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 Void__Dragon wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I dunno. This just seems like another "This specific army/unit is causing a problem, so let's change the rules for everyone!" situation like the aircraft 'fix' from a few weeks back.

Planes got what they deserved friend.

Ah yes, glad to see all these

Dark talon
Corvus blackstar
Voidraven bomber
Harpy
Razorwingjetfighter
razorshark
stormraven
valkyrie
crimson hunter
stormwolf
stormfang
hive crone
hemlock wraithfighters
nephilim
sun shark
heldrake
night scythe
stormtalon
stormhawk

nerfed those were really dominating and oppressive.

Just giving an appropriate points cost to the Archaeopter and Dakkajet was the correct fix, shame GW couldnt just do that.

The previous problems of planes being un-hittable was already fixed with 9th restricting modifiers

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Planes got what they deserved friend.

Really? Lot of Scion Air-Cav armies out there defining the current meta? Are there big examples of Craftworld Air Forces ruling tournaments with turn 1 wins? Was there a plague of Stormravens and Stormhawks dominating the tournament scene that I wasn't aware of? Mass Crone and Harpy formations eating too much biomass for players to handle? Were massed wings of Sun Sharks and Razorsharks leaving so few alive that the Tau can't spread The Greater Good?

I doubt it.

AdMech and Ork flyers were busted. Rather than fixing these, they decided to take a sledgehammer approach to the situation and fethed everyone else over in the process.

 Dysartes wrote:


@PenitentJake - is the one GMNDK per sub-faction keyword thing written into the rules for the GK, or is that your position based on the background? I haven't picked up the 9th book for GK yet to check. If it's written in stone, does it apply to GM outside of NDK as well?

To be honest, I don't have the 9th GK dex yet.

But the GM in GMNDK stands for Grand Master. There is only one Grand Master per brotherhood. It's the same way you can't field two Chapter Masters in a Marine army- each Chapter only has one master.

Now you are right, having not actually read the codex, I can't say this for sure. But I don't think the four or five other people who have posted that only one can be used would have done so if it wasn't true. I chose to respond to the question because no one else had. I'm sure someone who actually has the dex can confirm it beyond the shadow of a doubt, but I'm as positive as I could be that this is the issue everyone's writing about.

The 1 Grand Master per Brotherhood is a codex limitation.

ERJAK wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
What specific problem are GW attempting to fix with this change?

This is another issue. There isn't a problem. Only certain factions bother souping at all and those who do soup are represented all the way up and down the tier chart.

It's a hamfisted solution to something only GW seems to think even IS a problem.


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Rihgu wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
What specific problem are GW attempting to fix with this change?

My guess is the problem of a specific subsection of the community that hates "cherry picked" detachments.

Casual players are a blight.

We casuals have nothing on the poison that tourney play & players bring to the hobby.

ERJAK wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

ERJAK wrote:


So the summation of all of that is that IH and BT are definitely doing better than SoB currently, now we can argue semantics about what "Significant" is.

You aIso haven't explained HOW it would open up room for more armies to compete. IH, BT, and Nids are all tier 1 factions right now that are totally unaffected by the change. DE are S tier and the general consensus is that they'll receive an exemption to this rule due to how their army construction works.

DA, SW, DW, and Custodes don't care about subfaction rules at all either. So out of the 14 books in the top 3 tiers of Goonhammer's ratings, only 5; Orkz, GK, SoB, Admech and Tsons care about the subfaction changes. GK and Tson being only mildly inconvenienced by them.

Really all it's going to do is shuffle some armies out of tier one and then tighten the remaining tier 1's noose on the rest of the meta.

Definitely? Those numbers fluctuate all the time - especially depending on who has played the army recently. Being within 3% is so close as to not even be notable.

For example when looking at just last week Sisters were 54%, IH was 44%, and BT was 50%. Sisters are rather more consistent than most armies and marines for the past 6 months have largely been unremarkable.

Hang on...I'm going to go write a script and see if I can cobble together some data.

