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No, 6th was and will be the worst edition every, 7th doesn't hold a candle to 6th.

Unlimited OW's
No jink saves so transports were impossible to use
No anti-air so flyers were impossible to counter
Disembark was after movement and still could not charge (so a worst vs of what it is now)
Challenges were worst than 7th
Vehicles were worst than 7th
D-weapons were crazier than 7th
Deathstars transition from 5th books to 6th books were much worst than 7th

Basically everything was worst than 7th from a core rules section.

While people say 7th had 2++ wound allocations, so did 6th and worst at times, both had same wound allocation rules but 6th had worst shooting phase rules so it amplified the allocation crap.

7th had a great start actually, yes some book imbalances but it wasn't until formations and a certain few spells that made it bad. It was also really easy to balance 7th with minor house rules, just say no Invis spells and 1 unit with D-weapon, its hard to change 10+ core rules to balance the game like you had to in 6th.

So why do players talk about 7th more? Maybe bc 6th barely lasted for 2yrs and it was so close to 7th that players most likely forgot, and 7th being so much closer to 8th/9th easier to remember.

The executive summary of the issues with 7th:

1) Core rules

Vehicles used to use a different system of defenses in previous editions than everything else, where they had an armor value - say, "12" and you had to roll a D6 and add the strength of your gun to figure out if you penetrated the armor, or glanced (your roll was equal to the armor value). Vehicles in ye olden days didnt even have a fixed hit point value at all, you rolled on a table and anything between 'the vehicle only hits on 1s next turn' to 'the vehicle is instantly ker-sploded' could happen.

In 7th, they added hit points to vehicles, and in their infinite wisdom almost all vehicles in the game had 3. Just 3. And if you did a 'glancing hit' you just took away one of the hit points, nothing else happened.

So the whole system with the armor values and the penetration table and the whatever else became super super secondary, because what youd do is take a strength 6 weapon, and just fish for 6s because most vheicles had a top armor characteristic of 12. 3 6s, and any tank in the game was toasted.

In addition to that, there were a huge number of other rule systems that just..never mattered, never got used, just sat there bloating up the game:

-ramming
-tank shock (vehicles running over infantry)
-sweeping advances and morale in general (morale was really really deadly/threatening, so GW gave almost everything access to fearless)
-grenades
-precision shots/strikes
-challenges
-half the universal special rules
-most of the psychic powers

2) THE PSYCHIC SYSTEM

The way psychic powers worked in 7th, every dex had their own power list like they do now, AND everyone had access to like...7 generic disciplines in the core rulebook.

And these generic disciplines included two...interesting choices.

Interesting choice #1 was the "Malefic" discipline, which let you summon daemons. for free. As any army. Even like....eldar. Or space marines. You didnt have to pay points for the daemon models you successfully summoned.

Interesting Choice #2 was a little spell called "invisibility". What this spell did, was give you complete immunity to blast weaponry, and template weaponry, and make all other weaponry hit you on 6s. So obviously, this was by a bonkers margin the very very best defensive buff in the entire game, for the entire edition, and it was never fixed.

The way this was..."balanced" was that power selection, along with warlord trait selection too was just random. Your psykers would show up to the battlefield and go "Hmmm, what do I know how to do today?" and if you chose to roll on the table with invisiblity, you could get some useless-ass gak, or your psycher could turn your nastiest unit into a basically unkillable behemoth.

And lastly, 3) The formations, or, how I learned to stop caring and love manufactured discontent.

This is the moment that GW realized, hey, we dont actually HAVE to make it so each new codex is strong by releasing strong units.

We can just...put some kind of bs rule in the game that basically says "you win if you bought the new book!"

And theyve never questioned it since - 7E had formations, 8E had "wait til your codex to get your stratagems and faction traits", and 9E has its doctrine bs.

 Sim-Life wrote:

Spoiler:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 blood reaper wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
A bunch of interesting concepts poorly realised.

