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It's equivalent to the 9th Ed aircraft nerf: A blanket solution applied to fix specific problems.

And it's not even a solution. It doesn't fix the towering issue. I don't even think GW understand the towering issue. I'd even go so far as to say that in their "test" games prior to 10th being locked, they didn't play it the way they wrote it, instead playing it the way they thought they wrote it, because that's how God-awful they are at writing and testing rules.

Not particularly surprisingly, GWs solution was to fix things in a way that didn't require them to change their core rules of the game just weeks after release. Therefore we received:

Fate Dice: Strong nerf that doesn't alter any printed materials. Aeldari Codex isn't even on the roadmap, giving them plenty of time to perfect this before it goes to print.

Indirect Fire: Indirect Fire got you down? Let's make them all less points efficient with a points raise.

Towering: It worked for Indirect Fire, so let's put a big points increase on Towering models.

In theory, this will reduce the abusiveness of the marquee issues of the day. Only time will tell.

This removes the worst offenses from the game so GW can assess what else needs adjustment. Given that this only took a couple of weeks hopefully that means we can look forward to more changes in the weeks to come.

Honestly I don't know what people were expecting from a quick emergency fix that wasn't planned in their schedules.

Was it a rushed job? It was by definition rushed! And yet it came out decent.

Fate dice has been fixed in a way that makes sense and many CWE players are expressing their satisfaction with the change. It has been kept nice and fluffy but now it doesn't make you lose friends.

Indirect fire was solved by increasing points on many (not all) units capable of doing it. And this is IMO the right approach. A unit with indirect fire has the perk of being able to influence the battlefield for longer than a unit without it, so it is really just a case of increasing points. Luckily they had the time to go over single entries in this instead of doing a blanket increase. Thanks to this admech, death guard and tau indirect options were not touched, because it honestly made little sense. Before someone says "Mah' exorcist!!!!", at 140 points it was too good. Yes the sisters need help, but this and that are 2 different issues which luckily they didn't make the mistake of mixing.

With towering they had 2 possible approaches. Change the rule or make the units capable of abusing the rule less good at it. The first option clearly wasn't viable. By the nature of this change, there was clearly no possible playtest of the changes. Changing the rule could have had deep ramifications which could have broke the game and forced them to release yet another emergency fix. Going with point increases was the "Better safe than sorry" approach. Now, it sucks for CK, but IK were already stat checking people very hard and warping into the meta into a "How many knights per turn can you drop?" race, so a point nerf to them was already expected with or without towering. The issue with CK is again a different one (faction rules) and they did a good job of not mixing the 2 issues.

For a (necessarily) rushed job, they did a good one IMO.

 alextroy wrote:

Indirect Fire: Indirect Fire got you down? Let's make them all less points efficient with a points raise.

Towering: It worked for Indirect Fire, so let's put a big points increase on Towering models.

And if your unit has non-indirect options that suddenly went up in cost, or your towering unit has a pure HTH build that wouldn't really make use of Towering, well then I guess that's just too bad!

"Simple, not clever."

Spoletta wrote:
Honestly I don't know what people were expecting from a quick emergency fix that wasn't planned in their schedules.

Was it a rushed job? It was by definition rushed! And yet it came out decent.

Fate dice has been fixed in a way that makes sense and many CWE players are expressing their satisfaction with the change. It has been kept nice and fluffy but now it doesn't make you lose friends.

Indirect fire was solved by increasing points on many (not all) units capable of doing it. And this is IMO the right approach. A unit with indirect fire has the perk of being able to influence the battlefield for longer than a unit without it, so it is really just a case of increasing points. Luckily they had the time to go over single entries in this instead of doing a blanket increase. Thanks to this admech, death guard and tau indirect options were not touched, because it honestly made little sense. Before someone says "Mah' exorcist!!!!", at 140 points it was too good. Yes the sisters need help, but this and that are 2 different issues which luckily they didn't make the mistake of mixing.

With towering they had 2 possible approaches. Change the rule or make the units capable of abusing the rule less good at it. The first option clearly wasn't viable. By the nature of this change, there was clearly no possible playtest of the changes. Changing the rule could have had deep ramifications which could have broke the game and forced them to release yet another emergency fix. Going with point increases was the "Better safe than sorry" approach. Now, it sucks for CK, but IK were already stat checking people very hard and warping into the meta into a "How many knights per turn can you drop?" race, so a point nerf to them was already expected with or without towering. The issue with CK is again a different one (faction rules) and they did a good job of not mixing the 2 issues.

For a (necessarily) rushed job, they did a good one IMO.

I think the issue is the inherent disadvantages of the new points system means that for any unit "fixed" their alternative loadouts went from "ok" to "why bother" in some cases. The easiest example being the sword and board wraithknight who didn't benefit hugely from fate dice, towering and nobody was too concerned with, just got a whopping great hike for issues it didn't have due to sharing a datacard.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 alextroy wrote:

Indirect Fire: Indirect Fire got you down? Let's make them all less points efficient with a points raise.

