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 Insectum7 wrote:
AND it made a Captain feel like a friggin army leader.

It let Marines all but ignore a newly added major element to the game.

I don't know if "distasteful" is the word, but did not like 3rd Edition when it arrived. It felt like the flavour had been boiled away from 2nd Edition and the table became so crowded.

Still played lots, and good things certainly happened in the hobby/gaming scene.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
AND it made a Captain feel like a friggin army leader.

It let Marines all but ignore a newly added major element to the game.

Marines weren't the only beneficiary. Necrons all had Ld 10. CSM could get Ld 10 pretty easy iirc. More ways to differentiate units is welcome, even if Marines get it too.

ccs wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

oh, for fun I'll also throw out:

If a necron player ever got below 1/4 of the number of necron models (stuff like wraiths/scarabs/vehicles didnt count) they had at the start, they instantly lose the game because all the necrons disappear.

Brilliant, wonderful rules writing, very fluff, very narrative, very fun and satisfying for everyone.

(shrug) I actually liked it. And I played Necrons then. Still do. I'd not be opposed to using it today in fact.
I just knew how to play around it. in fact? I've lost more games with Necrons here in 9th than I ever did via Phase-Out.

^Fully agree. Loved that rule and how it influenced army structure and strategy.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
AND it made a Captain feel like a friggin army leader.

It let Marines all but ignore a newly added major element to the game.

Marines weren't the only beneficiary. Necrons all had Ld 10. CSM could get Ld 10 pretty easy iirc. More ways to differentiate units is welcome, even if Marines get it too.

CSM could get Ld10 very easily. Any character, including Aspiring Champions, were Ld10. Meanwhile you're basic CSM, Raptors, and Havocs were Ld9 even without the Aspiring Champion. This meant loyalists needed their leaders, but CSM didn't, they could function without them just fine. I loved that. It made CSM feel far more like Veterans of The Long War than a +1 to wound stratagem ever will.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
AND it made a Captain feel like a friggin army leader.

It let Marines all but ignore a newly added major element to the game.

Marines weren't the only beneficiary. Necrons all had Ld 10. CSM could get Ld 10 pretty easy iirc. More ways to differentiate units is welcome, even if Marines get it too.

CSM could get Ld10 very easily. Any character, including Aspiring Champions, were Ld10. Meanwhile you're basic CSM, Raptors, and Havocs were Ld9 even without the Aspiring Champion. This meant loyalists needed their leaders, but CSM didn't, they could function without them just fine. I loved that. It made CSM feel far more like Veterans of The Long War than a +1 to wound stratagem ever will.

Why should Chaos Marines that aren't cult troops have higher leadership than Imperial Loyalist Marines? It goes agaisnt all fluff since the dawn of time.

They are chaotic. They lost the war. They ran away to the eye of terror and started tearing themselves apart. They are characterized by a serious LACK of leadership. They are individualistic, they KNOW fear because they have personal goals. Most loyalist marines are indoctrinated nutjobs that would gladly die for their God-Emperor (Like most chaos cult troops)

Actually , going with the fluff, Chaos Marines specially the veterans ones should be more powerfull than imperial equivalents (Because chaotic and corrupted boons are more powerfull than "good" boons. Dawn of War 2 made that very well with corrupted wargear. Evil is more powerfull than Goodness in any setting because it comes with a price) but have a serious lack of tactical and strategic coordination because even the most organized of the chaotic legions and warbands are made of squads of , by their own nature, egoistical, tyranical, and evil marines.

I dislike not being able to charge into a unit, kill it, and charge something else. I get it, the cascading charge effect can be scary for a gunline, but a) feth gunlines and b) the 'tactical guardsman screen' is a bug not a feature of the rules.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Most of the stuff from 5th onwards.

- Formations
- New MC treatment that made MCs just Vehicles +1
- Changes to vehicle damage chart and addition of hull points
- TLOS rather than more abstracted terrain rules.
- Rules based more in existing factions rather than Your Dudes (e.g. in 3.5 IG, Your Dudes could exist wholly differently than any other dudes. In 5th IG, Your Dudes didn't exist and neither did anyone else. In 6th-7th IG, if any rules for regiments came out at all they were for pre-existing regiments (e.g. cadian formation in 7th). In 8th and 9th, Your Dudes can kind of sort of exist like 3.5 but miss out on relics, WLTs, special orders, and special characters).