Formations for instance? A nice way to encourage “fluffy” armies over min-maxing. However, they were far from equal. Some were frankly ridiculous, including special rules and hundreds of points worth of free equipment.

Fluffy?!? do you mean sales driven like a certain helldrake formation that didn't even function propperly?

i member far more formations falling into spam x unit and get boni, that maybee or not work at all.

I honestly never remember any of the formations being fluffy. They always just felt like a way to try and sell an arbitrary x amount of stuff.

That's how they always felt like to me. Buy (X) models, get (X) bonus rules. And the fact that they sold bundles for them made it look even more like that.

He said encourage fluffy lists. Not that they were fluffy. As with everything GW does they came up with a good idea and fethed it up with their usual incompetence.

Did they? Because if they sold lots of models for those formations, then I'd say their idea worked exactly how they wanted it to, whether they were "fluffy" or not.

I remember a friend of mine using the Raven Guard super formation, which gave them lots of cool deep striking rules, but were tied to scout squads being already set up on the table. It felt very fluffy and not oppressively powerful. Although he was also using it to run a fluffy list, not trying to break the game, so that helped.

It's the same as so many of GW rules, they can be fine if used in moderation, but GW leaves them open to abuse.

The AoD ruleset used in HH fixed a lot of the issues our group had with 7th Ed.
The Psychic trees were reworked and loads of useless USRs removed. Sure ramming and tank shock are still worthless 90% of the time but the huge lack of Fearless units in HH makes Sweeping Advances dangerous to everyone. The balance between armies and subfactions is pretty good IMO and it's only in rare cases that full subfactions (cough*Tsons*cough) are utterly broken. I think the lack of a competitive lobby helps with this. Nobody is expected to bring garbage units or bad lists but if you're rocking up to every game with Court of the Crimson King and 2 Sicaran Arcus's then you're going to run out of friends real fast.

8th fixed a lot of long running problems with the 3 to 7 ruleset like vehicles and monsters having totally different and wildly more or less powerful rules from each other, it brought back AP in a meaningful sense and did away with other silly cludges like Instant Death.

It's a shame I'm not really a fan of the strategem and CP paradigm for special abilities because when I first started looking at it I was really excited by how it solved a lot of problems. But it seems like six of one, half dozen of the other is the order of the day with GW rules sometimes. Even amazing rulesets like BFG had stinkers like the Necron fleet.

Formations were a great idea, hopelessly, comically implemented. Many of them were actually pretty fluffy. The problem is, the only ones anyone used (and therefore remembers) were broken in so many ways I'm sure I've erased a lot of the trauma from my memory. You had literally 300+ free points in some formations. Others increased the survivability of your army by 50% and others just let you ignore the FOC to take nothing but SH knights. It was dumb.

There were other problems with 7th that were mostly fixed in 8th. Sadly 8th introduced the slew of problems we currently have. Incidentally, that's one of my big problems with GW's approach to game design. We're not really on 9th edition, we're on the second iteration of the 3rd edition of the game because 1st and 2nd were all based on the same system, as were 3-7. That means a lot of the experience from previous systems is thrown out and you're starting from scratch again. For evidence of this check out all the early changes to 8th edition involving Deep Strike and Aircraft.>

Yeah it's true, in a lot of ways there've been 3 or 4 editions of 40K. Rogue Trader was a wacky weird roleplaying skirmish game. 2e was a significant departure from that into a slightly larger skirmish game with some vehicles. 3-7 were a radical departure that simplified the game radically but then gradually added cruft back in as time went on, and fiddled with small sections of the rules. But the core was essentially the same.

Now 8/9 seem to be operating on a similar paradigm. It's a bit exhausting to keep up with for me.

 the_scotsman wrote:
The way this was..."balanced" was that power selection, along with warlord trait selection too was just random. Your psykers would show up to the battlefield and go "Hmmm, what do I know how to do today?" and if you chose to roll on the table with invisiblity, you could get some useless-ass gak, or your psycher could turn your nastiest unit into a basically unkillable behemoth.

