim-Hann way to play) but often it does not. A lot of the “fast and agile” that they used to survive is gone (stacking -1s, but also removal of WS vs. WS in melee and initiative) leaving them as glass hammers, but kinda shaky on the “hammer” part.

Right now the aspect warriors, who should be the hyper-specialized experts in their style of fighting, are largely outclassed by generalist units from other armies. And you can have marine sergeants with more attacks than Phoenix Lords. Not even captains or chapter masters (who I grant might be able to strike parity with some PLs) but basic squad leaders with the same 4A.

The book needs a major overhaul.

Eldar (aside from Harlequins): No. CWE and Drukhari both are totally borked in terms of how they play relative to how they ought to play, and the new Drukhari codex does nothing to fix this. It's still a "flood your opponent with cheap efficient junk and gum up the table" army, which still feels wrong. CW are even worse.

Thousand Sons: They play like they should, the problem is just that they're terrible. Lol.

GSC: They play like they should, the problem is just that there's not much room left for the playstyle in 9th edition. It's very hard to win in 9th when you don't have a unit with ob-sec capable of holding an objective for a turn.

Guard, and....eh?

"Guard" covers an absolute gakton of regimental variety in fluff (light infantry, shock infantry, siegers, motorized, cavalry (horse), cavalry ("horse"), cavalry (mechanized), scout/recce, armoured, artillery, drop infantry, drop mechanized, superheavy, etc etc) so by default the answer is "no" since there will always be a type of regiment you can point to and say "this doesn't work like the fluff" simply because no ruleset would be capable of covering all the different regimental types effectively.

That said, I think we might be suffering a little due to our mundanity. Our tanks don't have any of the special rules that seem to be required to make them actually tanky in 8e+, and our infantry seem pretty reliant on Orders to do much of anything (from what I've seen of batreps/other posters, they lack the inherent stats/gear to do lifting without getting yelled at and while we can certainly do "human wave", we used to be able to do it better). This is less a problem with the army not matching the fluff (we're supposed to be the mundane army mans what win through grit, numbers, and high-caliber HE instead of magic and hypertech), but with the way 40k is built I'm not sure there is room for fluff-accurate IG play to match with fluff-accurate IG results.

As far as fixing it...well, I haven't had a chance to play 9e yet, so I'm hesitant to say too much about non-listbuilding changes. Dropping in points costs, especially of vehicles, and getting the return of the old Platoon system in some form (free/slotless Command Squads for Platoon/Company Commanders? 2-5 Infantry Squads as a single Troop choice? Copy-pasting the 3.5e or 5e system wholesale?) would go some way to alleviate my gripes without dipping into potentially UP/OP/nonfunctional special rules, but I'm not sure that would be sufficient to get us to where fluff would place us.

(To be fair, I'm kind of a grog - I got more inspiration and excitement out of reading the 3.5 dex for the first time a few years back than I had reading and re-reading the 6e/8e dexes dozens of times after they had come out - so I will have a bias towards returning to IG the way they were when 40k in general was this shiny new thing to me with this kick-ass universe and all these sweet gothic-sci-fi models to buy. Mea culpa.)

(Also, I'll make the obligatory mention that fluff can vary wildly, so making a unit/faction "fluff accurate" would require some determination of what the fluff should be for them in the first place)

I'm going to reluctantly go with 'no' on my Tyranids, for two reasons.

First, for a species that is defined by their adaptability, there really isn't any mechanism for this on the table. Most units have very few options, and the ones with lots of options primarily just have wargear choices. Comparing to past editions, 3rd Ed let you create your own species from the base Tyrant, Gaunt, Warrior, and Carnifex genuses, and 4th and 5th Ed let you take per-unit upgrades that could significantly affect their stats and capabilities. Over time, those upgrades have been pared down or reworked to have more minor wargear effects (such as Toxin Sacs going from +1S to D2 on a 6 to wound, which is... okay, I guess), leaving pretty much just the guns.

