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Tyel wrote:
The issue is that the "professional" scene has a bar which is "can you expect to place with this list". And so the binary of "OP" and "Trash" sort of feeds through.

Its fair to say, I don't think Custodes are going to be OP any more. I expect this week's tournament winners will be re-worked Harlequins (foot troupes, bikes & characters still busted yo), Ulthwe "good stuff", and Tyranids. I hope to then see a mix of other factions. Some of this may be skewed by low tournament player base.

Exactly. When the "top competitive players" say that a codex is "out of the meta", it just means that it isn't broken, because that's what it takes to get to the top in the competitive scene: the most busted, broken, OP that they can find. If they think that Custodes are "not competitive", then it just means that the codex is now more in line with all of the "normal" codexes.

 kingheff wrote:
I super chatted on the aow stream tonight and specifically asked if they thought the Custodes nerfs were a bit overhyped. Jack harpster admitted that someone I can't remember was running a skimmer list and was very happy with it. Custodes is a deep enough codex that people will make good armies with it still.

We even had a top 2 finish (beaten by Crusher Stampede) at a GT this past weekend with an off-meta Custodes list that didn't really see too much in the way of nerfs (Emmissaries Saggitarum spam). I'm prety sure the goldybois will be fine.

 kingheff wrote:
I super chatted on the aow stream tonight and specifically asked if they thought the Custodes nerfs were a bit overhyped. Jack harpster admitted that someone I can't remember was running a skimmer list and was very happy with it. Custodes is a deep enough codex that people will make good armies with it still.

I'm not sure what he was referring to but I can tell you Custodes don't have skimmers. Maybe he meant a Pallas?

The Custodes Codex itself isn't very deep at all. It has 19 datasheets, 8 of which are HQ's and 2 more of which are Elite Characters. That leaves it with only 9 non-Character units.

FW opens that quite a bit, but not everyone wants to buy FW. FW gives an additional 14 non-Character datasheets.

We'll see how the meta unfolds, but I have a feeling you won't see Custodes placing top 5's any more than you see Necrons at best (so one or two here or there now and then).

 Laughing Man wrote:

 kingheff wrote:
I super chatted on the aow stream tonight and specifically asked if they thought the Custodes nerfs were a bit overhyped. Jack harpster admitted that someone I can't remember was running a skimmer list and was very happy with it. Custodes is a deep enough codex that people will make good armies with it still.

We even had a top 2 finish (beaten by Crusher Stampede) at a GT this past weekend with an off-meta Custodes list that didn't really see too much in the way of nerfs (Emmissaries Saggitarum spam). I'm prety sure the goldybois will be fine.

Competitive players will usually look pretty hard at ways to adjust their armies if they're doing well with them. Not everyone is Mani cheema, bless 'im.

 kingheff wrote:
I super chatted on the aow stream tonight and specifically asked if they thought the Custodes nerfs were a bit overhyped. Jack harpster admitted that someone I can't remember was running a skimmer list and was very happy with it. Custodes is a deep enough codex that people will make good armies with it still.

Yeah there was a troop heavy list discussed in brief in the AoW hot takes stream as well.

There are builds, they just won't auto-win.

Audustum wrote:

 kingheff wrote:
I super chatted on the aow stream tonight and specifically asked if they thought the Custodes nerfs were a bit overhyped. Jack harpster admitted that someone I can't remember was running a skimmer list and was very happy with it. Custodes is a deep enough codex that people will make good armies with it still.

I'm not sure what he was referring to but I can tell you Custodes don't have skimmers. Maybe he meant a Pallas?

The Custodes Codex itself isn't very deep at all. It has 19 datasheets, 8 of which are HQ's and 2 more of which are Elite Characters. That leaves it with only 9 non-Character units.

FW opens that quite a bit, but not everyone wants to buy FW. FW gives an additional 14 non-Character datasheets.

We'll see how the meta unfolds, but I have a feeling you won't see Custodes placing top 5's any more than you see Necrons at best (so one or two here or there now and then).