Pointless pedantry - it was arguably even worse than that, because Telepathy's Primaris Power (which you could always pick after rolling if you didn't like the result) was Psychic Shriek. Roll 3D6, do an unsaveable wound for every point over leadership. Basically mortals before mortals. Sure most things are LD8-10, so you do nothing a bunch of the time, but you spike that 3d6 a bit high (i.e. 15+), oh look that's a whole squad of say terminators dead (not that people ran terminators competitively, but still.) I think you had a 1 in 6 chance to scream a Wraithknight to death.

When people talk about the rules for an edition, they're really talking about a list of several different things:
1) Core rules (how models move/shoot/fight)
2 Unit rules (unit types, universal rules, etc.)
3) Missions (win conditions, deployment, length)
4) Army construction (how to build an army)
5) Army Rules (rules for each given faction)
6) Terrain rules (how models interact with scenery)

9th edition actually rates pretty well in most of these. the core rules are tight, simple, and solid. There aren't a ton of unit rules, and those that exist make sense. Oddly, unit rules in 9th are basically all keyword based, and come up in the relevant core rules. So, there is no section of the rulebook that tells you what the rules for say, infantry are. But the terrain rules mention infantry a lot, and the shooting rules note that infantry take a -1 to shoot heavy weapons after moving. 8th edition has missions that emphasis board control and are fine. Armies are built using preset detachments which give flexibility but are the same for all armies (with a handful of exceptions). Armies also cannot spam units, and troops are encouraged by the cheaper detachments and by ObSec. Army rules are bonkers, however, with so many rules for any given army that there is crazy bloat. The terrain rules are clear, technical, and while fiddly they seem pretty solid.

Okay, so what about 7th?
- Core rules were a hot mess, with complications quirks in things like the psychic phase, remvoing casualties, challenges, and of course, the last gasp of the all or nothing AP system (RIP).
- Unit rules... as noted, there were dozen and dozens of USRs, at least one of which was literally just two other USRs stapled together. Vehicles played totally differently from other models. Jump pack infantry was different from Jet Pack infantry. Fliers had their own whole section of the rules, but were also either vehicles or monsters. It was a lot.
- Missions I only played a few games, and can't comment on the missions. I forget if it still had kill points, which was another low point that stuck around way too long.
- Army construction - while not too dissimilar from today, in addition to a handful of core detachments there were dozens of army specific detachments, which often gave bonuses. Some of these nested, with a super detachment being made up of two or more smaller detachments. In theory, this could have been awesome. In practice, a few S tier formations dominated.
- Army Rules Honestly the basic army codexes were a bright spot for 7th edition. Because so many unit rules were baked into the main rulebook, the codexes could focus on fewer rules. OTOH, almost all armies had rules scattered among mulitple publications, leading to the infamous stack of hardcover books for even a single game.
-Terrain - I honestly can't remember interacting with terrain

IMO, the poster who noted that this was when GW stopped caring hit the nail on the head. Most of 7th edition was built on simply having MORE rules rather than better rules, and nothing was pruned or edited. Decent ideas were doomed by lazy execution, and bad ideas were never corrected. It was the longest stretch of time I spent not playing 40k, and I don't regret it at all.

 Amishprn86 wrote:
So why do players talk about 7th more?

They kind of blend together, so people remember 7e being the same kind of trainwreck as 6th but with formations on top.

Anecdotal, but I remember that in 7th edition I could field a mechanised sisters army for 1500pts, or the exact same models as marines for 1000pts - and aside from the usual S4/T4/ATSKNF/etc bonuses the marines would also have army wide obsec and game long rerolls. That marine army would be considered unoptimised and uncompetitive.