I'm not sure that returning to having a ton of upgrades (and there's been a step in that direction, with Adaptive Physiology) would really capture the fluff. It definitely demonstrates genetic variety, but doesn't quite capture the idea of a whole force being bred specifically to counter a particular threat profile. The different hive fleet traits of course characterize the fleets, but being fixed bonuses are basically the opposite of threat-specific adaptation.

I'd like to see Tyranids' mono-faction bonus be something like getting to choose an adaptation during deployment that then applies army-wide, to represent that this force has been bred specifically for this battle. So maybe if your opponent has a lot of shooting, you take a tunneling adaptation that makes you more durable against ranged attack. Or if the battlefield has a lot of dense terrain, you take chameleonic scales to get a cover save bonus. Or if the enemy has lots of good saves, you take extra-sharp claws to get bonus AP in melee. The ability to pick a trait relevant to the matchup rather than baked into the army list would really sell the theme of adaptability, and give them the ability to exploit the weaknesses of overspecialized forces- exactly as it should be.

Second, the Tyranid fluff always centers on wave after wave of creatures, not equal-forces fights. Now, it isn't desirable from a gameplay standpoint for every fight against 'Nids to take the form of a desperate defense against overwhelming odds, but it'd be fun if there were more mechanics to reflect the idea of a never-ending swarm- make Tyranids the army for recycling units as they die, particularly with the new Strategic Reserves system allowing new units to outflank via board edges.

Might be hard to balance but those are by big two.

Dark Eldar... somewhat.

The new codex has definitely made some improvements (e.g. characters can now ride with other units in transports, rather than having to jog alongside them).

However, there's still quite a lot of janky stuff that doesn't feel appropriate:

- DE give up armour for speed. This is represented by Raiders and Ravagers being slower than heavily-armoured Eldar tanks.

- Archons are master schemers, strategists and manipulators. Master Archons represent this by... er... hitting things a second time 1/game.

- Archons are known for their strange and exotic tastes in personal fleshcraft and for using the best and most devious weapons and artefacts available. This is represented with a complete lack of customisation and by all their non-artefact weapons being about as effective as a board with a nail in it.

- Haemonculi are the unrivalled masters of devious science and are known for bringing all manner of exotic artefacts and esoteric wargear to battle. This is represented by a complete lack of any options or non-artefact wargear.

- Haemonculi forget how fleshcraft works for every DE unit outside of Coven.

- Archons still forget how to command their troops - including their own Trueborn retinues - when standing on the same transport as them.

- Lhamaeans refuse to share their poisons with Trueborn or even with the Archon who hired them unless both get off their transport. If they get back on a different transport, the Lhamaean immediately confiscates her poison again.

- Scourges are meant to be highly mobile, yet almost all their weapons are Heavy and they have no way to get around the penalty for moving with them.

- A general lack of tricks, movement abilities etc. This one is harder to pin down, just one of those things where it's weird that Marines seem to have far more tricks, movement bonuses and mobility options than DE do.


To be clear, these aren't all necessarily major issues. But while many may have little bearing on how powerful they army is, they do have a significant impact on how it feels to play. For example, I'm sure Scourges are efficient with 4 Dark Lances, it just feels weird when they have M14" but you're encouraged never to move them.

GSC: Mostly yes, they could have more "sabotage" mechanics to hinder the enemy, but otherwise they feel true to the lore

Tyranids: Big fat nope. In addition to what the above posters said about Nids, Tyranids have additional areas that are poorly represented, if at all:

1) The coordination. The Synapse network links the senses of every individual creature, gathers all sensory feeds, and processes them by an absurdly powerful distributed computing network while spitting out countless nearly instantaneous orders to basically everything, even a tiny receptor in a bio bullet in a middle of a flight (if there's a need to).
Only daemons have anything even remotely comparable to the Tyranid Command & Control network.

