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A.T. wrote:

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
6th Ed Drop pods. As a CSM player, having pods drop and not scatter was furiating.

I don't remember that one, was it a formation?

Drop Pods in general reduced scatter to avoid a mishap.

You had the Skyhammer Cashgrab Formation which was 2x Drop Pods w. Devastators, and 2x Assault Squads
- Devs could still fire at full BS after arriving from the pods.
- Assault Marines didn't scatter if arriving near the pods.
- Any unit hit by a Dev attack couldn't Overwatch, and the Assault Marines got some kind of other boost to go with it.

Firing at full BS and charging out of DS were pretty rare effects in 7th.

 Valkyrie wrote:
Drop Pods in general reduced scatter to avoid a mishap.

Yes, from the start of 4th edition IIRC.

I do remember the skyhammer though. Classic 7th edition.

 Valkyrie wrote:

A.T. wrote:

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
6th Ed Drop pods. As a CSM player, having pods drop and not scatter was furiating.

I don't remember that one, was it a formation?

Drop Pods in general reduced scatter to avoid a mishap.

You had the Skyhammer Cashgrab Formation which was 2x Drop Pods w. Devastators, and 2x Assault Squads
- Devs could still fire at full BS after arriving from the pods.
- Assault Marines didn't scatter if arriving near the pods.
- Any unit hit by a Dev attack couldn't Overwatch, and the Assault Marines got some kind of other boost to go with it.

Firing at full BS and charging out of DS were pretty rare effects in 7th.

All those rules and it STILL wasn't the most broken Formation LOL

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Valkyrie wrote:

A.T. wrote:

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
6th Ed Drop pods. As a CSM player, having pods drop and not scatter was furiating.

I don't remember that one, was it a formation?

Drop Pods in general reduced scatter to avoid a mishap.

You had the Skyhammer Cashgrab Formation which was 2x Drop Pods w. Devastators, and 2x Assault Squads
- Devs could still fire at full BS after arriving from the pods.
- Assault Marines didn't scatter if arriving near the pods.
- Any unit hit by a Dev attack couldn't Overwatch, and the Assault Marines got some kind of other boost to go with it.

Firing at full BS and charging out of DS were pretty rare effects in 7th.

All those rules and it STILL wasn't the most broken Formation LOL

7th was nuts.

And lowered the bar enough were they could simply somewhat often write a faq and release a bit more regularly and that is touted as a second golden age...

Not Online!!! wrote:
[
7th was nuts.

And lowered the bar enough were they could simply somewhat often write a faq and release a bit more regularly and that is touted as a second golden age...

Haha, truth!

They've definitely made some positive moves in many areas, but Strats, three Marine Codexes in 4 years, 30$ single character models etc aren't in the 'positive' category.

7th was a low, low bar.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
[
7th was nuts.

And lowered the bar enough were they could simply somewhat often write a faq and release a bit more regularly and that is touted as a second golden age...

Haha, truth!

They've definitely made some positive moves in many areas, but Strats, three Marine Codexes in 4 years, 30$ single character models etc aren't in the 'positive' category.

7th was a low, low bar.

Yeah about what was coming afterwards, the indices made me, somewhat, happy.
What they did afterwards with cashgrab release after cashgrab release including PA and vigilus, nevermind supplement and dexes 2.0...
and you know what's funnier? 8th selling point, or one of it anyways, was that it was described as a "living ruleset" and the "last one."... yeah about that.
And ironically 9th isn't really a improvement, because we got day one DLC, and somehow lost in the transtition what, another 3 armies? Infact we haven't even had propperly adapted rulesets to the 9th edition changes for the vast majority of dexes.
Also SoB got within 1 year another codex to buy? And that is somehow acceptable? NVM that some of the new sister units don't fit 40k esthetically atleast not in the IoM forces. (yes the nundams look cool but esthetically they are too smooth, incidentally i'd have fix if i ever were to make chaos sisters but the nundams just don't fit.)

But all is fine in gw land, dare point that out and especially their anti consumer behaviour and you get shouted down. Because they improved their PR, and improveing is a lose word in that manner, because from an non existent PR department to a meh Pr department is an improvement. And ofcourse, it ain 7th edition unbalanced, so it's good, right guys?
...

I guess what i am getting at is the corporatisation is affecting the hobby in a negative way and you see it in the strategies GW employs, rangeing from FOMO to mobile games, to cycles of releases for rules, to first day dlc, etc...

Not Online!!! wrote:
Oh yes wound allocation:

Wound allocation in 5th i think with nob bikers especially.
That was NONSENSE.