When you get done with that, let me know how this change opens up more room for armies to compete when 9 of the top 14 armies are completely unaffected?

I made a script to scrape all the data from BCP. I chose tournaments with at least 16 players and 12/1 through now for this particular exercise ( typical reporting is on GT level events only ). There's probably some noise I have to clean up, but it looks to me that Sisters have absolutely no problem with GK, Ork soup, IH, BT, or Nids.

The majority of losses for Sisters comes from DE ( surprise! ), Goffs, DG, SW, Marine soup, and Daemons. This seems to tell me that Sisters struggle against some of the more melee forward armies, but most of the meta armies you're worried about are not the problem.

We have no idea of the true scope of these changes and the resulting outcome, but if DE gets tweaked the most by this then it's probably a wash for Sisters. Goffs and Freebooterz armies will stretch further, but they're a minority of lists it seems - not sure what the Goff lists look like, but I'm sure point adjustments are coming for Wazboms.

I'm going to clean this up and make the reporting easier and add the ability to see W/L by round for more granularity as well as running this for something like August through now.

12/1 to now


11/13 to now ( about when Dataslate would have been used ) - SW get smoothed out a ton, GK has a 2 win advantage, and tied against the best army in the game. I'm going to run this for 28 player tournaments only. This total WR is like 57% so I want to get closer to the figure presented in recent trends.



11/13 to now for 28 player and above -- 56% WR. I'm just not feeling the concern for Sisters here, but I'll spend time vetting the data.



Ok, so, discrepancies are because I had removed mirror matches. I'll have to think of how to process those, because there's a lot of risk of over-counter the way their website works.

Still more vetting to do.

PenitentJake wrote:

Spoletta wrote:


Drukhari are being slaughtered by the detachment changes.

They are virtually guaranteed to have a partial exception- they'll still be able to combine Kabals, Cults and Covens, but only one of each. Otherwise the codex literally doesn't work. As opposed to the way so many people use the term "unplayable" to describe a thing which is merely sub-optimal or inefficient, the Drukhari dex would literally be unplayable. What that means, as others have said, is that the impact of this rule on the top ranking faction will be little to nothing.
.

You are thinking about the Real Space Raid, which for sure will remain, no need of an exception. It uses Cabal, Cult and Coven, not 3 flavors of Cabal, so no problems there. You won't be able to slot Strife cults into other cult detachments though.
In any case, Real Space Raids are not the competitive lists of DE, they are good and can play decently well, but the strenght of that factions lies elsewhere.
In particular it lies in the coven lists.
According to the rumors, those are being hit twice by these changes. FIrst they will not be able to mix 2 different covens, which is the popular set up right now.
Secondly, if the patrols get limited to a single heavy slot, those lists are severely impacted.

So as you can see, these changes are impacting the top ranking faction the most.
Which means that as I was saying, any prediction based on current rankings is completely void.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
[
Ah yes, glad to see all these

nerfed those were really dominating and oppressive.

Just giving an appropriate points cost to the Archaeopter and Dakkajet was the correct fix, shame GW couldnt just do that.

The previous problems of planes being un-hittable was already fixed with 9th restricting modifiers

You can't give appropriate points costs to planes friend. They are almost always either not worth taking or completely oppressive. Which is why limiting the amount of planes an army can have was the only option.


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 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Really? Lot of Scion Air-Cav armies out there defining the current meta? Are there big examples of Craftworld Air Forces ruling tournaments with turn 1 wins? Was there a plague of Stormravens and Stormhawks dominating the tournament scene that I wasn't aware of? Mass Crone and Harpy formations eating too much biomass for players to handle? Were massed wings of Sun Sharks and Razorsharks leaving so few alive that the Tau can't spread The Greater Good?

I doubt it.

AdMech and Ork flyers were busted. Rather than fixing these, they decided to take a sledgehammer approach to the situation and fethed everyone else over in the process.

Read above. The only army I would even entertain giving access to exemptions toward the plane limit are Scions, because their planes are just glorified transports. If some other army had planes that operated similarly maybe them too.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Ah yes, glad to see all these

<fliers>

nerfed those were really dominating and oppressive.

