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I don't understand all the hate for 9th. Its like you guys all forgot the problems we had in 8th. Did you guys forget about the unkillable Iron Hands list? about the Eldar flying shenanigans? 8th wasn't bad, neither is 9th, 7th was just a fethstorm of bad.

Sure we have some broken lists/armies right now, but nowhere near the peak levels of stupid we were seeing.

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
My friends joined during 7th, and I joined during 8th, and we are all currently playing 8th. I played 7th twice, using 30k armies. I don't have much experience when it comes to the edition, and no experience when it comes to older ones. Why is 7th considered the worst edition for 40k?

In 9th, a good 2000pt list vs a bad 2000pt list results in a fairly onesided tabling around turn two or three with only a handful of models on the good list dead.

In 7th, a good list 1850pt list vs a bad 5000pt list could easily result in a completely onesided tabling top of turn two with ZERO models dead on the 1850 side.

Usually one problem at a time in 8th and IH for example was swiftly nerfed as soon as a new problem showed up and all marines got the doctrine nerf.

So far in 9th we had a few ok and so releases until Drukhari came and played 9,5 and after that the new books continue with 9,5 while the rest play 8th to 9th. Drukhari and And mech got a slap on the wrist and nothing really changed for most armies the last 6 months. Besides getting crushed by Drukhari and AM now you also get crushed by Dreadknights and buggies/planes. Instead of dropping FAQs or erratas or balance patches GW continue with physical books and stupid day 0 dlc supplements. Those supplements is probably a big reason for why they don't do quick pdf fixes. They don't want to fix the new menace before they release the book that uses it.

SemperMortis wrote:
I don't understand all the hate for 9th. Its like you guys all forgot the problems we had in 8th. Did you guys forget about the unkillable Iron Hands list? about the Eldar flying shenanigans? 8th wasn't bad, neither is 9th, 7th was just a fethstorm of bad.

Sure we have some broken lists/armies right now, but nowhere near the peak levels of stupid we were seeing.

Previous editions being bad doesn't excuse 9th from also being bad.

 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?

AoS and 40k at the same time definitely did.

 LunarSol wrote:
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.

Man how easily people forget how screwy 8th was.


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Klickor wrote:
Usually one problem at a time in 8th and IH for example was swiftly nerfed as soon as a new problem showed up and all marines got the doctrine nerf.

So far in 9th we had a few ok and so releases until Drukhari came and played 9,5 and after that the new books continue with 9,5 while the rest play 8th to 9th. Drukhari and And mech got a slap on the wrist and nothing really changed for most armies the last 6 months. Besides getting crushed by Drukhari and AM now you also get crushed by Dreadknights and buggies/planes. Instead of dropping FAQs or erratas or balance patches GW continue with physical books and stupid day 0 dlc supplements. Those supplements is probably a big reason for why they don't do quick pdf fixes. They don't want to fix the new menace before they release the book that uses it.

IH were such a tiny part of 8th being at the ass end of it.

Ynnari, Flyrant spam, Bobby Razorback spam, Razorwing spam, hyper efficient Reapers, Castellans, mega CP factories, Smash Captains, Centurion infiltrators, TFC spam, etc, etc, etc....

DE is totally beatable with a current book ( and some old ones ) even if they're too strong. Admech is busted for a portion of their book and has too many tools alongside planes and artillery. Orks are busted with a sub-faction using planes and artillery.

People pretend that the current admech and ork were the ones that were being used since the books came out - those lists are like a month or two old...

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
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.

Man how easily people forget how screwy 8th was.

That's why I say hand on the wheel. The car was drifting all over the place, but at the very least it felt like someone was trying to correct back to center.

Perhaps the better analogy for 9th is that the hand is on the wheel but wildly swerving toward every exit ramp it sees?

 LunarSol wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
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.

Man how easily people forget how screwy 8th was.

That's why I say hand on the wheel. The car was drifting all over the place, but at the very least it felt like someone was trying to correct back to center.

Perhaps the better analogy for 9th is that the hand is on the wheel but wildly swerving toward every exit ramp it sees?

You have that impression, because there was a schedule for FAQs with more to fix that hit regularly ( except when they missed it one time and people freaked the f out ). They've been doing the same thing except also taking the extra step of semi-nerfing DE and Admech on a much faster schedule. We got a Chapter Approved five months ago.