Made for a quite the time of never giving regular mooks a sarg or special weapon

"Half of this pile of wounds goes to the regular dudes and the other half goes to the singular squad leader of the unit"

Definitely made Farsight Bomb a big spongey expensive nuisance once I figured out how to work that out towards the ending months of 5th

7th edition. All of it. There wasn't a single redeemable quality to that entire godawful ruleset.

Even Horus Heresy, the best possible iteration of it, is constantly teetering on the edge of exploding itself.

ERJAK wrote:
7th edition. All of it. There wasn't a single redeemable quality to that entire godawful ruleset.

Even Horus Heresy, the best possible iteration of it, is constantly teetering on the edge of exploding itself.

I guess, even FW 's output, at the time ruleswise often better quality, suffered from the nonsense...

 ChiliPowderKeg wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Oh yes wound allocation:

Wound allocation in 5th i think with nob bikers especially.
That was NONSENSE.

Made for a quite the time of never giving regular mooks a sarg or special weapon

"Half of this pile of wounds goes to the regular dudes and the other half goes to the singular squad leader of the unit"

Definitely made Farsight Bomb a big spongey expensive nuisance once I figured out how to work that out towards the ending months of 5th

Apologies if this sounds pedantic, but unless the entire unit was the sergeant and just 1 grunt, you could not do a 50/50 split like that with your wounds. You couldn't allocate more wounds in a wound group than there were models in that wound group.

Flamers hitting units inside Open-top.

Worst rule every mostly b.c there was Torrent flamers (You message out 12" from the gun and can pistol the 8" flamer marker on that point, so you had basically a long range flamer to hit almost any direction meaning you can hit 2 or more units without trying). Heldrakes, Immolators, Land Raiders, and many others with torrent flamers meant I had to stop taking Venoms and Raiders all of 6th. Which also meant I had to take Beaststars and quinstars.... they are fun for me but not for others and not what DE is.

People talk about 7th, but really 6th was 10x worst, 7th just had terrible power creep for the last year of the game and too many USR, but 6th rules were so bad they had to bring 7th out just after 2yrs.

 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.

Scatter dice for each jump/jet pack model in a unit. 10 Scatter rolls for a full assault squad took FOREVER.

 Amishprn86 wrote:
Flamers hitting units inside Open-top.

Worst rule every mostly b.c there was Torrent flamers (You message out 12" from the gun and can pistol the 8" flamer marker on that point, so you had basically a long range flamer to hit almost any direction meaning you can hit 2 or more units without trying). Heldrakes, Immolators, Land Raiders, and many others with torrent flamers meant I had to stop taking Venoms and Raiders all of 6th. Which also meant I had to take Beaststars and quinstars.... they are fun for me but not for others and not what DE is.

People talk about 7th, but really 6th was 10x worst, 7th just had terrible power creep for the last year of the game and too many USR, but 6th rules were so bad they had to bring 7th out just after 2yrs.

6th was actually a much worse ruleset (My character challenges your character, now I'm immune to 10 man assault terminator squad he was attached to!) but it had 2 specific things going for it that I think playing during 6th still ended up being better than playing during 7th.

1 was how short the edition was. By the time you got your first army built and painted you only had maybe a year and a half left of the edition.

The bigger one was that you could just assume you were playing rules wrong. 6th edition was before meaningful FAQs existed so there was always this idea in the back of your head that you must be doing something wrong and that the rules meant something other than what they said. GW's rules writing has always been fairly ambiguous, so without the 70 page FAQ that came out in 7th some part of you was still thinking maybe it's my fault. Maybe I read the rule wrong. This can't be what they meant to happen. It has to be something I did wrong. Which oddly made the nonsense less...nonesense-y.

TBF, 6th also had no / less formations, so that is also a massive plus.

Not Online!!! wrote:
TBF, 6th also had no / less formations, so that is also a massive plus.

It was less but there was definitely a few.

6th edition's biggest problem was that it came after 5th, which was like the most functional ruleset the game has ever had. All they needed to do was fix wound allocation, but of course GW had to be GW and throw the baby out with the bathwater and now here we are.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
6th edition's biggest problem was that it came after 5th, which was like the most functional ruleset the game has ever had. All they needed to do was fix wound allocation, but of course GW had to be GW and throw the baby out with the bathwater and now here we are.

imagine if they fixed 5th somewhat semi regular and reigned in some of the balance issues of dexes...
would be a damn good wargame...

Not Online!!! wrote:

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
6th edition's biggest problem was that it came after 5th, which was like the most functional ruleset the game has ever had. All they needed to do was fix wound allocation, but of course GW had to be GW and throw the baby out with the bathwater and now here we are.

imagine if they fixed 5th somewhat semi regular and reigned in some of the balance issues of dexes...
would be a damn good wargame...