7th edition was a time when a 55pt skitarri unit could formation-up for 135pts of free gear and remove gets hot from their weapons and abilities like +3 cover saves or rerolls to hit... and still not be considered the top faction. Whatever reigning-in GW did of rules between 6th and 7th they undid twice over with subsequent releases.

To add to da Boss: 9th with the morale system from 7th would actually be pretty awesome, as for the first time GW seems to write Codizes that don't ignore morale 90% if the time, but on the other hand the morale rules themselves are also pretty worthless nowadays

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

Spoiler:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 blood reaper wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
A bunch of interesting concepts poorly realised.

Formations for instance? A nice way to encourage “fluffy” armies over min-maxing. However, they were far from equal. Some were frankly ridiculous, including special rules and hundreds of points worth of free equipment.

Fluffy?!? do you mean sales driven like a certain helldrake formation that didn't even function propperly?

i member far more formations falling into spam x unit and get boni, that maybee or not work at all.

I honestly never remember any of the formations being fluffy. They always just felt like a way to try and sell an arbitrary x amount of stuff.

That's how they always felt like to me. Buy (X) models, get (X) bonus rules. And the fact that they sold bundles for them made it look even more like that.

He said encourage fluffy lists. Not that they were fluffy. As with everything GW does they came up with a good idea and fethed it up with their usual incompetence.

Did they? Because if they sold lots of models for those formations, then I'd say their idea worked exactly how they wanted it to, whether they were "fluffy" or not.

Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.

Honestly 7th was bad but not as bad as everybody makes it out to be. A huge part of the problem was in the codex creep and poor rules interactions (e.g. rerolling 2+ invulns or whatever) and ridiculous detachment bonuses that gave you hundreds of points of free things (e.g. Gladius). Honestly I really liked formations and detachments because they often rewarded you for taking fluffy combinations and provided a sort of shopping list when you wanted to expand your force. As usual, the problem was in the balancing or lack thereof.

Horus Heresy still uses 7th and it works fairly well there where they don't have nearly as much of that crap.

Don't get me wrong it was still pretty bad but I don't think it was unsalvageable.

It wasn't unsalvageable, but unfortunately there was never a single try from GW to salvage it.

 Sim-Life wrote:

Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.

Gonna press X to doubt that one edition of 40k was so bad that it caused store closures, staff reductions, and the removal of the CEO.
7th was released in May 2014 and 8th in June 2017. In 3 years you're saying that 40k singlehandedly caused all of this?

 Gert wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.

Gonna press X to doubt that one edition of 40k was so bad that it caused store closures, staff reductions, and the removal of the CEO.
7th was released in May 2014 and 8th in June 2017. In 3 years you're saying that 40k singlehandedly caused all of this?

I would assume 7th was the final straw for a lot of people. As has been said 6th wasn't the best and when 7th came around and it was the same as usual you think its a coincidence that there was a mass exodus to other game systems? It just so happens that WmH/X-Wing peaked to the point of having a shot at the crown during 7th and crashed when 8th launched? As well as the aforementioned staff cuts and store closures.

 Gert wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.

Gonna press X to doubt that one edition of 40k was so bad that it caused store closures, staff reductions, and the removal of the CEO.
7th was released in May 2014 and 8th in June 2017. In 3 years you're saying that 40k singlehandedly caused all of this?

The picture is a bit more complex. Warhammer Fantasy was just about dead as well. I recall everyone posting that marketing magazine that listed the top selling games and Fantasy never made the list for quite a few years.

But given that 40K is THE money maker any falter there when the other flagship product is doing poorly will definitely set things in motion.

Dudeface wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:
40k community- "7th is the worst edition!"
9th- "Hold my beer!"

Not even close, until 9th armies start getting 25% of their army for free, units can be summoned in for free (or was that 6th? Kinda blurred into one), stacked bombs with a 2++ rerolling 1s, invisibility. That alone was worth burning it down.