Just giving an appropriate points cost to the Archaeopter and Dakkajet was the correct fix, shame GW couldnt just do that.

The previous problems of planes being un-hittable was already fixed with 9th restricting modifiers

Don't be like that - most of the models on that list have been a problem at some point in time in the past. Massed fliers have been a problem that GW has played whack-a-mole with since 6th and the have finally provided a solution that works for all of them.

PenitentJake wrote:

The issue with GMNDK is that only one per subfaction exists.

So if you can't take more than one subfaction, you only get one GMNDK.

Isn't it 1 per detachment like space marine captains, sisters of battle canoness or pretty much every other 1 per restriction? Are GK's even more limited?


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 H.B.M.C. wrote:
What specific problem are GW attempting to fix with this change?

Answer me this:

How is argent shroud retributor and bloody rose retributor supposed to be balanced? If game is balanced those should be equally viable options.

Why only one is seen though?

Subfactions are bad for game balance to begin with. Cherry picking is even worse. As long as either exist game balance is joke. But at least cherry picking removal reduces imbalance a bit.

tneva82 wrote:

PenitentJake wrote:

The issue with GMNDK is that only one per subfaction exists.

So if you can't take more than one subfaction, you only get one GMNDK.

Isn't it 1 per detachment like space marine captains, sisters of battle canoness or pretty much every other 1 per restriction? Are GK's even more limited?

Yes, they have a special limitation, since they are actually named characters which GW was too lazy to name.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
You can't give appropriate points costs to planes friend. They are almost always either not worth taking or completely oppressive. Which is why limiting the amount of planes an army can have was the only option.

That which is presented without evidence...

And please stop saying "friend" like that. It makes you come across as incredibly patronising.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
The only army I would even entertain giving access to exemptions toward the plane limit are Scions, because their planes are just glorified transports.

So you're allowing for the possibility that a blanket solution to a specific problem may now have been the right answer?

tneva82 wrote:
How is argent shroud retributor and bloody rose retributor supposed to be balanced? If game is balanced those should be equally viable options. Why only one is seen though?

I am unfamiliar with their rules. Sisters remain one of the armies in 40k that I do not play.

However, from what you are describing, it would appear that one sub-faction has a rule that cause a problem, so the proper way to fix that would be to fix that specific sub-faction and not completely change how sub-factions operate across the entire game.

You fix specific problems with specific solutions. Not with general game-changing ones.

tneva82 wrote:
Subfactions are bad for game balance to begin with.

To repeat what I said above: That which is presented without evidence...

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
What specific problem are GW attempting to fix with this change?

The idea could be to muddle up the current Tier list with Drukhari as Tier S, GK and others as Tier 1.

I doubt GW cares about "tier lists". Certainly not as much as some people do.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I doubt GW cares about "tier lists". Certainly not as much as some people do.

Probably not.
But GW cares about sales.
If the Tier list is mixed up, players reorganized their armies and therefore buy different units.

"Chapter tactics" etc etc were a mistake imo. If you ask me, a better way to tighten things up for matched/competitive play would be to remove them entirely, and keep the flavour rules for narrative game and/or chill people who can be trusted to behave.

 Nazrak wrote:
"Chapter tactics" etc etc were a mistake imo. If you ask me, a better way to tighten things up for matched/competitive play would be to remove them entirely, and keep the flavour rules for narrative game and/or chill people who can be trusted to behave.

They're a good idea poorly implemented. Like most of GWs ideas. The subfaction rules should effect army composition IMO, not just stack more rules onto things. If they wrote the books so that only basic Troops choices had the <Core> keyword and then subfactions added the <Core> keyword to certain non-Troop units it would be much less of an issue.

I'm biased because I'm one of them - but I think GW know there are a range of people who are relatively casual in terms of the game, they aren't aiming to win their local GT or anything like that, who like variety in list building - but equally don't like playing stuff which is obviously worse than the alternative.