The Ork books has been out officially for two months and Freebootas with buggies and jets is like a month old.

We're certainly due some sort of action from GW before too long.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
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.

Man how easily people forget how screwy 8th was.

That's why I say hand on the wheel. The car was drifting all over the place, but at the very least it felt like someone was trying to correct back to center.

Perhaps the better analogy for 9th is that the hand is on the wheel but wildly swerving toward every exit ramp it sees?

You have that impression, because there was a schedule for FAQs with more to fix that hit regularly ( except when they missed it one time and people freaked the f out ). They've been doing the same thing except also taking the extra step of semi-nerfing DE and Admech on a much faster schedule. We got a Chapter Approved five months ago.

The Ork books has been out officially for two months and Freebootas with buggies and jets is like a month old.

We're certainly due some sort of action from GW before too long.

Its not just that tho, new GK's are also surprisingly very strong (for sure S tier, but not Ork level of S tier, DE level). But we also have some armies that are borderline not playable, GSC, Tau, heck even new BA's are pretty bad (WS and EP's just does what they do but better), and a few more that are on extreme hard mode (CWE without allies for example, Ynnari players, IG, Knights/Chaos Knights with no ally, IF) in t8h IDK any army that was so unplayable compare to 9th.

NOTE: in 8th there were 2 groups of Players ITC and non ITC, each had different armies that were good and bad, IH playing in Maelstrom was actually a middle tier army. And No not everyone played ITC, but numbers and tier lists for armies were based off of ITC, it was a daily controversy.

Yea, 8th was very fragmented. It made reconciling experiences even harder.

GKs have a great secondary and some overly efficient dreadknights. I'd dare say the rest is mostly fine.

T'au and GSC are the ones to watch with their books due soon. Tyranids took a 5-0 in a tournament that allowed the book this past weekend, but otherwise not much data to look into there yet.

At some point you have to factor in that the weaker armies aren't going to be played by the more competitive types ( like Siegler not championing T'au like he used to ) and those armies just don't get used to their full potential. There's a single guy who does great with GSC ( dodging bad matchups occasionally, I'm sure ), but other players can't replicate, because it requires specific units they may not have on hand. Same thing with FW heavy lists like with the Magaera.

8th had more broken lists trought is duration, they just changed.

We started with conscript spam and ended up with inmortal iron hand leviathans.

But we wen't trought guilliman flyer spam, azrael 4++ parking lot, turn-1 bloodletter bombs and double shooting obliterators, shadowswords making all vehicles useless and then imperial knights making shadowswords useless, infinite manticore barrages, loyal 32, smash captains, inmortal castellans, custodes bikers, inmortal celestine, etc, etc...

But being fair, the community was very much active and GW was very much active with nerfs and balance changes.

And 8th was probably the edition I have played most and I enjoyed it.

The truth is, if I haven't been able to enjoy 9th as much as 8th is because the pandemic.

I did go from playing 1-2 tournaments a month in my store with my friends trought all of 8th to 1 tournament each 5-6 months in 9th and my store being closed because they didn't survived the pandemic.

It sucks, and sucked the enjoyement of the game from me.

8th had two big high points going for it.

1: The initial release and indexes felt like a new and refreshing shakeup of the game, and while it had some imbalances, in general the game felt like a much welcome reprieve from 7th and it had a lot of potential.

2. Just before the release of the SM codex 2.0, the game had been adjusted and readjusted into a pretty good state, balance wise.

Unfortunately in both instances GW didn't let the game "breathe" for hardly any amount of time before blasting it apart with relentless releases.

The thing is during 8th I still held some hope. 9th, despite having some strong points, has been really dissapointing in comparisson. GW has effectively eroded my faith in their handling of things.

I would say 8th post SM codex 2.0 but before all supplements was the most balanced state 40k has been in decades.

 Galas wrote:
I would say 8th post SM codex 2.0 but before all supplements was the most balanced state 40k has been in decades.

Yeah, ok. I can roll with that. The supplements were just awful additions to 40k, rulrs wise.

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

We're not quite there yet. It's still saveable right now.

7th was objectively worse than 9th, no doubt. But I agree with the people who say that the way 9th has shook out since the DE codex is actually more disappointing than 7th was. I feel like 9th shows that GW didn't actually learn any lessons at all from what went wrong last time.