Using forward units to give increased accuracy to other units, map the battlefield ground and find the best route for the next wave at higher speed, reacting to ambushes and deep strike reserves, counter maneuvering against charges, etc.
They can't have everything, but they should feel like a singular linked entity.

2) Expendability - everything on the field is expendable and will die anyway within few weeks at best, even the synapse creatures. There should be more inter-unit mechanisms for mutual protection and support at one's expense. It's a team effort, no one has self-preservation beyond what's practical and no one cares about pain or wounds. Everything and everyone is slaved to a singular purpose, achieving the goal.

3) Overall stat lines are outdated in every area. The codex will probably fix this, I just doubt it will be enough. I mean, a hormagaunt is supposed to be a tiger-sized wrecking ball of teeth and claw on crack that weights 3x as much as a guardsman. Doesn't really feel that way on the battlefield, does it? And that's just the start.

4) Shadow in the warp. This could be buffed several times over and it would still be a distant shadow of the lore. This is probably for the health of the game as no psyker-heavy faction would have a good time playing against Nids if the SiTW was even remotely comparable to the actual level of strength.
But the current implementation is a merely small hindrance at best. -1 to cast AND deny with 36" aura and all doubles trigger perils within 18", that would be better.

Ideally it would come with a new model to fit in more with the scale, but in between now and then, just let primaris use drop pods so they can do the most marine thing marines should do.

Tyranids - No, for reasons others have more eloquently described than I could. I will add that it is not just the rules but the model line. There are tons and tons of options for big creatures... in the swarm army. I want more swarm unit options, and further I want more abilities, psychic powers, and stratagems to buff swarms.

Nurgle Daemons - Yes, they could use some updating but thematically their rules do a good job of representing what they are supposed to be.

Not having an army at present, but I have liked the Tyranids for a while now because of their theme, but their rules have fallen with every codex that came out.

I think the best versions were the 3rd and 4th, even though some of later models to come out were very interesting, but what the army could do as a whole seemed to degrade with each book. It's kind of like Chaos' 3.5 codex that they seem to have been paying for ever since.

A couple points regarding what has been brought up:

Spoletta wrote:My ideal nid dex is one where the bugs are not ultra fast killers or ultra deathly shooters, but you simply can't kill them fast enough and the nid player keeps putting new models on the field each turn.

Edit: On a similar note, while I don't play guards, I think that they should follow the same concept. More problems --> More guards.

The baby bugs and basic Guard Squads should definitely have a "Send in the Next Wave" concept (even as a Strategem), even without the Tervigon. However, the bigger ones would be a harder sell, without massively upgrading their cost. Could you imagine downing a Carnfiex, just to have another appear from the table edge or deep striking from a Tyrannocyte the following turn? They should be tough nuts to crack, though.

catbarf wrote:I'd like to see Tyranids' mono-faction bonus be something like getting to choose an adaptation during deployment that then applies army-wide, to represent that this force has been bred specifically for this battle. So maybe if your opponent has a lot of shooting, you take a tunneling adaptation that makes you more durable against ranged attack. Or if the battlefield has a lot of dense terrain, you take chameleonic scales to get a cover save bonus. Or if the enemy has lots of good saves, you take extra-sharp claws to get bonus AP in melee. The ability to pick a trait relevant to the matchup rather than baked into the army list would really sell the theme of adaptability, and give them the ability to exploit the weaknesses of overspecialized forces- exactly as it should be.

That would be a very hard thing to balance. It would be good, but hard to balance. It would almost require a CP cost to make it anywhere near balanced. This is why the pre-purchased system of 3rd, and even 4th, was used till they decided to go boring with Eldar at the end of 4th.

catbarf wrote:Second, the Tyranid fluff always centers on wave after wave of creatures, not equal-forces fights. Now, it isn't desirable from a gameplay standpoint for every fight against 'Nids to take the form of a desperate defense against overwhelming odds, but it'd be fun if there were more mechanics to reflect the idea of a never-ending swarm- make Tyranids the army for recycling units as they die, particularly with the new Strategic Reserves system allowing new units to outflank via board edges.