Chapter Tactics were - imo anyway - meant to unlock alternate ways of playing your army. This doesn't work if the "solution" is to have one detachment of X with the pro-X bonuses, and another detachment of Y with the pro-Y bonuses and doing anything else is obviously statistically inferior.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
On one hand, never made much sense to me for Tyranids of two different Hive Fleets to be in the same place.

On the other hand, I have Tallarns and Mordians, and idea of running them at the same time as distinct entities appeals to me.

On some level running Tallarns and Mordians together should just be cosmetic and you pick one or the other as the dominant. On another level, they SHOULD have rules for fluffy but otherwise <KEYWORD> breaking armies. Windriders of Saim-Hann, Death/Raven/Combi-wing, The way WAAGH!'s were - Orks are the ones who got boned the hardest by turning their unit types into faction keywords - I think Orks should be the other way around, they lose rules when they DON'T have each faction type. Or, you know turn the factions back into units and come up with better factions that tickle those units in different ways. I'd say make the units and the factions overlapping but distinctly different. If you have a Deathskull warboss, you can have everything else, but THESE changes happen to assorted unit. If you have a Goff warlord all of THOSE changes happen to each unit and THESE/THOSE changes subtly influence the various units into harmony with the warboss. Sometimes worse, sometimes better sometimes worse and better but always towards the theme (not necessarily IN theme just assisting it- the Deathskull Lootas might get even shootier in a Goff army because even the shooty units get more punchy and orks need SOME shooting)

Spoletta wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

PenitentJake wrote:

The issue with GMNDK is that only one per subfaction exists.

So if you can't take more than one subfaction, you only get one GMNDK.

Isn't it 1 per detachment like space marine captains, sisters of battle canoness or pretty much every other 1 per restriction? Are GK's even more limited?

Yes, they have a special limitation, since they are actually named characters which GW was too lazy to name.

Spoletta, I'm not sure why you said yes, because the part about GM's being similar to named characters is correct, which means your answer to tneva82 should have been no- you can't take two GMNDK's from the same brotherhood even if you put them in separate detachments, because each brotherhood only has one Grand Master- just like you can't take two Dantes by putting them in separate detachments because only one Dante exists.

Grand Masters are unique: only one exists per brotherhood. That character is the supreme leader of that brotherhood. The head honcho. Because there are 9 brotherhoods, there are nine of these dudes. In the entire universe. Now yes, technically that does mean you CAN take two GMNDK's- one in each detachment, but since they all have to be from different brotherhoods, every detachment will now lose it's special brotherhood power because of the changes. This is the part that has GK players so upset- they used to be able to take Brotherhood A in one Patrol and Brotherhood B in another and include a GMNDK in each WITHOUT losing the Brotherhood power of each detachment. Now they can't. If you want your army to have Brotherhood abilities, it can only include a single Brotherhood, which means you can only include one GMNDK because again.... And I can not stress this enough: ONLY ONE PER BROTHERHOOD EXISTS.

If more than one per brotherhood existed they would not be called GRAND masters: they would be Co-Masters.

Spoletta wrote:


You are thinking about the Real Space Raid, which for sure will remain, no need of an exception. It uses Cabal, Cult and Coven, not 3 flavors of Cabal, so no problems there. You won't be able to slot Strife cults into other cult detachments though.

Nope- wasn't thinking about Realspace raids. Was thinking about armies that include One Kabal Patrol, One Cult Patrol and One Coven Patrol. Those ARE technically three different sub-faction detachments. But GW will make an exception to allow them to be fielded this way, because if they didn't it would break the dex and make Realspace Raids the ONLY viable option.

Spoletta wrote:

In any case, Real Space Raids are not the competitive lists of DE, they are good and can play decently well, but the strenght of that factions lies elsewhere.
In particular it lies in the coven lists.
According to the rumors, those are being hit twice by these changes. FIrst they will not be able to mix 2 different covens, which is the popular set up right now.