Towering: It worked for Indirect Fire, so let's put a big points increase on Towering models.

And if your unit has non-indirect options that suddenly went up in cost, or your towering unit has a pure HTH build that wouldn't really make use of Towering, well then I guess that's just too bad!

"Simple, not clever."

Oddly they did get that right to a degree for the chaos knights as the rampager wasn't changed as it has a stubber to it's name for ranged output. So they do know this but I doubt the moral quandary over the wraithknight actually gave them pause though.

for people who say changing core rules for fresh released game is not viable, remember GW changed a core rule for Age of Sigmar after the release day because the people in the promo video played it wrong and they thought it is the better solution to change to rule to match the video

anything is viable for GW if it is needed, they will just go cheapest possibility no matter if it solves the problem or creates more

Wow, genestealer cults special rule is just as bad as Eldar were. You can just endlessly recycle everything, with automatic success for all battleline units, AND they get sustained fire and ignores cover for that unit too. I thought the 2CP recycling of IG was bad, but GSC just gets it for every unit for free!

I had hopes for 10th, but this is a dumpsterfire. GW rule writers are incompetent

My objectivity on towering is kind of skewed because I don't really want Knights of any sort in the game. As such I don't really mind blanket nerfs. If they have to be in the game, have them C-Tier at best. If you want to play them for fun, feel free. They won't however warp the meta, which they have done every time they've been good. Same view on flyers.

Really towering should just go, but I can understand perhaps why they didn't want to admit that right out the gate.

Canadian 5th wrote:This removes the worst offenses from the game so GW can assess what else needs adjustment. Given that this only took a couple of weeks hopefully that means we can look forward to more changes in the weeks to come.

They've specifically said there won't be another balance change for 3 months. So the units caught in the crossfire of this "fix" are screwed at least until then.

Spoletta wrote:Honestly I don't know what people were expecting from a quick emergency fix that wasn't planned in their schedules.

Competence? A sense that they at least understand the problem?

Spoletta wrote:Was it a rushed job? It was by definition rushed! And yet it came out decent.

Did it? Tell that to anyone running a melee Wraithknight, or a FOB with either of the two non-indirect weapons. Or anyone running the worryingly large number of units that can't attack in close combat because GW forgot to give them a close combat option.

Spoletta wrote:Fate dice has been fixed in a way that makes sense and many CWE players are expressing their satisfaction with the change. It has been kept nice and fluffy but now it doesn't make you lose friends.

Indirect fire was solved by increasing points on many (not all) units capable of doing it. And this is IMO the right approach. A unit with indirect fire has the perk of being able to influence the battlefield for longer than a unit without it, so it is really just a case of increasing points. Luckily they had the time to go over single entries in this instead of doing a blanket increase. Thanks to this admech, death guard and tau indirect options were not touched, because it honestly made little sense. Before someone says "Mah' exorcist!!!!", at 140 points it was too good. Yes the sisters need help, but this and that are 2 different issues which luckily they didn't make the mistake of mixing.

The biggest issue here is that GW obviously don't understand what they're doing.

Indirect was identified as a problem in 9th edition. This was mainly due to the large number of indirect weapons that were created towards the end of the edition with a high volume of shots and large numbers of re-rolls. GW's fix was to introduce penalties to these weapons to make them all less effective. This worked, but had the unintended consequence of making a lot of older indirect weapons useless. The real problem was that GW don't understand what makes things powerful, so they gave too many indirect fire weapons stats that were simply too good. The correct solution is to understand the power of indirect fire and make sure the weapons that have that property don't get out of control in their basic stats.

Now in 10th we have a double whammy of incompetence. They put the 9th edition fix into the core rules, then gave over half the indirect weapons in the game rules that get around it. Go look at the number of indirect weapons that have Ignores Cover and are Heavy and you'll see how pointless the indirect restrictions are. Then you have things like Desolators that just have far too many shots in general. No single unit should be rolling that many dice with that level of accuracy. It's the same mistakes they've made before - literally six months previously - and it's absolutely maddening.

I also think the Blast rule probably needs to change to only kick in for units above 5, but that's a minor grievance at this point.

Spoletta wrote:With towering they had 2 possible approaches. Change the rule or make the units capable of abusing the rule less good at it. The first option clearly wasn't viable. By the nature of this change, there was clearly no possible playtest of the changes. Changing the rule could have had deep ramifications which could have broke the game and forced them to release yet another emergency fix. Going with point increases was the "Better safe than sorry" approach. Now, it sucks for CK, but IK were already stat checking people very hard and warping into the meta into a "How many knights per turn can you drop?" race, so a point nerf to them was already expected with or without towering. The issue with CK is again a different one (faction rules) and they did a good job of not mixing the 2 issues.