For the little bugs, I could see it, but not for the bigger ones. Now, if you're looking at a Crusade-style Narrative function, I could see pushing that easier where they could still gain "experience" despite having been killed, along with a cheap restoration feature.

 Charistoph wrote:
That would be a very hard thing to balance. It would be good, but hard to balance. It would almost require a CP cost to make it anywhere near balanced. This is why the pre-purchased system of 3rd, and even 4th, was used till they decided to go boring with Eldar at the end of 4th.

Yeah, I agree that it would be hard to get right. As with Adaptive Physiology, there would inevitably be winners and losers. I'm not intrinsically opposed to CP costs, but those are quite hard to balance too- I suppose you could do it per unit, like adaptive physiology. Pay a CP for each unit that you want to 'adapt', pick a trait. But that has some unintuitive consequences, like heavily incentivizing large squads and expensive monsters, leaving small squads and Carnifexes out in the cold.

 Charistoph wrote:
For the little bugs, I could see it, but not for the bigger ones.

Back in the day you could buy 'Without Number' for a unit of Gaunts, which gave them the ability to recycle. It was crap, because they had to come onto your table edge, but in 9th I could see that ability being a lot more useful.

 catbarf wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
For the little bugs, I could see it, but not for the bigger ones.

Back in the day you could buy 'Without Number' for a unit of Gaunts, which gave them the ability to recycle. It was crap, because they had to come onto your table edge, but in 9th I could see that ability being a lot more useful.

True, but unless one was willing for them to spawn from a Tervigon or unused Tyrannocyte still in Reserves, I don't think there really is much of a balanced option otherwise. Especially when you consider these are supposed to be a new brood charging in from an insertion point behind the line.

CSM = not at all

In all the fluff I have read the CSM are portrayed as the veterans of the long war, many of the ones remaining alive for 10k years, some walked and fought along side the primarchs and maybe even the emperor. Each veteran of the long war is worth 100 loyalists (pre primaris but don’t see why it would be much different).

CSM should be hard as nails but they are more like over the bill loyalists.

However I haven’t read anything about the black legion really and the codex mostly reflects the black legion.

It’s hard to play a traitor legion with the available models and link it too the fluff in your mind. Why aren’t old terminator variants available for example.

I think without number could work very well as a core concept in 40k to represent swarm units more accurately without resorting to the likes of 2-point models. If the unit is wiped out you can deploy a new unit as if it were coming in via strategic reserves. For Tyranids you could make it so they must be deployed in synapse range to act as a balancing factor and provide counterplay. Also make it so if the unit is at below half strength in the command phase the controlling player can voluntarily kill it/use a stratagem to kill it (treat as failed morale) in order to trigger the reinforcements. Put it on gaunts, gargoyles, and rippers. Maybe combine with a 'new units count as half a model for objectives' rule if it is too strong.

Basic guardsman, grots, and slugga boys could have it too.

Custodes get a "Some of the Time" raiting.

Against certain armies they fit the fluff just fine. Armies with very little AP on their shooting (orks, nids, aeldari, tau) let the custodes do what they are supposed to do and survive.

Against most other armies custodies only live for 2 turns by blowing 5-6 CP per turn. After that they start dying in droves and your tabled at the bottom of 4.

Custodes also lack offensive output for the points vs almost every army in the game atm. The only reliable shooting we have is our grav tanks, bikes, and venetari. The grav tanks have been getting nerfed at every update though, and while the bikes are an excellent unit overall, your still paying 75pts for 4 wounds with a 4++ with no way to get a FNP or heal. If we had magical apothecaries who could heal and revive every turn for no CP we'd be in a great spot though.

mrFickle wrote:
CSM = not at all

It’s hard to play a traitor legion with the available models and link it too the fluff in your mind. Why aren’t old terminator variants available for example.