I was unaware that a double coven was so popular; since they fixed liquifier guns, my assumption was that Dark Technomancers were no longer so flavour of the month. If having two different Covens really is a huge factor to their success, then yes, you're right, the change will affect that aspect of the army. I don't actually play competitively; in my campaign, there is more than one Coven... But the commander of the DE army is only going to pick whichever Coven proves itself to be the best, so his army is only going to include a single Coven detachment.

Spoletta wrote:

Secondly, if the patrols get limited to a single heavy slot, those lists are severely impacted.

And yes- you're definitely right here. I forgot about this part of the change- and it will hit DE hardest. There are some other armies that used to run double patrols, but very few (other than DE) ever ran triples.

Spoletta wrote:

So as you can see, these changes are impacting the top ranking faction the most.

This IS still debatable. You're definitely right that it hits them harder than I thought it did. But DE lists WILL still be able to include One Kabal Patrol, One Cult Patrol, and One Coven Patrol without penalty- almost guaranteed. Whereas Sister will NOT be able to include One Argent Shroud Patrol, and One Bloody Rose Patrol.

Spoletta wrote:

Which means that as I was saying, any prediction based on current rankings is completely void.

I've always agreed with this; there are so many moving parts in 9th that I've always believed that it's almost impossible to make predictions about what will happen until the books are in our hands and it's actually happening.

While I get GW’s desire to have tabletop armies match the fluff, I don’t think these kinds of changes are conducive for creating balance across the game.

The problem is that reducing army choice also reduces the ability for armies to overcome the strongest options. To those paying attention to win rate % , the numbers in 9th are significantly worse than those in 8th outside of few outlier months. Reason for this is because weaker armies could use more powerful specialized units/ psychic powers/ army rules/etc from other factions to plug areas they needed help in. For example, Blood angles where a horrible army in 8th, but plenty of imperial factions could use their smash captains to help with their CC deficiency. This helped allow weaker armies like sisters, space marines (pre 2.0), and ad-mech to show up in tournament placings from time to time.

By removing these options/making their cost too high, GW is allowing armies with best general rules to take over. That or armies with specific broken rules/combos. This makes balancing tough because nerfing broken combos/rules can leave an armies that relied on them too weak since they may not have enough else to fall back on (ad-mech).On the other hand it might take an extreme number of nerfs to get an army to a fair spot (drukhari).

Removing sub-faction soup is just another version of this. With this change I expect armies will have far less variance in what sub-faction traits they take. Additionally, we will see armies with better general traits box out armies with more specialized/ less strong ones far more frequently. Will this always be the case? Obviously no. Custodes as example have a variety of strong sub-faction options to choose from. However, GW is now forcing themselves to ensure that armies’ sub-faction traits are more generally good across from he the board for things to stay balanced. How many of you trust GW to be consistently good at this?

PenitentJake wrote:

My "Yes" was referred to his last question.

"Are they even more limited?"

Also, I don't think that an exception is needed. Having a cabal, a cult and a coven will simply not run into that limitation. It is not 3 istances of the same tag, like 3 different <Regiment>, it is actually 3 different tags. I don't see it being limited.

Ahh. okay, now I get where you're coming from.

Cheers.

Salt donkey wrote:

The problem is that reducing army choice also reduces the ability for armies to overcome the strongest options. To those paying attention to win rate % , the numbers in 9th are significantly worse than those in 8th outside of few outlier months. Reason for this is because weaker armies could use more powerful specialized units/ psychic powers/ army rules/etc from other factions to plug areas they needed help in. For example, Blood angles where a horrible army in 8th, but plenty of imperial factions could use their smash captains to help with their CC deficiency. This helped allow weaker armies like sisters, space marines (pre 2.0), and ad-mech to show up in tournament placings from time to time.

Another interesting argument for armies with more than less variety.
Mono-subfactions may eventually have less variety based on the model range.
E.g. I'm looking at Iyanden. Besides poets and philosphers aka Guardians there will be only Wraith constructs and tanks to choose from.