He didn't go into any specifics, maybe I misheard, I thought he said skimmers but I am old.
The main thing I took away was that some people were happy with custodes.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
I for one was super glad we got nerfed. It was that or continue listening to all you theory crafters complain about how hard the competitive scene was taking it from the Golden Horrors. Now? Literally silence about the other elephants in the room.

There is not silence, you're biased here.

 Sasori wrote:
Crusher and Levi Banned: https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/XTEpZheWFGC2pWI3.pdf

I'm pleasantly surprised that GW has published this. It's great that they have 1) established which documents are still considered up to date, and 2) explicitly say what the majority of players already implicitly knew: that supplements are considered invalid once a new Codex comes out.

JakeSiren wrote:

 Sasori wrote:
Crusher and Levi Banned: https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/XTEpZheWFGC2pWI3.pdf

I'm pleasantly surprised that GW has published this. It's great that they have 1) established which documents are still considered up to date, and 2) explicitly say what the majority of players already implicitly knew: that supplements are considered invalid once a new Codex comes out.

The minority knew it as well.
They were just trying to have it any wich way as best suited them. YOU try & use an outdated source? They'll tell you all about it. THEY try it? Oh how the tune changes....

JakeSiren wrote:
2) explicitly say what the majority of players already implicitly knew: that supplements are considered invalid once a new Codex comes out.

Are they? Is my Black Templars supplement going to become worthless when the new SM codex comes out? If so, how am I supposed to play my army? GW seem to pick and choose at random which supplements and armies of renown will remain legal with a new codex and which ones will be replaced. I think they get the office intern drunk, blindfold him, and tape faction logos to a dartboard. He's got 3 darts and anything he hits is no longer legal. It's like groundhogs day for codexes.

Toofast wrote:

JakeSiren wrote:
2) explicitly say what the majority of players already implicitly knew: that supplements are considered invalid once a new Codex comes out.

Are they? Is my Black Templars supplement going to become worthless when the new SM codex comes out? If so, how am I supposed to play my army? GW seem to pick and choose at random which supplements and armies of renown will remain legal with a new codex and which ones will be replaced. I think they get the office intern drunk, blindfold him, and tape faction logos to a dartboard. He's got 3 darts and anything he hits is no longer legal. It's like groundhogs day for codexes.

Whenever GW release the next SM Codex, then yes, unless they explicitly say so like they did (via a FAQ) with the current SM Codex and supplements that came out before it.

If you cut the hyperbole, it's as simple as: GW writes a supplement for a specific Codex, if the codex is superseded then the supplement is considered invalid unless FAQ'd otherwise.

It's almost like you wanted to prove CCS's point.

Toofast wrote:
My local FB group has custodes players.

They don't sound like Custodes players. They sound like bandwagon jumpers.

Karol wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:


Yeah, calling hard BS right here. Super easy to run harlies without spamming. HQs, jester, solitaire, troupes in transports, sky weavers, a couple voidweavers, done.
That’s the same with any army, including grey knights. Spamming is a conscious choice, not a forced result.

So the difference between that and a tournament list is the 3 to 6 void weavers. As I said people either under estimate what bad armies play like, they are super protective of their own armies power or all of the above at the same time. As I said the difference between your army and a tournament lists is minimal. Which means the list would be weaker vs an optimised tournament list from other factions. BUT if I were to believe that does are only played in tournaments , we get a situation where johny space marine is going to have great fun with his non optimised marine army playing vs a 75-80% full power tournament harli list.

Do you know anything about Harlequins?
Let’s say I took 3 voidweavers, a reasonable non spammy number, I’m left with 450pts more than the 9 weaver list (pre nerf points). I already have all the characters, so guess what’s left? 3 data sheets… troupes, starweavers, bikes. I can fill 450pts with bikes easily enough and the list would still have been super strong. And if GW had just not allowed the void weaver to be a squadron, this is where would be and there would have been more variety in lists (some dark, light, maybe even twilight) at least as much as harlequins can be varied.
Point is, you didn’t need to take voids to be competitive and we’ll see how they perform now that that choice has been effectively removed.

What's the reason behind having different expire dates (January or June 2023) for the supplements?

 Blackie wrote:
What's the reason behind having different expire dates (January or June 2023) for the supplements?

