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I play mainly narrative or pick up games with like minded people and we all seem to share a distate for how GW handles strategems in 9th edition. With the recent preview of the changes to the harrlequin weapons, we're sittiing here scratching our heads, who wants this?
I know that GW uses more competitive minded playtesters, especially with the endorsement of ITC and the bleed over into the game design/direction.

Do competitive/tournament type players genuinely favor strategems as they currently are being rolled out?

If the comp scene really does want more standardized weapon profiles and a resource system to make them "special" then maybe its time GW make a seperate game to house all the competition rather than sacrifice the role play/simulation roots of wargaming.

For those that may know, the only game designed and marketed by GW from the ground up to be a Competitive tournament game is Warhammer: Underworlds, and apparemtly the balance passes and everything is much more akin to what we are seeing bleed into 40k.

I don't think the Harlequin weapon strategems have anything to do with competitive players.

It is just a new (silly) design philosiphy GW thought up recently. Also evident in the Tau support systems (slightly better implementation). And we may see it again in the new CSM codex.

The blame everything GW does on someone outside GW concept is in my opinion very flawed. I would suggest you blame the GW rules writers/game designers and only the GW rules writers/game designers.

I'd be surprised if anyone likes how GW does strats currently.

The idea of using Stratagems as wargear is both brilliant and asinine at the same time. Some wargear is so situational as to be not worth taking unless you have strong knowledge of your opponent's army list ahead of time. Others are so commonplace that the only reason to make them a Stratagem is to limit their usage.

Melta Bombs is a great example of a good Wargear stratagem. The ability to get an applicable unit into the proper circumstances to use Melta Bombs is so low as to make paying points for them very unattractive. However, they toss the Keyword on the right units and you get to use it if you manage to move yourself into the correct position. Also, as a Keyword, you are prevented from spamming the effect so much as to be unfun for your opponent.

Smokescreens is a good example of a bad Wargear stratagem. It makes perfect sense to advance on your opponent with a line of smokescreen protected vehicles to blunt their fire. However, as a Stratagem you only get to use it on one unit a turn, regardless of the size of the game. So for some silly reason, only one vehicle in a 3000 point army can turn on their smokescreens at a time. Just silly.

What boggles my mind is that there is a game system, RIGHT THERE, in AOS, that actually manages to do Stratagems correctly as a concept, and the 40k team just like...I guess...doesn't read the rules for it?

The AOS system checks basically every box for how stratagems should work if you think theyre an interesting concept.

1 - NOT A LUMP SUM OF POINTS

this means that strats in AOS happen over the course of the game, rather than the player dumping a huge wombo-combo turn 2/3 to try and table their opponent before they get more than 1 turn in.

2 - TIED TO ACTUAL "COMMANDERS"

instead of bland, boring, and unbalanceable always-on auras, commander characters in AOS tend to have access to unique stratagems AKA command abilities. This means that you have some narrative versimilitude as to *why* your dudes are now capable of just fighting better, for some reason, and since you generally have 'foot dude buffs foot dudes, mounted dude buffs mounted dudes' you have an actual reason to field things like commander units on foot and mobility boosts arent just by default the best thing.

this has the side effect of making the number of strats you have to remember *gasp* SCALE WITH GAME SIZE as it's tied to the number of characters you brought. What a concept! not dumping 10,234,573 different strats to remember on a fething newbie in their first 500pt game!

3 - IF YOU WANT YOUR UNIT TO HAVE SOME SPECIAL CAPABILITY JUST MAKE IT A fething ONCE PER GAME ABILITY ON THE DATASHEET

Why are my units' special capabilities hidden in a giant wall of text in the back of my book where it's so god damn easy to forget them? Who thought this was a good method of formatting? WHAT DOES THE STUPID COLOR CODING THEY ADDED IN 9TH EVEN GOD DAMN MEAN? if a designer thinks an ability is cool, but too powerful to give the unit access to all the time, what in the hell is wrong with just giving units a once per game ability?

4 - MAKE THE UNIVERSAL STRATS ACTUALLY WORTH A DAMN

the universal stratagem list in 9e makes me laugh and shake my head every time I'm reminded of the dumb gak that's in it. Oh right, I say, THIS is for some reason how they resolved the stupid tournament play loophole of "tripointing" in 8th edition. They stapled it...to the strat system. Just, wtf. The 9e default strat list is a wonderful way to learn that you, a new player, are an idiot, because you're burning your CP on dumb gak wastes of time like "Cut Them Down" and rerolling one die, while your opponent spends 1cp to multiply the damage of some unit by 7 because that's fun gameplay.