And most importantly:
- Losing track of abstractions. If "this guy fights betterer after a charge" is Furious Charge, then Hammer of Wrath (this guy slaps better after charging) doesn't need to exist. They're abstracting the same phenomenon generally (i.e. "charging = good for this unit") Like Ogryns having Hammer of Wrath instead of Furious Charge - what really changed there, abstraction wise?

Are you me? I agree so hard with this.

 Galas wrote:
They are individualistic, they KNOW fear because they have personal goals. Most loyalist marines are indoctrinated nutjobs that would gladly die for their God-Emperor (Like most chaos cult troops)

Exactly. Ten-milennia-old veterans need less handholding to know what to shoot at, loyalists get ATSKNF. Veterans have experience, loyalists have indoctrination. Sounds perfect to me.

'Leadership' does have to be synonymous with either bravery or army coordination. If used for things like target priority, then it's more a measurement of overall quality, as it was in several of the specialist games (eg BFG, where all special orders required passing a Ld test).

 Dakkamite wrote:
I dislike not being able to charge into a unit, kill it, and charge something else. I get it, the cascading charge effect can be scary for a gunline, but a) feth gunlines and .

Well feth melee armies, too.

 Galas wrote:

Spoiler:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
AND it made a Captain feel like a friggin army leader.

It let Marines all but ignore a newly added major element to the game.

Marines weren't the only beneficiary. Necrons all had Ld 10. CSM could get Ld 10 pretty easy iirc. More ways to differentiate units is welcome, even if Marines get it too.

CSM could get Ld10 very easily. Any character, including Aspiring Champions, were Ld10. Meanwhile you're basic CSM, Raptors, and Havocs were Ld9 even without the Aspiring Champion. This meant loyalists needed their leaders, but CSM didn't, they could function without them just fine. I loved that. It made CSM feel far more like Veterans of The Long War than a +1 to wound stratagem ever will.

Why should Chaos Marines that aren't cult troops have higher leadership than Imperial Loyalist Marines? It goes agaisnt all fluff since the dawn of time.

They are chaotic. They lost the war. They ran away to the eye of terror and started tearing themselves apart. They are characterized by a serious LACK of leadership. They are individualistic, they KNOW fear because they have personal goals. Most loyalist marines are indoctrinated nutjobs that would gladly die for their God-Emperor (Like most chaos cult troops)

Actually , going with the fluff, Chaos Marines specially the veterans ones should be more powerfull than imperial equivalents (Because chaotic and corrupted boons are more powerfull than "good" boons. Dawn of War 2 made that very well with corrupted wargear. Evil is more powerfull than Goodness in any setting because it comes with a price) but have a serious lack of tactical and strategic coordination because even the most organized of the chaotic legions and warbands are made of squads of , by their own nature, egoistical, tyranical, and evil marines.

That's the point. They don't need leadership, as in leaders. A squad of CSM were perfectly fine without a HQ giving them buffs, loyalists needed one. They can think for themselves, loyalists are a bunch of brainwashed followers.

Their higher natural Leadership in older editions where Leadership meant more than how many guys run away meant they were more self sufficient than loyalists. That's how it worked with rules like Target Priority. Kill the loyalists leader and their less effective, kill the CSM leader and they work just fine, because they're more individualistic.

Well, if you look at leadership like that then ok, you are right.

But I always visualized it as cohesion and coordination of forces. Thats why stuff like tyranids, necrons and demons have perfect leadership.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

Spoiler:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
AND it made a Captain feel like a friggin army leader.

It let Marines all but ignore a newly added major element to the game.

Marines weren't the only beneficiary. Necrons all had Ld 10. CSM could get Ld 10 pretty easy iirc. More ways to differentiate units is welcome, even if Marines get it too.

CSM could get Ld10 very easily. Any character, including Aspiring Champions, were Ld10. Meanwhile you're basic CSM, Raptors, and Havocs were Ld9 even without the Aspiring Champion. This meant loyalists needed their leaders, but CSM didn't, they could function without them just fine. I loved that. It made CSM feel far more like Veterans of The Long War than a +1 to wound stratagem ever will.

Couldn't they reroll their Ld tests too with the Mark of Chaos Undivided?