Got to assume they're loosely tied to the date they become obsolete/replaced. If this isn't a "get daemons and guard by Jan and an inquisitor book by June" I've no idea what's going on.

Maybe it's a failsafe in case they forget about this PDF and never update it again

Could it be the six month seasons?

 bullyboy wrote:

Point is, you didn’t need to take voids to be competitive and we’ll see how they perform now that that choice has been effectively removed.

That is like saying you don't need to take steroid in sports to be good. No one who saw the stats on the void weavers, followed by its costs, thought to not take more then 3 of those. It would be like GK playrs deciding to not use NDKs or DE saying no to cult of strife.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
So with all the talk about Custodes being nerfed, how many people have actually played games with the models and tried seeing if they work instead of theoryhammering how bad they are?

This is the dumbest thing I ever heard. What the hell is wrong with you?

Karol wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

Point is, you didn’t need to take voids to be competitive and we’ll see how they perform now that that choice has been effectively removed.

That is like saying you don't need to take steroid in sports to be good.

Exactly, you don't. They're actually illegal.

And Harlequins can definitely manage with 130ppm voidweavers.

stratigo wrote:
The entirety of art of war. Goonhammer. Mani Cheema. Name a player who regularly places at the top of majors, and if they have said anything about custodes, it's that they were nerfed out of competitive play entirely.

Also, marines (all of them) are better now too. So are admech. So are sisters. Et cetera. Custodes didn't just get nerfed, like half the factions (Or at least it sometimes feels like power armor is half the factions) in the game caught a serious and dramatic buff.

If the current competitive meta any 'balanced' codex is out of competitively play because the top is firmly ruled by utterly broken codexes running near or above 70% winrates.

Being good for competitive and being balanced are 2 very different things right now and that is a bad thing. We want those 2 concepts to get closer together. And yes that means any other codex that ends up doing as well as Custodes were doing should get slapped down hard.

I want to live in a world where all codexes have a 45-55% winrate against basically the entire field and not what we have now where its 65+% armies that decide everything, where you can have GT's with the top 10 consisting of 3 codexes. I want the player to decide the outcome, not the army.

Since Harlequins couldn't run more than 3 voidweavers prior to the codex, the idea an innocent casual could accidentally find out 6-9 of them was a bit good but that's all they own so they can't play without them... feels like a leap.

I have a bit more time for someone who perhaps just loved crisis suits - but even then, crisis outside of optimised combinations (weapons, drones, buffing characters, chapter/warlord trait synergies etc) are not nearly as good. Someone just turning up with 3 units of 6 Crisis "cos they like them" is going to probably do a lot less well than someone who was running say 2 units of 5 and 2 units of 3 bodyguards.

The issue usually is just codex power. Harlequins, Tau, Custodes were near universally powerful. So if you made a "bad" list with them, you were still probably going to crush someone with a "bad" list drawn from various underperforming factions. Same with DE a year ago, Marines in late 8th etc. But that's different from "oh look, I'm mysteriously running that exact list that won that tournament the other week, what a coincidence."

This is what GW should have done with Hammer:

“If every unit in your army has the Astra Militarum keyword, then each time a <Regiment> or <Tempestus Regiment> model from your army makes a ranged attack, an unmodified hit roll of 6 automatically wounds the target.”

Karol wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

Point is, you didn’t need to take voids to be competitive and we’ll see how they perform now that that choice has been effectively removed.

That is like saying you don't need to take steroid in sports to be good.

You mean it's 100% accurate?

The problem with competitive 40k is if something isn't bonkers broken you don't see it so we have no real idea if Harlequins with fewer Voidweavers but more bikes might be the new meta terror. I suspect it won't be quite as good but we've seen this problem before when GW nerfed the standard DE build, only to see the Coven Monster Mash army become the new hotness.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
So with all the talk about Custodes being nerfed, how many people have actually played games with the models and tried seeing if they work instead of theoryhammering how bad they are?

This is the dumbest thing I ever heard. What the hell is wrong with you?

You're right, I shouldn't assume anyone complaining about the game actually plays it.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
So with all the talk about Custodes being nerfed, how many people have actually played games with the models and tried seeing if they work instead of theoryhammering how bad they are?