 Nazrak wrote:
"Chapter tactics" etc etc were a mistake imo. If you ask me, a better way to tighten things up for matched/competitive play would be to remove them entirely, and keep the flavour rules for narrative game and/or chill people who can be trusted to behave.

I mean, as a DE player I certainly miss the days when my army functioned as a cohesive whole, rather than a disjointed mess of micro-subfactions with no ability to share buffs (or even detachments) and barely any options between them.

However, I realise that this is a special case so other factions may have different views.

Though, as someone who also plays Necrons, I'd be wholly in favour of removing their chapter tactics equivalent just so I no longer have to remember all the stupid names, which are like Egyptian by way of Harry Potter.

 Sim-Life wrote:
They're a good idea poorly implemented. Like most of GWs ideas. The subfaction rules should effect army composition IMO, not just stack more rules onto things. If they wrote the books so that only basic Troops choices had the <Core> keyword and then subfactions added the <Core> keyword to certain non-Troop units it would be much less of an issue.

In theory I like this idea.

In practise, I suspect it would just lead to a 'rich get richer' problem. For example, when you look at the SM codex and its 4 trillion units, there are probably a fair few interesting CORE combinations to be made to give each subfaction a reasonably different theme and playstyle.

Now try doing the same for Harlequins, which have all of 8 units (4 of them characters and 1 a dedicated transport). Assuming Troupes are always CORE, that give you all of 2 combinations - you can have Skyweavers as CORE or you can have Voidweavers as CORE.

 wuestenfux wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I doubt GW cares about "tier lists". Certainly not as much as some people do.

Probably not.
But GW cares about sales.
If the Tier list is mixed up, players reorganized their armies and therefore buy different units.

The tippy top of tournament players switch armies. Those players have obscene collections through winning tournaments or borrowing models. Others are rarely crazy enough to drop money on whole new armies. The vast majority of people do not any of that.

What gets people to buy more models? New models and updated rules.

 vipoid wrote:

I mean, as a DE player I certainly miss the days when my army functioned as a cohesive whole, rather than a disjointed mess of micro-subfactions with no ability to share buffs (or even detachments) and barely any options between them.

GW has always had the Rubber Band problem. They always snap back too far. They've more or less figured out how to get people to play the mission, now they just need to apply the same solution to army building while re-injecting fluffy not power soup. They spent entire editions trying to beat people into making the armies they wanted to see. Then they rubber-banded into formation-based Monte Haul syndrome to try and bribe us into it. With Missions they've both in moderation. They reward people who play the missions, and added enough variation and secondaries you're intruiged by the mission and can usually find enough secondaries to sate your plastic blood lust. Apply that to Army Comp and the secondaries just get better too.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Planes got what they deserved friend.

Really? Lot of Scion Air-Cav armies out there defining the current meta? Are there big examples of Craftworld Air Forces ruling tournaments with turn 1 wins? Was there a plague of Stormravens and Stormhawks dominating the tournament scene that I wasn't aware of? Mass Crone and Harpy formations eating too much biomass for players to handle? Were massed wings of Sun Sharks and Razorsharks leaving so few alive that the Tau can't spread The Greater Good?

I doubt it.

AdMech and Ork flyers were busted. Rather than fixing these, they decided to take a sledgehammer approach to the situation and fethed everyone else over in the process.

Not even all ork flyers, just the wazbomm really. Dakkajet was something that needed a Freebootas buggy list to work, and honestly even then it was strong, not broken. Try taking a bomma, they’re terrible.

tneva82 wrote:

Subfactions are bad for game balance to begin with.

Ok, remove them all then. Marines don't get a special exemption. One Necron army, One Space Marine army, One Alderi army.

I like sub-factions. They add flavour and variety. This is a miniatures game where we collect and paint our models from the rich background of 40K.

I also think that in a Matched Play game you should only have one sub-faction. There will always be exceptions - no issues, for instance, with an Imperial Knight in an Astra Militarum force. We should remove, however, the ability to cherrypick sub-factions to gain a variety of benefits/ avoid drawbacks. Make a decision and stick with it!