Yeah, the ruleset was tight but 5th ed codices had the absolute worst internal balance ever. Every FOC slot had one super obvious unit that was head and shoulders better than everything else, so cookie cutter lists were the order of the day. Every Imperial Guard list was mech vets, Vendettas, and Manticores. Every Space Wolves list was Grey Hunters, Long Fangs, and outflanking Wolf Scouts. Yadda yadda yadda for every other book. If GW had been as committed to post-launch support then as it is now, we would have had an amazing game on our hands.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
...Every Imperial Guard list was mech vets...

Hey! I'll have you know my list included a minimum-size mech platoon right when I started playing before I switched it to all mech vets

 creeping-deth87 wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
6th edition's biggest problem was that it came after 5th, which was like the most functional ruleset the game has ever had. All they needed to do was fix wound allocation, but of course GW had to be GW and throw the baby out with the bathwater and now here we are.

imagine if they fixed 5th somewhat semi regular and reigned in some of the balance issues of dexes...
would be a damn good wargame...

Yeah, the ruleset was tight but 5th ed codices had the absolute worst internal balance ever. Every FOC slot had one super obvious unit that was head and shoulders better than everything else, so cookie cutter lists were the order of the day. Every Imperial Guard list was mech vets, Vendettas, and Manticores. Every Space Wolves list was Grey Hunters, Long Fangs, and outflanking Wolf Scouts. Yadda yadda yadda for every other book. If GW had been as committed to post-launch support then as it is now, we would have had an amazing game on our hands.

Yup.
And it isn't like GW didn't have people that were able to design armies in a way were the setup allowed for other options instead of mechvets and hydras f.e.
It's just that GW didn't bother to ask them for help, or institute general oversight over their rules output. Something they still don't considering the broken Day 1 dlc interaction right now making DE broken.

But what can you do...
Also 5th was for some factions just a tragedy, like the CSM dex wouldn't come out till 6th and so you were straddled with double prince lash and the 9 happy obliterators for a whole edition because the rest of the csm book was just that trash comparatively...

Everyone having the same base movement. Biggest thing that killed 3rd for me.

Not Online!!! wrote:
Also 5th was for some factions just a tragedy, like the CSM dex wouldn't come out till 6th...

That in of itself wasn't the problem - 4e CSM were only a year old when 5th edition was released and had already adopted the 5e style cheaper vehicles, free grenades and pistols, etc.

But 5e suffered from GWs usual lack of ability / desire to stick to a set power level for their books. Ward kept raising the takes while Cruddace phoned in anything that didn't interest him.

A.T. wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Also 5th was for some factions just a tragedy, like the CSM dex wouldn't come out till 6th...

That in of itself wasn't the problem - 4e CSM were only a year old when 5th edition was released and had already adopted the 5e style cheaper vehicles, free grenades and pistols, etc.

But 5e suffered from GWs usual lack of ability / desire to stick to a set power level for their books. Ward kept raising the takes while Cruddace phoned in anything that didn't interest him.

Well no, it actually did matter, because 4th edition CSM dex was an utter shitshow for a dex. Failing conceptually , design wise, and most importantly managed to increase the power from before via crippling the faction at the same time.
And yes it didn't help that GW did just randomly shift design paradigms jus because. And just like once upon a time, we see the same careless attitude of the rulewriters in regards to their new books, cue SM 2.0 supplements, the recently broken book of rust and de dex...

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
6th edition's biggest problem was that it came after 5th, which was like the most functional ruleset the game has ever had. All they needed to do was fix wound allocation, but of course GW had to be GW and throw the baby out with the bathwater and now here we are.

Imo 5th was also crippled by the removal of area terrain and fully embracing TLOS.

A.T. wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Also 5th was for some factions just a tragedy, like the CSM dex wouldn't come out till 6th...

That in of itself wasn't the problem - 4e CSM were only a year old when 5th edition was released and had already adopted the 5e style cheaper vehicles, free grenades and pistols, etc.

But 5e suffered from GWs usual lack of ability / desire to stick to a set power level for their books. Ward kept raising the takes while Cruddace phoned in anything that didn't interest him.

LOL Ward was NOWHERE near as bad with balance as Kelley was.

Not Online!!! wrote:

A.T. wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Also 5th was for some factions just a tragedy, like the CSM dex wouldn't come out till 6th...

That in of itself wasn't the problem - 4e CSM were only a year old when 5th edition was released and had already adopted the 5e style cheaper vehicles, free grenades and pistols, etc.

But 5e suffered from GWs usual lack of ability / desire to stick to a set power level for their books. Ward kept raising the takes while Cruddace phoned in anything that didn't interest him.

Well no, it actually did matter, because 4th edition CSM dex was an utter shitshow for a dex. Failing conceptually , design wise, and most importantly managed to increase the power from before via crippling the faction at the same time.
And yes it didn't help that GW did just randomly shift design paradigms jus because. And just like once upon a time, we see the same careless attitude of the rulewriters in regards to their new books, cue SM 2.0 supplements, the recently broken book of rust and de dex...