Yeah I liked that balance too. ATSKNF was the loyalists allegiance to the Chapter as an institution larger than themselves. A selfless loyalty. The CSM Ld. Was a confidence in themselves and their prowess, but if things went sideways they turned to self preservation l. Good stuff.

Nurglitch wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:
...Almost, but the point stands that the dice or role-playing dichotomy is a false one. Take Carcassonne as a game involving no dice, but essentially makes a game out of what Warhammer players might consider 'set-up.' They're both games about making a diorama, and Carcassonne really strips it down to the essentials.

Absolutely, but then you're not playing Warhammer, you're playing Carcassonne. Dice aren't somehow metaphysically necessary to every game, no, and you can absolutely make perfectly fine games without them, but I put it to you that if the existence of dice is your problem with Warhammer maybe you ought to be playing a different genre of game.

I guess I'll have to politely reject that suggestion: there's plenty of wargames out there that don't depend on dice, (Tactical Assault: Combat Cards is one notable example using cards) and as noted Warhammer can shed dice just like any other old rules and obsolete player-aids that have gone by the wayside over the years, like blast markers and templates. In fact, from the 'walled garden' approach GW takes the lack of special Warhammer-specific dice is something of an oversight that leaves the door open to third-party providers.

Ugh. Game specific dice. They aren't an advantage, or an oversight (especially since GW does use them for multiple games- BB, warcry, underworlds), they're a sales gimmick. Any special symbol dice are just a conversion of a normal die so you can be sold junk. Doesn't matter what the system is, or how 'special' they are.
Usually some variation of
1-2 (or 1-3) fail
3-4 (or 4-5) basic success
5-6 (or 6) special or double success.
[Adjust for whatever level of success appeals to the writer.]

They're completely unnecessary, and do nothing but obscure odds from people who can't map the symbols to the math behind them. They change nothing.

Yeah. Those sorts of rules were awesome. I even remember old Command and Control networks you could set up as Imperial Guard with vox-casters, where your character's Leadership was shared with any other squads that had voxes.

It meant that squads without voxes (heavy weapon squads for example) had to be babysat with the officers' normal auras, whilst squads with voxes could spread out more.

It meant that IG armies looked and played totally differently depending on how they kitted their squads, and skilled players could build "maneuver elements" with voxes and 'fire elements' without to save points, but it rigidified their plan.

You could easily get Army Wide LD10 as guard though with a Heroic Senior Officer and Commissar and Vox on everyone. You had to pay points, but it was a good bit less vulnerable than the SM command structure due to the durability of the IG command squads relative to a single captain (unless you got into melee). It was more vulnerable at the 'end' of the C2 chain though because a squad could lose a vox operator, which immediately removed it from the net and forced it to rely on local leadership (commonly the sergeant).

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Yeah. Those sorts of rules were awesome. I even remember old Command and Control networks you could set up as Imperial Guard with vox-casters, where your character's Leadership was shared with any other squads that had voxes.

Voxes were garbage though. You'd pay points for something that you already got for free by keeping one part of one model within 12" of an officer.

Back when Officers had a 12" Ld bubble (re-rollable with a standard bearer, and can regroup under 50% with Iron Discipline), the idea of having to pay points for a vox network was just silly.

Vaktathi wrote:For my part, on rules I found distasteful in older editions?

3E/4E transport rules: "unless you're a skimmer, don't actually ride in these".

Vehicle movement/shooting rules: particularly 3-5E's, these were wonky and bad.

Consolidation into new combats: "oh yeah, I rode up behind area terrain where you could never see me, dove into combat turn 2, and never gave you a chance to shoot at that unit again the whole rest of the game as it ate that whole flank on its own".

Blast/Ordnance weapon rules: These were always wonky until 8E. The change to random shots and not potentially affecting multiple units is definitely a change, but these weapons are generally much more functional in terms of average damage output and performance.

So these I disagree with, some because of preference. I still play 3rd and use non skimmer transports to great effect. Having actually trained for combat in tracked vehicles the move/shooting rules and the blast template rules are much more intuitive to me than what is currently used.