This is the dumbest thing I ever heard. What the hell is wrong with you?

You're right, I should assume anyone complaining about the game actually plays it.

If you play the game, you clearly aren't serious enough about hating it to post on dakka
Playing also wastes precious time you could better spend posting in eight nigh identical threads about how you hate every single thing GW has done in the past ten years.

Honestly I was asking because I know sometimes nerfs feel worse on paper than when you actually put the army on the table and I was wondering if anyone upset about the nerfs had gotten a game in to see if they're as bad as the hot takes think they might be.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Honestly I was asking because I know sometimes nerfs feel worse on paper than when you actually put the army on the table and I was wondering if anyone upset about the nerfs had gotten a game in to see if they're as bad as the hot takes think they might be.

funny how it works, the domsayer stalk about how the sky is falling. I didn't like the rules changes as they by proxy nerfed orks, I acknowledged it was going to be rough, now 4 2k points games, several skirmish games, plus a few various 1500-2k point games on TTS I am now reasonable certain I can say the ork codex doesn't work very well in top levels of play now. That said casual themed lists while not on par with other books can work. I personally prefer the play it out and see how this affects me first. spoiler alert orks are on the shelf for a while, fortunately i like the new chaos knights look and will probably be picking up the big box so painting project and likely playing my super cheap chaos marine body spam list (red tide?) while working on that.

 G00fySmiley wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Honestly I was asking because I know sometimes nerfs feel worse on paper than when you actually put the army on the table and I was wondering if anyone upset about the nerfs had gotten a game in to see if they're as bad as the hot takes think they might be.

funny how it works, the domsayer stalk about how the sky is falling. I didn't like the rules changes as they by proxy nerfed orks, I acknowledged it was going to be rough, now 4 2k points games, several skirmish games, plus a few various 1500-2k point games on TTS I am now reasonable certain I can say the ork codex doesn't work very well in top levels of play now. That said casual themed lists while not on par with other books can work. I personally prefer the play it out and see how this affects me first. spoiler alert orks are on the shelf for a while, fortunately i like the new chaos knights look and will probably be picking up the big box so painting project and likely playing my super cheap chaos marine body spam list (red tide?) while working on that.

That's a fair take. I've been there with my Sisters in the past so I can respect the frustration that a bad codex can bring, plus give a nod of respect for you trying it out before shelving it first.

 Ordana wrote:

stratigo wrote:
The entirety of art of war. Goonhammer. Mani Cheema. Name a player who regularly places at the top of majors, and if they have said anything about custodes, it's that they were nerfed out of competitive play entirely.

Also, marines (all of them) are better now too. So are admech. So are sisters. Et cetera. Custodes didn't just get nerfed, like half the factions (Or at least it sometimes feels like power armor is half the factions) in the game caught a serious and dramatic buff.

If the current competitive meta any 'balanced' codex is out of competitively play because the top is firmly ruled by utterly broken codexes running near or above 70% winrates.

Being good for competitive and being balanced are 2 very different things right now and that is a bad thing. We want those 2 concepts to get closer together. And yes that means any other codex that ends up doing as well as Custodes were doing should get slapped down hard.

I want to live in a world where all codexes have a 45-55% winrate against basically the entire field and not what we have now where its 65+% armies that decide everything, where you can have GT's with the top 10 consisting of 3 codexes. I want the player to decide the outcome, not the army.

There's actually considerably more nuance than just a 45-55% win rate. For example, I played at a large event with my Drukhari. One of the matches I was against a Tau player. The game was won on who got first turn - both of our armies did considerable damage and were not sufficiently resilient. We could have played 100 games and got 50 wins and 50 losses each, but the game came down to the singular dice roll to see who got first turn or not.

Part of the discussion should be what the overall game experience is like. It's no good if "balance" is decided by winning or losing one roll off. I don't think anyone here is interested in playing a glorified coin flip simulator. One of the better metrics I have seen around balance is win/loss rate grouped by first/second turn. An army should have a 45-55% win rate if they go first, and a 45-55% win rate if they go second. To me, this shows that an actual game has been played, rather than the players going through the motions of resolving the foregone conclusion.