Well, yes. The cliche of when someone says "hold my beer", it means they are about to do something stupid. 9th is well on that way if you ask me.

Wayniac wrote:
Horus Heresy still uses 7th and it works fairly well there where they don't have nearly as much of that crap.

Don't get me wrong it was still pretty bad but I don't think it was unsalvageable.

I never played 7th but I do play HH, and it stands out to me that just about all the things that people really vocally complain about with 7th outright don't exist in HH. No Fearless armies (or even ATSKNF), no Invisibility, no re-rolling 2++, and no formations.

The thing that seems to have been carried forward though, and my main gripe with the system, is that its implementation of USRs reminds me of the code obfuscation contests we'd do in college where the objective was to make your technically functional content as obtuse and unreadable as possible. Maybe I just need a cheat-sheet of all the USRs, long as that might be.

Loosing grip with all those supplementary books bolstering the existing codices.
Terrible edition.

I really quite enjoyed the army-building 7th had in it's super formations made of formations, and I thought it was a neat way to allow a diversity of unit types, and have folks take less than optimal units. Loved my Slaughtercult in my Khorne Bloodbound, and the rules were very thematic.

The main issue, was not everyone had these sorts of detachments, and some were a lot better than others.

I wish they made the rules so that none of the formations could have been taken outside of the 'Decurion' style detachment. That would have limited folks just cherry-picking the best rules with no downside, but alas. Also, Admec and Space Marines getting free models/upgrades was pretty silly.

 Sim-Life wrote:
I would assume 7th was the final straw for a lot of people. As has been said 6th wasn't the best and when 7th came around and it was the same as usual you think its a coincidence that there was a mass exodus to other game systems? It just so happens that WmH/X-Wing peaked to the point of having a shot at the crown during 7th and crashed when 8th launched? As well as the aforementioned staff cuts and store closures.

Cool so 7th Edition didn't cause them, years of mismanaged products and poor community engagement did.
As a side note, the one-man stores I have been to have always made sense to be one-man. London had like 5 when I visited just before 7th dropped and while the Covent Garden store was a nice little Hobbit Hole, you could tell I was the first person to come in for a while. In big cities like Edinburgh, Nottingham, or Birmingham it makes sense to have more than one employee. But Stirling or store 4/5 in London? Not so much.
7th was without a doubt a final nail but not the main cause of GW's dip in 2015-17.

 Gert wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

Well given that 7th resulted in GW having to cut way back on stores, turned all the stores to one-man operations and finally motivated the board to boot Kirby out due to hovering dangerously near the red in his final few years I'd say yes, they fethed it up.

Gonna press X to doubt that one edition of 40k was so bad that it caused store closures, staff reductions, and the removal of the CEO.
7th was released in May 2014 and 8th in June 2017. In 3 years you're saying that 40k singlehandedly caused all of this?

Like others have said, there's more to it than JUST 40k sales on the GW side, but yeah, the edition was actually that bad. A lot of the non-GW gaming stores in my area were able to stay afloat based solely on 40k sales up to that point. Even in "down times" when the game was less popular. But sales dipped so bad in 7th that no less than 5 stores closed due to lagging 40k sales. It was also (arguably) the worst edition for needing multiple sources to play your army. White Dwarf was basically a nice looking pamphlet that came out literally weekly and often had rules. If you weren't keeping up on your weekly WD, you were missing out. It also made it really hard for tournament organizers. A lot of groups stopped doing 40k tournaments during 7th because of how much of a PITA it was. This is also why Reece and Co are such a big part of the picture now. IMO they (again, arguably) saved the competitive 40k scene in the states because it was dead at that point due to 7th.

Fantasy was also DOA, and you had, for the first time ever (I think - certainly the first time in a LONG time) 40k get passed by X-Wing as the "most popular miniatures game" in terms of sales. So the cash cow is now number 2, the backup game isn't on the radar and sales of your product have sunk so bad it's actually taking people who were on the edge and putting them out of business. Yeah, 7th was that bad.