My big bugbear is with the consolidation into combat thing. You could only consolidate 3" which meant that anybody with an ounce of common sense could keep their units 5" apart and negate this tactic. I've come to discover through the last few years of discussion on different forums that the consolidation into combat rule was simply played wrong as almost invariably rolling for distance moved is brought up. That's a sweeping advance, and allows you to be shot by every enemy unit that can draw line of sight to you.

7th edition mob rule. Love my 7th edition Orks but the change to mob rule was the single worst decision that befell that faction. Get shot, take casualties, failed pinning, take casualties, took too many casualties so morale check which failed so more casualties. It worked sorta ok for large blobs of Boyz but it ruined any small unit of Orks such as trukk boyz and it REALLY hurt units that tended to not have a Nob such as Lootas.

Also hated Invisibility as if was the single most broken psychic power outside of maybe fortune.

D weapons, while fine for Apoc, was the bane of tanky vehicles and poorly implemented on certain units (looking at you Eldar and Imperial Knights).

As much as 6th and 7th had some hot garbage rules going on, none of them match 8th edition in it's entirety. Killed the hobby for me as it removed basically everything I found fun in the game for an experience about as compellingly as a game of 2 player Risk.

 Vankraken wrote:
7th edition mob rule. Love my 7th edition Orks but the change to mob rule was the single worst decision that befell that faction. Get shot, take casualties, failed pinning, take casualties, took too many casualties so morale check which failed so more casualties. It worked sorta ok for large blobs of Boyz but it ruined any small unit of Orks such as trukk boyz and it REALLY hurt units that tended to not have a Nob such as Lootas.

Also hated Invisibility as if was the single most broken psychic power outside of maybe fortune.

D weapons, while fine for Apoc, was the bane of tanky vehicles and poorly implemented on certain units (looking at you Eldar and Imperial Knights).

As much as 6th and 7th had some hot garbage rules going on, none of them match 8th edition in it's entirety. Killed the hobby for me as it removed basically everything I found fun in the game for an experience about as compellingly as a game of 2 player Risk.

God, totally forgot about D-weapons. First incarnation was a weapon which caused auto-penetrating hits or Instant Death if it wounded. That's the important part. You could have a Destroyer weapon representing a radiation caster of some kind, it could be S3, Ap- but could still cause Instant Death if a wound did get through. It was interesting and not too OP in my opinion.

Then they decided to change it to "If you're hit, on a 2+ you're dead, no excuses. On a 6+ you're super dead". Boring and ridiculously OP.

2nd Ed Imperial Guard opening barrage.

For every Leman Russ, Basilisk and Griffon in your army, you got essentially a free Battle Cannon shot at the start of the game.

Themeatically it was great. But man that ruined many a game with how effective it could be.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
2nd Ed Imperial Guard opening barrage.

For every Leman Russ, Basilisk and Griffon in your army, you got essentially a free Battle Cannon shot at the start of the game.

Themeatically it was great. But man that ruined many a game with how effective it could be.

What was worse, that or the Planetstrike barrage? 3D6 Battle Cannon shots before the game starts. Oh it's ok now, now it's just a number of D6 Mortal Wound-causing markers.

God I hated that expansion.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
2nd Ed Imperial Guard opening barrage.

For every Leman Russ, Basilisk and Griffon in your army, you got essentially a free Battle Cannon shot at the start of the game.

Themeatically it was great. But man that ruined many a game with how effective it could be.

Given the havoc a Virus Grenade could wreak on an IG army, I'd call it about even

Deleted

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
2nd Ed Imperial Guard opening barrage.

For every Leman Russ, Basilisk and Griffon in your army, you got essentially a free Battle Cannon shot at the start of the game.

Themeatically it was great. But man that ruined many a game with how effective it could be.

Given the havoc a Virus Grenade could wreak on an IG army, I'd call it about even

At least I had to get within lobbing range to give you all a nasty case of the sniffles! Virus Outbreak was a sod though, so much so GW genuinely told people to destroy the card!

Just the term Virus Outbreak makes me nauseous to this day. Just how swingy it was showed terrible design. Marines? Won't hurt Jack... IG Orks or anything not in armor? Dead. But at least it took forever to implement.

The old Altoic rules in 3.5E. Enjoy the pinning rules? Enjoy being sniped by a ton of rangers before the first turn even occurs with random results? Well lets roll the dice to see how most of your army is screwed!