 Galas wrote:
I would say 8th post SM codex 2.0 but before all supplements was the most balanced state 40k has been in decades.

No - it was definitely Mar 2020 to Dec 2020.


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yukishiro1 wrote:
7th was objectively worse than 9th, no doubt. But I agree with the people who say that the way 9th has shook out since the DE codex is actually more disappointing than 7th was. I feel like 9th shows that GW didn't actually learn any lessons at all from what went wrong last time.

So, Sisters, GK, TS, and BT are as bad as Admech and a subset of Orks? Maybe some might be tempted to put Dreadknights on the same short list as Ork buggies and flyers, but I find that to be a far cry from 7th.

I think people are more disappointed, because they can sense that GW finally knows a bit better and it still keeps slipping away rather than them having not learned anything at all.

A side note, not about others but for me 7th was and will be the greatest bc I played Corsairs (No formations actually) and GW will never have had another more fun (actually very balanced IF no formations) army rules list every again, I will never have games more fun than I had in 7th.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
7th was objectively worse than 9th, no doubt. But I agree with the people who say that the way 9th has shook out since the DE codex is actually more disappointing than 7th was. I feel like 9th shows that GW didn't actually learn any lessons at all from what went wrong last time.

So, Sisters, GK, TS, and BT are as bad as Admech and a subset of Orks? Maybe some might be tempted to put Dreadknights on the same short list as Ork buggies and flyers, but I find that to be a far cry from 7th.

I think people are more disappointed, because they can sense that GW finally knows a bit better and it still keeps slipping away rather than them having not learned anything at all.

That's just a balance thing, and GW has always been terrible at balance and always will be terrible at balance; before the last six months I would have said they are getting better at balance, now I think you can't even say that. But that isn't actually what I was getting at.

I realize maybe it sounded like I was talking only about balance because I mentioned the DE Codex as being the turning point, but my "they haven't learned anything" was less about narrow balance in the sense of creating unbalanced monsters and more about bloat and the general structure of the way editions progress.

Fundamentally 7th wasn't bad just because the balance was terrible, 7th was bad because the system got so corpulent and bloated that it started collapsing in on itself. The bad balance was more of a symptom than a root cause. And I think from the way 9th has gone we have seen that same thing happen - 9th isn't failing just because Ad Mech+, it's failing because it's becoming the same sort of bloated mess that 7th was. It just fundamentally isn't fun to play any more, especially if you have an old book trying to compete with the new bloat.

The lesson GW ought to have learned from 8th was that the best thing they ever did was resetting things with the indexes. In 9th they took precisely the opposite approach, and aggressively didn't reset anything, to the point where you have truly absurd things like 1W CSM a year and a half after loyalists went to 2W. And yet at the very same time, they aggressively bloated out everything with more and more rules interactions, which creates monsters like ad mech because that's what happens when you do that.

I think that we can use the recent GK as a meter to show how balance has changed.

We all can agree that GK are extremely good, probably top tier, due to the dreadknight datasheet being criminally undercosted. If it wasn't for that, it would be a decent dex but nothing special.

Let's assume that we ultra nerf the Dreadknights, by increasing the cost by 40 points (!). This puts the cost of the typical DK setup at over 200 points. Still usable probably, but definitely no longer OP.

If we operate under this assumption, it means that the current difference between an average dex and one perceived as top tier, is around 160-200 points (current GK lists play 4 or 5 DK).

In other terms, the difference between average tier and top tier is around 8-10% efficiency in points.

In 7th, against top tier lists you could very well take 4k point lists and still lose if you didn't have one of the top dexes.

We use the same terms "OP" "Unbalanced" "Crap dex" that we used in 7th, but the meaning of those terms has changed quite a lot in these years.

 Amishprn86 wrote:
A side note, not about others but for me 7th was and will be the greatest bc I played Corsairs (No formations actually) and GW will never have had another more fun (actually very balanced IF no formations) army rules list every again, I will never have games more fun than I had in 7th.

The warp maze psychic power (put target unit into Ongoing Reserves) was simultaneously the funniest and most wildly unbalanced thing that has ever existed.

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
My friends joined during 7th, and I joined during 8th, and we are all currently playing 8th. I played 7th twice, using 30k armies. I don't have much experience when it comes to the edition, and no experience when it comes to older ones. Why is 7th considered the worst edition for 40k?