40k was non-existent in my area for a while form the middle of 7th to a little after the launch of 8th and that's after it had been wildly easy for years to find a game. It just ... died.

 Grimtuff wrote:

Dudeface wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:
40k community- "7th is the worst edition!"
9th- "Hold my beer!"

Not even close, until 9th armies start getting 25% of their army for free, units can be summoned in for free (or was that 6th? Kinda blurred into one), stacked bombs with a 2++ rerolling 1s, invisibility. That alone was worth burning it down.

Well, yes. The cliche of when someone says "hold my beer", it means they are about to do something stupid. 9th is well on that way if you ask me.

Oh I know, I just was pointing out the leaps and bounds 9th will need to take to get anywhere near.

 Gert wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
I would assume 7th was the final straw for a lot of people. As has been said 6th wasn't the best and when 7th came around and it was the same as usual you think its a coincidence that there was a mass exodus to other game systems? It just so happens that WmH/X-Wing peaked to the point of having a shot at the crown during 7th and crashed when 8th launched? As well as the aforementioned staff cuts and store closures.

Cool so 7th Edition didn't cause them, years of mismanaged products and poor community engagement did.
As a side note, the one-man stores I have been to have always made sense to be one-man. London had like 5 when I visited just before 7th dropped and while the Covent Garden store was a nice little Hobbit Hole, you could tell I was the first person to come in for a while. In big cities like Edinburgh, Nottingham, or Birmingham it makes sense to have more than one employee. But Stirling or store 4/5 in London? Not so much.
7th was without a doubt a final nail but not the main cause of GW's dip in 2015-17.

No, just 7th being so bad was enough to make people who had previously been able to overlook the aforementioned mismanagement to actually decide to leave. If the one product line you had keeping you afloat sinks then something has gone badly wrong. Thus, 7th was the cause.

Trying to balance out super powerful must-take models with good-to-mediocre models by making the second category free was a very peculiar design choice that soured a lot of folks on that edition.

Plus all the broken units and combinations like invisibility death stars.

I'll be honest from the start, I am incredibly biased because I play Orkz and Orkz only, and GW did orkz dirty as all hell in 7th.

7th edition launched with Orkz getting the 1st codex...which is kind of nice since we hadn't had a codex update since 4th! coming hot on the heels of the end of 6th it was kind of touted as the bellwether for 7th edition and it came in as ...well, kind of mediocre. Some things got fixed, some things got minor buffs, a lot of stuff got toned down. So 7th started with a lot of hope that the game would finally tone down the arms race and maybe make the game a bit more enjoyable. Only bad part was that the 7th edition ork codex was so bad that 5th edition and 6th edition codex's were routinely trouncing it with relative ease. But we all thought "hey it is what it is, when they get their next codex it will turn it down as well"

That level of hope lasted about 5-6 months until codex NECRONS came out and the birth of DECURION! See, ork formations were...kind of crap. Our buffs were minor in the extreme, take these 12 units and if you do, then everyone who is in base to base gets 1 free hammer of wrath attack on the charge....if you roll a 10+ yeah it was that bad.

Decurion on the other side...well its core limitations were almost as bad but significantly better in that they weren't tax units but the big upside....well, Orkz get HoW attacks on a 10+ on the charge, Necrons got +1 to reanimation rolls, which effectively gave their entire army a 4+ Reanimation protocol which was the best you could get it to.