Nurglitch wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:
...Almost, but the point stands that the dice or role-playing dichotomy is a false one. Take Carcassonne as a game involving no dice, but essentially makes a game out of what Warhammer players might consider 'set-up.' They're both games about making a diorama, and Carcassonne really strips it down to the essentials.

Absolutely, but then you're not playing Warhammer, you're playing Carcassonne. Dice aren't somehow metaphysically necessary to every game, no, and you can absolutely make perfectly fine games without them, but I put it to you that if the existence of dice is your problem with Warhammer maybe you ought to be playing a different genre of game.

I guess I'll have to politely reject that suggestion: there's plenty of wargames out there that don't depend on dice, (Tactical Assault: Combat Cards is one notable example using cards) and as noted Warhammer can shed dice just like any other old rules and obsolete player-aids that have gone by the wayside over the years, like blast markers and templates. In fact, from the 'walled garden' approach GW takes the lack of special Warhammer-specific dice is something of an oversight that leaves the door open to third-party providers.

Shh, don't give them any ideas!

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
The old Altoic rules in 3.5E. Enjoy the pinning rules? Enjoy being sniped by a ton of rangers before the first turn even occurs with random results? Well lets roll the dice to see how most of your army is screwed!

I remember that! we had a guy with a fantastically painted Eldar army playing Altoic. He was quite surprised when I had a platoon as a single troop choice, messed up his chart rolls a few times. The look on his face was always worth it. He's steam roll lots of other factions back then.







Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Vankraken wrote:
7th edition mob rule. Love my 7th edition Orks but the change to mob rule was the single worst decision that befell that faction. Get shot, take casualties, failed pinning, take casualties, took too many casualties so morale check which failed so more casualties. It worked sorta ok for large blobs of Boyz but it ruined any small unit of Orks such as trukk boyz and it REALLY hurt units that tended to not have a Nob such as Lootas.

I had blocked that Mob rule from my mind. Truly a horrible codex. We had two bad books in a row. I was ready to give up 40K until the index dropped for 8th. amazing that a book with so little in it can be such an improvement.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Inspired by this thread: Are there any old rules that you remember fondly?, I thought we'd do a similar discussion. Going back to earlier editions of the game, what are some rules that you found distasteful, frustrating, unappealing, etc?

I'll share a few to get the ball rolling:

Formations & allies - call be a purist, but in standard games I like the notion of just having one basic detachment pulled from one codex. No allies to leverage weird wombo-combos, no formations to provide power creep escalations. Just a nice simple detachment will do.

Random charge distances - introduced in 6th edition (and here since). I much prefer fixed charge distances.

Casualty / wound allocation in most editions - I don't think GW did this very well back then. It seems a little better now, but in complex situations the ruleset is really murky with how you are supposed to do it, short of rolling one dice at a time, which is annoying.

For rules that used to exist but no longer exist, I think I'm going to have to go with:

Challenges - Seriously, I have no idea why there are even in the game. Dumb in general [seriously, your berzerker leader charges into combat weapons at the ready, but rather than getting right to the stabbing with the force of his charge behind him in a mad frenzy like his squadmates are, he stops, stands there in from of it all, and in the moment calls out "which one of you will fight me in honorable single combat!"], but more importantly contributes almost nothing to the game mechanically except seeing to it that the sergeant dies first in melee, which is a mostly pointless thing to really care about.

Multiple IC attachment conferring stacking rules to squads - This is an okay idea, and honestly probably better than what we have now with regards to how characters issue buffs and are protected. However, the ability to stick 6 different character in the unit to confer the whole unit like 8 different special rules was really absurd, even more so than nowadays.

Universal Overwatch - Overwatch was basically ineffective at it's job. It basically existed to deter someone from declaring everything in range as a charge once they introduced random charges, but it didn't actually succeed in doing that and never amounted to anything but a slow down to the game. It adds nothing but takes time, glad to see that as a stratagem it is now basically contained to units that will have an impact when they do it, like flame guns.

Snap Shots - The whole thing with fliers was absurdly broken in earlier editions. I don't miss only being able to hit flyers on a 6 except with AA guns. OTOH, it made sense, and wouldn't have been as bad if everyone got some form of AA option.

Wound Allocation - Remove from the front was always a matter of discussion, and the 5e version was hilariously abusable. The new version is much better.