Because they can't maintain the old variants. So when stuff gets shot up too bad they're SOL. Unless they go raiding the Imperium for resources. Then, as the Imperium doesn't use alot of the old stuff here 10k years later, what they take as loot is newer versions.
Hence the minis you've got.
And they haven't started looting Primaris stuff because it's too new & they can't maintain that either....

What's that? You say there's demonic Forge Worlds? Ignore that!

Wyldhunt wrote:
Craftworlders:
Eh. Not really. They don't feel especially fast/agile now that initiative, skimmer rules, compared WS, move-shoot-move version of battle focus, and stacking to-hit mods have all been removed. They don't feel especially coordinated/reliant upon each other to cover their weaknesses. My Iybraesil army can't really take banshees in place of normal troops unless want to pay CP for a troopless detachment. But they could be worse off.

Drukhari:
Mostly pretty okay. My buff characters have to job around on the ground to hand out buffs. My beatsticks lose to marine beatsticks pretty consistently. The newer primaris vehicles more or less match me for speed and maneuverability. PFP rules currently encourage me to wipe out my foes in one fell swoop rather than playing with my food. A lot of the juiciest special rules have gone away over time. But overall they're okay.

I've been avoiding the recent leaks from the new book, so maybe some of this is already fixed.

Yes the lack of speed specific rules in the core mechanics have severely curtailed the ability of fast armies to be represented accurately - nids are also effected.

So in terms of fluff, I don't think CWE, DE, Harlies or Tyranids are well reflected due to the lack of proper speed mechanics. Orks waaaghing as well.

I disagree with this. I'll take a bash at your points:
1 - Being a VotL means very little in practice. The Long War is just from the Heresy to now, whenever now may be. The nature of the Warp, especially Eye Space and the Maelstrom, means that time isn't linear and a warband could go into the warp in M.31 fleeing Terra, disappear for 5k years, and come back looking nothing like they did when they went in. It's very rare to see background written that equals both factions' accomplishments mostly because you can't sell a faction that stalemates all the time. Even so, it's very rare to see a book of SM protagonists vs CSM antagonists where the SM aren't hard-pressed and in a struggle to win. Not because CSM are better but because they are a foe of equal might to SM. The game doesn't show that because poster boys losing doesn't sell toys.
2 - Unless a CSM is possessed/marked by a god/is in Terminator armour then they are really no different to a loyalist. They still die to the same things.
3 - I'm not sure what you mean by the codex mostly reflecting the BL. If you mean lore-wise then only in the sense that they get maybe two more lore pages than the other Legions. Unit images are BL because they are the UM of CSM, the poster sub-faction. This isn't unwarranted because Abbadon is Warmaster and the BL are his Legion. They are the most numerous, influential and unified of any Legion and regularly draw warriors from the other Legions and renegade chapters. As for units, they have one more character than the other forces in the codex, hardly a massive increase.
4 - The available models are corrupted arms and armour that are readily available to make/loot. Those models are compatible with loads of other GW kits if people want to make their units stand out. Lore reason for no older terminator variants is they are difficult to maintain in an environment of constant warfare with little resources. GW didn't put them in the codex because they don't have spikes and therefore are not a CSM unit.

CSM / Black Legion - no. Infantry is too weak, other units are too expensive. Most units are outclassed by loyalist equivalents. Changes with detachments limit the number of HQs we can bring, which takes a lot of flavor from the army.

Death Guard - yes. Contagions were a brilliant addition.

Grey Knights - no. Too constrained with psychic powers. Not enough options in the Codex. They should be the Emperor's Mailed Fist.

Deathwatch - yes, barely. However, there's not enough SIA to go around. They are supposed to be the elite of the elite.

Chaos Daemons - no. Hard to play mono-God, hard to do anything with Khorne. Bloodthirsters are outclassed by Keepers of Secrets, makes no sense.

Guard - yes. Most satisfied with my Guard army.