I suspect the feedback from the testers was "too CP hungry, just bake into the weapons" but as such strats seem to be a someones cherished pet it was duly ignored

 the_scotsman wrote:

WHAT DOES THE STUPID COLOR CODING THEY ADDED IN 9TH EVEN GOD DAMN MEAN?

This annoys me so much. It's like they tried to organise them by theme which is the stupidest way possible. Why are they not organised by WHEN YOU CAN USE THEM? I feel like GW codexes designers are being maliciously incompetent like 99%of the time.

 alextroy wrote:
Melta Bombs is a great example of a good Wargear stratagem. The ability to get an applicable unit into the proper circumstances to use Melta Bombs is so low as to make paying points for them very unattractive. However, they toss the Keyword on the right units and you get to use it if you manage to move yourself into the correct position. Also, as a Keyword, you are prevented from spamming the effect so much as to be unfun for your opponent.

In Horus Heresy I have to actually think about what units I give meltabombs to and how I intend to use them. I then have to deploy and move to get said unit into range of a tank, which even on a deep striking platform is not easy. If I manage to pull that off I am rewarded with a dead tank. If the stars align and I can do it with two units simultaneously, I get two dead tanks. I've been able to do it enough, and it's effective enough in an army otherwise light on anti-tank (Legio Cybernetica), that I voluntarily pay points for it.

Of course points can always be adjusted as needed until they are attractive without being a no-brainer, but that's neither here nor there.

Having any unit able to pull a meltabomb out from under its hat- but just one, because we can't have major tactical blunders be un-fun for your opponent- is just... bland. That it's also tied to the same resource used to execute strategic maneuvers, and can no longer be thrown if the army has used its special abilities, is more annoying than anything else.

Reworking simple wargear into Stratagems has felt to me like a solution in search of a problem. The choice of whether to take meltabombs on a unit is little different from the choice to take a powerfist on a sergeant.

Melts bombs are hard to use?
In what world? They are easy to get into combat, so long as you put them on the right unit. In 7th I put them on all my bikes and every single on got into combat to use them.

 Backspacehacker wrote:
Melts bombs are hard to use?
In what world? They are easy to get into combat, so long as you put them on the right unit. In 7th I put them on all my bikes and every single on got into combat to use them.

I remember seraphim meltabombers from Codex: Witchhunters. They were a fun unit.

Yeah, I mean it's disingenuous to say melts bombs are ebad and should be a strat, If you only use them on horrible units to begin with.

Tittliewinks22 wrote:
I play mainly narrative or pick up games with like minded people and we all seem to share a distate for how GW handles strategems in 9th edition. With the recent preview of the changes to the harrlequin weapons, we're sittiing here scratching our heads, who wants this?
I know that GW uses more competitive minded playtesters, especially with the endorsement of ITC and the bleed over into the game design/direction.

Do competitive/tournament type players genuinely favor strategems as they currently are being rolled out?

If the comp scene really does want more standardized weapon profiles and a resource system to make them "special" then maybe its time GW make a seperate game to house all the competition rather than sacrifice the role play/simulation roots of wargaming.

For those that may know, the only game designed and marketed by GW from the ground up to be a Competitive tournament game is Warhammer: Underworlds, and apparemtly the balance passes and everything is much more akin to what we are seeing bleed into 40k.

GW doesn't listen to their playtesters very much, this has been corroborated multiple times already.

Also, the competitive playerbase is just as varied and different as the casual base is. There isn't a one size fits all option that will appeal to all competitive players and most of GW's attempts to do so have either failed or (when they haven't made things worse) been met with mild responses ranging from complete indifference to a small degree of optimism.

I would argue that most of what GW does is trying to bridge the gap between competitive and casual play and in doing so alienates members of both. The subfaction rules are a great example of that. The rules were put in place to try and reduce the power gap between a casual player's list and a competitive player's list in the same faction. Casual players have responded with either adulation that "cheese builds" are getting reigned in (desptie 0 of the top...idk...10 armies being affected at all) or annoyance that they have less options should they ever try to attend events. Competitive players either didn't care if it didn't impact their army (it won't have any tangible impact on the wider metagame) or angry that their faction got nerfed for an arbitrary reason.


Sidebar: Generally speaking, While what competitive player's WANT out of 40k changes wildly from person to person, the competitive player's mindset when playing this or any GW game pretty much gets FORCED into a loop of 'yunno what? Fine. Whatever. I'll deal'. So many of the changes they make have such wildly inconsistent logic behind them that doing anything else but accepting how stupid it is and moving on isn't really an option.