Formations - Seriously, this was a mess. Free rules on free rules for the same units in the same army taken a different way, and completely broken to boot.

Hull Points - These were a terrible idea to implement. Like, the VDT already models the destruction of a vehicle, vehicles don't need wounds too. This effectively reduced the number of throws to create a vehicle casualty after a hit from 2 to 1, while monsters still had 2 throws.

and begrudgingly have to acknowledge that the game is better without Scatter - This seriously slowed the game down and was the single leading generator of arguments. I still miss placing the template over things though.



If we're going to complain about all rules

Allies - I don't think allied detachments should ever have been a thing. It's bad for the balance of the game and the classification and distinction of the factions.

Lords of War - Also don't belong outside of Apocalypse.

Detachments - I think the only force organization chart should be the 1-2HQ, 2+ troops, and 0-3 FA, 0-3 Elite, and 0-3 HS. This newfound level of customization for armies unleashes a whole new level of combinations and army power.

8e+ Vehicle Rules - I think that MC's should have been made to work like vehicles rather than the other way around to reconcile their different. I really dislike the HP mechanics; they make everything feel spongy and indecisive.

Save Modifiers - The old method of armor saves made weapon types effective against different targets to give more defined roles and capabilities, and also felt a lot more decisive. Nowadays, SM, Sisters, and other 3+ infantry is really spongy against everything and the sweet spot is that AP1/2 maximum statistical impact-for-cost range rather than have dedicated anti-heavy-infantry weapons.

Multiwound Infantry and damage characteristics - Toughness versus Strength already represents the difficulty of generating a casualty with a hit. Wounds, theoretically, represent a model taking a hit that would have made them a casualty, and continuing to fight anyway. Basically plot armor. That's why a Company Commander has more wounds than a Guardsmen. There's no reason a basic noncharacter infantry unit should have multiple wounds, if they're harder to kill than average, they should have higher toughness.

Moving and Shooting Heavy Weapons, Moving and Shooting RF weapons > half range, and Shooting non-assault weapons and charging - This, more than anything else, is what has increased the game's lethality. Formerly, you could not move, shoot, and charge with full effect in the same turn. This made choices to maneuver versus shooting more significant, and made the game less lethal since units couldn't shoot and charge, in the same phase.

I actually liked the challenge system in the earlier editions as its main purpose seemed to be attempting to nullify 'hidden' weapons such as Marine sergeant hidden powerfists during a time where most people treated their tac marines as ablative wounds for their plasma guns, lascannons, and/or sergeant with powerfists. Of course, not every army could take advantage of the mechanic--I think only the Tyranids' Broodlord at the time could.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
AND it made a Captain feel like a friggin army leader.

It let Marines all but ignore a newly added major element to the game.

I've played the game off and on for over 15 years, and in that time, I've learned one invariable truth:

If a rule exists, Space Marines have access to that rule, have a better version of that rule, or can ignore that rule.

On topic, I hated rules in older editions that allowed armies to play shenanigans with the Force Organization Chart. Army that comes to mind is Iron Warriors that were able to trade two Fast Attack slots for another Heavy Support slot, a trade most if not all armies would gladly make. I believe they could also take Obliterators--a heavy support choice--as elites as well.

The taking additional wounds if fearless and lost combat was stupid--especially, once again, as Space Marines were able to ignore both it and the actual downside of losing combat (that being Sweeping Advance destroying the unit).

Just the most nonsensical decisions regarding weapons in the earlier decisions, especially for the Tyranids. Venom cannons can't pen vehicles. Devourers can't pen vehicles. Your strongest anti tank weapon being either a single shot S8 blast weapon that if the hole scatters off the tank has its S value halved. After that? Two shot S6 weapons, because why not strength cap ranged weapons since Tyranids were of course a close combat army.

I disliked challenges, but I can see why they were added. "Honourable duels" is a popular theme among more 'narrative' players.

One of my gaming groups actually wrote their own 'dueling' rules. They originally found that basically "who swung first won" as they wiped out their opponent.
So they compensated by, as soon as you enter a duel, all damage dealt is halved and all wounds are doubled.
So you just rolled back and forth and it became a test of who had the most DPS.
40k is not structured to allow fun duelsl and I'm glad the mechanic has never returned.

Glad most people hate the old AP system. All or nothing was garbage design.