Yes, but was the 6th edition CSM codex really that much of an improvement? For me, personally, the only things that saved CSM in 6th/7th was IA13 and that brief, brief period we had with the Traitor Legions supplement.

Yeah, Ward was just crap at the important bits of the game like lore/narrative.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
LOL Ward was NOWHERE near as bad with balance as Kelley was.

5e Dark Eldar was in a reasonable place as far as the edition balance went. Wolves got played locally by a chaos player on the grounds that it was basically better at everything he wanted than both the SM and CSM book. So 50/50.

Ward started with Blood Angels (aka marines +1), moved on to the wonder that was 5e Grey Knights, and finished with 5e Necrons.
Cruddace kicked off with his favourites the Guard, followed by his not favourites the Tyranids, and if you ever want to see a textbook example of phoning it in try the WD Sisters of Battle where he didn't even bother changing the points on his copy/paste command squad entry (or managing more than base colours on the 4-5 models for his 'making of' website article). His rules screw-ups in the subsequent Sisters vs Nids battle report was also - in the spirit of the thread - distasteful.


Though props to whichever anonymous designer wrote the 5th edition pdf update for some of the old books. It was an inconsistant train-wreck of an errata but it actually did a pretty good job of bringing some of the outdated 3e-4e books into play again. Armies like post-update 5e Dark Angels weren't a joke.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
6th edition's biggest problem was that it came after 5th, which was like the most functional ruleset the game has ever had. All they needed to do was fix wound allocation, but of course GW had to be GW and throw the baby out with the bathwater and now here we are.

Imo 5th was also crippled by the removal of area terrain and fully embracing TLOS.

Neither of these things are true: area terrain was the most common terrain type in 5th and included most things, and TLOS wasn't indiscriminate line of sight like we have now.

Big Grey Book, page 13 wrote:For the clarity of the game it is important to be able to tell where the boundary of the terrain feature is, as these pieces normally count as difficult terrain. This is where we need to introduce the concept of 'area terrain'. You can show the boundary of a piece of area terrain by using a flat baseboard, an outline of lichen or sand, or by painting a slightly different color on your gaming board. Trees, rocks, ruins, or whatever is appropriate for the kind of terrain you are representing, are usually placed within the boundary of the area terrain's base.

In fact, 5e didn't really have TLOS (though they called it that) because it ignored banners and outstretched appendages:

Big Grey Book, page 16 wrote:Line of sight must be traced from the eyes of the firing model to any part of the body of at least one of the models in the target unit (for 'body' we mean its head, torso, legs and arms). Sometimes, all that may be visible of a model is a weapon, an antenna, a banner or some other ornament he is wearing or carrying (including its wings and tail, even though they are technically part of its body). In these cases, the model is not visible. These rules are intended to ensure that models don't get penalised for having impressive standards, blades, guns, majestic wings, etc.

I like that rule a lot more than the "the corner of my tread can see the edge of your wing, so all my guns are in range" in the current edition, though I think 9th is a better game.

It seems a lot of posts in this thread mistake rules going back beyond 7th edition, and remembered problems seem magnified.

A.T. wrote:

Ward started with Blood Angels (aka marines +1), moved on to the wonder that was 5e Grey Knights, and finished with 5e Necrons.

Oh. . . he did 5e Necrons too? May he forever be cursed for delivering Newcrons.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 DarkHound wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
6th edition's biggest problem was that it came after 5th, which was like the most functional ruleset the game has ever had. All they needed to do was fix wound allocation, but of course GW had to be GW and throw the baby out with the bathwater and now here we are.

Imo 5th was also crippled by the removal of area terrain and fully embracing TLOS.

Neither of these things are true: area terrain was the most common terrain type in 5th and included most things, and TLOS wasn't indiscriminate line of sight like we have now.

Area Terrain in 4th and Area Terrain in 5th were vastly different things. 5th edition used TLOS in the sense that they explicitly got rid of the more abstracted terrain levels/heights of 4th edition, and if you could "see" a model from the firing models view, you could shoot it, even if it was through a ruin or other "Area terrain".

Area terrain in 4th was automatically essentially what "Obscuring" terrain is today, with the addition of size categories. You couldn't shoot at a model on the other side of the area terrain as long as it was of equal size category or smaller. No models-eye shennanigans required. In addition, Area Terrian could not be "seen" into more than 6". So you could ave a Ruin that was 10" deep, and models could be in the ruin and still not see into/out of it.

5th ed junked a superior terrain paradigm, reducing the importance of maneuvering and hurting the game for the next 4 editions.