Actually 6th edition is the worst edition, it was just not around long enough for people to remember. it lasted all of 14 months before GW killed it(even they realized how bad it was). 7th stuck around for 3 years and started out with improvements to 6th, then about half way through the formation spam started.

Our group rates 9th just behind 6th in terms of worst edition. they replaced the problems with 7th edition formation spam with stratagem spam, codex bloat, and stupid levels of lethality among many of it's other problems.

That's just a balance thing, and GW has always been terrible at balance and always will be terrible at balance; before the last six months I would have said they are getting better at balance, now I think you can't even say that. But that isn't actually what I was getting at.

That is mostly because the game was never intended to be balanced in the way that they are trying to make it in 9th ed. it was designed for hanging out with friends rolling dice and having a good time playing in the lore of the 40K universe. i dare say it was intended to be un-balanced because it was not meant for tournament play at it's core. The draw was playing the game, not pure competition. remember the game started out as space crusade the scifi version of hero quest.

Every army had built in handicaps and strengths that you could exploit but they were not otherwise "equal" like something akin to chess.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
7th was objectively worse than 9th, no doubt. But I agree with the people who say that the way 9th has shook out since the DE codex is actually more disappointing than 7th was. I feel like 9th shows that GW didn't actually learn any lessons at all from what went wrong last time.

So, Sisters, GK, TS, and BT are as bad as Admech and a subset of Orks? Maybe some might be tempted to put Dreadknights on the same short list as Ork buggies and flyers, but I find that to be a far cry from 7th.

I think people are more disappointed, because they can sense that GW finally knows a bit better and it still keeps slipping away rather than them having not learned anything at all.

I can definitely agree on your second point. Gw were quick to nerf the most egregious stuff in the DE and Admech codexes, but they still have a ways to go, and they've been dragging their feet on a lot of other things. Hell, it took them almost a year to fix the basic rules for Dreadclaws. And they're still in the wrong FOC slot.

 aphyon wrote:

That is mostly because the game was never intended to be balanced in the way that they are trying to make it in 9th ed. it was designed for hanging out with friends rolling dice and having a good time playing in the lore of the 40K universe. i dare say it was intended to be un-balanced because it was not meant for tournament play at it's core. The draw was playing the game, not pure competition. remember the game started out as space crusade the scifi version of hero quest

"This" game started from a WW2 ruleset, the game that started from Space Crusade was stopped with 2nd Edi

and 7th was meant as a tournament game, as no casual/narritive player was chasing the meta and bought the latest gak that changed every 2 months to compete at events
those people played their Orcs, just bought 1 Wraithknight instead of 3 and did not cared that playing the same army list twice within a month was not an option if you wanted to be top 3

and don't follow the GW advertising/narrative that balance is for events
tournaments don't care about Errata/FAQ/Balance, because of those are needed they are done by the TO anyway. 7th had no rules support from GW, but every tournament had a FAQ/Errata to solve rules problems in advance for the event
Tournaments don't care if there are just 3 Factions viable to win the event, those that want to be top will play one of those 3 factions and don't care about the rest

Balance is important for casual and narrative play, if you make a pure casual game that is there to play Crusade like campaigns, balance between units within a Codex and between factions is much more important so that everyone can buy/play what they like and have fun (same as all starter boxes must have equal points and be the same strength for such a system)

for a tournament, no problem if there is no balance, the worst that happens is that everyone plays the same faction with the same army list and no one cares (except the casual player who wants to bring his army to an event and have fun but than again, if the balance is needed for the casual player and not the tournament)

Balance is important for casual and narrative play, if you make a pure casual game that is there to play Crusade like campaigns, balance between units within a Codex and between factions is much more important so that everyone can buy/play what they like and have fun (same as all starter boxes must have equal points and be the same strength for such a system)

Except the fact that there was a point in time that GW pointedly said that codex points costs were based on the value of a unit not based on how it compared to another faction, but how important it was within it's own faction.

Lore is the most important basis for casual or narrative play, not how one factions balances against another faction in points etc... the reason why the old hammer players always look back to the 3rd/4th edition army lists/faction special rules/codexes (not the core game rules) as one of the high points of the game because the factions behaved as they would within the 40K universe. the 3.5 chaos codex is still so loved because of this very reason.