Ok, well....umm..just a one off, it isn't that bad, GW can just nerf them in 2-4 years whenever they get around to it. And then Eldar, Space Marines and Tau all got their codexs and Ork players realized...Necrons weren't the outlier....we were. Eldar were the pinnacle of ridiculous in 7th. You had to actively try to take a bad list in 7th as Eldar. Scatbikes and Wraithknights were the flavor of the edition but D-scythe, D-cannon wraithguard were good, as were warp spiders and basically everything else. D-weapons everywhere. Marines on the other hand....they got a formation which effectively gave them 500+ points of Free razorbacks, Tau? Triptide wing. 3-9 Riptides, they all get +1BS shooting at targets already targeted they got reroll for their nova charge and the best part? They could shoot twice if they stood still...or 4 times basically if you activated ripple fire. I watched more than 1 game of Tau triptide wing vs Marine Demi-company that came down to whether or not the Tau player could table the Marine player in time to win the game. .....think about what I just said...Tau players would win by Tabling a Marine list that had 1/3rd more points than they did. Put that in 9th edition perspective, that would be a Tau list at 2000pts TABLING a Marine list at 2,700pt Marine list, optimized mind you.

I would walk into game stores for a tournament in 7th and my opponents would literally be smiling with glee that they got the "easy win" against an Ork army, I am not exaggerating here at all. I literally had players apologizing to me for how 1 sided the game was going to be. I was able to pull out a few stunners but they were few and far between, I walked into every single game in 7th knowing that my opponent was basically starting the game with 200-500pts more than me and better rules to boot.

7th was so incredibly broken that I witnessed several gaming communities basically shut down during this dark time. People just got sick and tired of seeing broken formations, or the codex imbalance being so blatantly obvious that the army they put hundreds if not thousands of dollars into was for all intents and purposes, useless.

7th edition sucked HARD. You can argue 6th was just as bad or worse, its irrelevant. 6th was bad and lasted a bit less than 2 years, 7th was terrible and lasted almost exactly 3 years. if you factor in how bad the Ork codex sucked, that meant Orkz had to go 2008 until November of 2018 before we had a codex worth playing. Most of us would have been happy to keep playing the 4th edition codex in 7th, that is how bad it was.

 catbarf wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
Horus Heresy still uses 7th and it works fairly well there where they don't have nearly as much of that crap.

Don't get me wrong it was still pretty bad but I don't think it was unsalvageable.

I never played 7th but I do play HH, and it stands out to me that just about all the things that people really vocally complain about with 7th outright don't exist in HH. No Fearless armies (or even ATSKNF), no Invisibility, no re-rolling 2++, and no formations.

The thing that seems to have been carried forward though, and my main gripe with the system, is that its implementation of USRs reminds me of the code obfuscation contests we'd do in college where the objective was to make your technically functional content as obtuse and unreadable as possible. Maybe I just need a cheat-sheet of all the USRs, long as that might be.

I must say I always get the feeling that HH works pretty fine despite bad core rules, not because of them. Yes, unlike 40K morale is actually used. Also psykers are pretty rare so the bad psychic rules don't show as much. However, HH has a lot of superheavy tanks that only work because superheavies outright ignore most vehicle rules.
Then you get dozer blades for everyone to ignore terrain. You get Upgrades to ignore the Melter rule and to ignore Lascannons iirc. So in short the game had to give every vehicle Upgrades to ignore vehicle rules which makes it quite obvious that their rules are rubbish. The faction whose roster is made up of walkers hardly features any actual walkers (Mechanicum) because the walker rules are terrible, they're all monsters instead.
Any CC unit needs a list of at least 5 USRs to be playable because CC is extremely punished in 6th/7th rules system.
Any weapon that's not Ap3 or better is practically useless because most armies have a 3+ so Ap 4 to 6 doesn't matter with the old AP system.
And quad-mortars aren't just bad because how badly pointed they are(were?) but also because the blast system breaks down with these kinds of units and turns the game into a slog.
Yes, FW shows what could have been possible even with 7th base rules, but HH still suffers from its terrible basic rules and would deserve a proper foundation.

8th was a great example of what happens when GW keeps their hand on the wheel.

9th is showing us what happens when they let go.

7th was when they put their hands on their foot to keep the gas pedal pinned to the floor.