 Amishprn86 wrote:
A side note, not about others but for me 7th was and will be the greatest bc I played Corsairs (No formations actually) and GW will never have had another more fun (actually very balanced IF no formations) army rules list every again, I will never have games more fun than I had in 7th.

Aye , i agree with that , for r&h or corsairs there never was a better time.

I Miss my militia platoons and grenadiers.


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 aphyon wrote:

Balance is important for casual and narrative play, if you make a pure casual game that is there to play Crusade like campaigns, balance between units within a Codex and between factions is much more important so that everyone can buy/play what they like and have fun (same as all starter boxes must have equal points and be the same strength for such a system)

Except the fact that there was a point in time that GW pointedly said that codex points costs were based on the value of a unit not based on how it compared to another faction, but how important it was within it's own faction.

Lore is the most important basis for casual or narrative play, not how one factions balances against another faction in points etc... the reason why the old hammer players always look back to the 3rd/4th edition army lists/faction special rules/codexes (not the core game rules) as one of the high points of the game because the factions behaved as they would within the 40K universe. the 3.5 chaos codex is still so loved because of this very reason.

And still one of the easiest dexes to play "Find that fething guy".

However most retro Hammer Communities know how to tame it Like everything else.

 LunarSol wrote:
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.

8th was a complete train wreck compared to 9th, it had all the problems that 9th have but amplified by a huge margin plus a whole set of problems (mostly tied to CPs availability mechanics and unbalance between codex vs index) that 9th doesn't have anymore.


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 Galas wrote:
I would say 8th post SM codex 2.0 but before all supplements was the most balanced state 40k has been in decades.

Maybe pre SM codex 2.0.

It's much more balanced now though, both in competitive and casual metas.

The game has only ever had brief periods of being well balanced, same is true of WFB. There's always some underpowered or overpowered book or some weird rule that breaks things, ever since I started playing.

I think the reason for it is a mix of genuine incompetence in the rules writers (there are certain writers who reliably produce drek in either direction) and GW having a culture in the design studio of kind of feeling that looking for balance being something a bit perverse, like a gentleman shouldn't need balance because they would just inherently understand that the aim is to have a good game.

I have to say the older I get, the more I sort of see where they are coming from and acknowledge that to have a good time I've got to take ownership myself, but the flipside of that is I'm not interested in paying GW money for badly written rules I'll have to balance myself by being careful in unit selection and negotiating with opponents beforehand. Charging for expensive hardback books with a useful shelf life of ~2 years with mostly recycled background where you know the rules are not going to be particularly well thought out...well, I dunno. It rubs me the wrong way and makes me raise my eyebrow at them, because the product doesn't match the attitude with which it was created.

8th was a complete train wreck compared to 9th,

Not at the very start. with the indexes, everybody had a codex at the same time and there were only 3 stratagems that everybody had access to.

It was a good idea, and then GW fethed it up as they always do.


The only real problem it had was being a bit to simple for 28mm play, however using the rules with halved ranges works fantastic for playing epic scale.

 aphyon wrote:

8th was a complete train wreck compared to 9th,

Not at the very start. with the indexes, everybody had a codex at the same time and there were only 3 stratagems that everybody had access to.

It was a good idea, and then GW fethed it up as they always do.


The only real problem it had was being a bit to simple for 28mm play, however using the rules with halved ranges works fantastic for playing epic scale.

Index 40k IMHO was the worst experience of 40k ever .

The idea was good but points costs were so insane that it was the only moment from 3rd edition in which I was tempted to abandon playing. I even missed 7th in that period, a lot. It didn't help that I saw the first 8th codex after an year and a half of the edition's release. Some factions had balanced indexes, but orks for example had super cheap troops and characters while anything else was extremely expensive. When a boy is 6ppm and a deffkopta is 83ppm (now 9 and 50) the only option was to bring the cheapest 6 characters and 180 boyz. Which, other than making 95% of the codex completely useless, lead to a style of playing that I utterly despised .

But I had the same problems with SW and drukhari, their indexes were very poorly balanced around points costs. Middle-end of the edition when everyone had a codex was a much better experience, although I never accepted that some armies had 2x or 3x the amount of CPs and that functiong armies had to bring 4-6 characters and 6-9 troops.