For a (necessarily) rushed job, they did a good one IMO.

Everything you've written here could be summarised as "GW didn't playtest". We're less than 2 weeks into 10th and we're seeing fundamental problems with the core rules. In many cases these problems were identified as soon as the Indexes were released, without any games being played. Towering and Fate Dice were probably the two biggest concerns at that point and they are the main things hit in this update. This is not some super niche interaction producing broken results. This is core rules that feel like nobody even played with before releasing them.

If you don't want to change core rules you need to playtest properly (or at all). GW didn't, leaving themselves in the position they now find themselves. To compound the problem they changed points to Power Levels so they can't even use points to adjust things properly as we're now seeing from the unintended consequences of non-problematic loadouts going up on certain units. That's to say nothing of the clumsy increase to almost all indirect fire units even when they're not actually a problem.

Spoletta wrote:
Indirect fire was solved by increasing points on many (not all) units capable of doing it. And this is IMO the right approach. A unit with indirect fire has the perk of being able to influence the battlefield for longer than a unit without it, so it is really just a case of increasing points. Luckily they had the time to go over single entries in this instead of doing a blanket increase. Thanks to this admech, death guard and tau indirect options were not touched, because it honestly made little sense. Before someone says "Mah' exorcist!!!!", at 140 points it was too good. Yes the sisters need help, but this and that are 2 different issues which luckily they didn't make the mistake of mixing.

I disagree. Imperial Guard was hit the hardest with this, now they're trash. For these reasons:
- Wyvern, FOB, and Deathstrike were already bad at their prior point costs. They should not have gone up. The Basilisk, Manticore, and FW Carriages were the problem and needed the nerf. If the before mentioned 3 indirect fire units remained their old cost they would be semi-viable but not fantastic.
- The only good units Guard have right now are Lord Solar, Creed, Infantry, Scout Sentinels, and Indirect. Now they've lost indirect, and got no buffs to their incredibly overcosted tanks.
- Bad rules writing. Colossus and Praetor were also nerfed, the issue is they have errors in their datasheets. The Colossus doesn't even have heavy and indirect on its weapon, it's also lacking the artillery keyword. The Praetor has S4 on its anti-tank profile.
- Guard are already at a 35% winrate, and now expected to go down.

Spoletta wrote:
Honestly I don't know what people were expecting from a quick emergency fix that wasn't planned in their schedules.

At least the slightest hint of any competence maybe, i'm not sure how that is still too much to expect from a multi-million dollar company who is doing this for freaking decades...

Spoletta wrote:
Was it a rushed job? It was by definition rushed! And yet it came out decent.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/decent

acceptable, satisfactory, or reasonable

Was it reasonable: NO.

Was it satisfactory: HELL NO.

Was it acceptable: If GW would be a small mid lvl company who is just starting sure, for the actual GW FETH NO.

Spoletta wrote:
Indirect fire was solved by increasing points on many (not all) units capable of doing it. And this is IMO the right approach.

Right, cause actually fixing the problem instead would be obviously the wrong approach...

Spoletta wrote:
A unit with indirect fire has the perk of being able to influence the battlefield for longer than a unit without it, so it is really just a case of increasing points. Luckily they had the time to go over single entries in this instead of doing a blanket increase.

Yeah luckily the janitor was going over the entries in his coffee break, otherwise their points changes might have embarrassingly started with making an already blatantly bad army even worse and in general lack any actual balance between the factions..., oh wait i guess their janitor was surprisingly more interessted in his coffee after all.....

Spoletta wrote:
Thanks to this admech, death guard and tau indirect options were not touched, because it honestly made little sense.

Okay at this point im pretty convinced that it's just your favourite hobby to gaslight Sisters of Battle players, right?

Spoletta wrote:
Before someone says "Mah' exorcist!!!!", at 140 points it was too good.

Let me just try to replicate the mental gymnastics necessary to unironically claim the Exorcist was too good, it was the only good(in absolutely no universe even remotely broken) tank in a so far below 40% faction: https://40kstats.goonhammer.com/#GbF full of overcosted and illogical(like the Castigator for example) units, who's biggest problem is everything related to tanks/heavy armor and their general fragility without any kind of punch, therefore the Exorcist(which nobody of the strong to broken armys with actually opressive units would ever take at 140 pts) must be obviously too good cause it looks notably better than most of the overcosted/illogical/hot garbage entries of the rest of the army XD...

Spoletta wrote:
Yes the sisters need help, but this and that are 2 different issues which luckily they didn't make the mistake of mixing.

Yeah luckily they did their best effort to put Sisters below 35% again(like they were last week) for absolutely no good reason, that's much more balanced, and luckily you do your best attempt at trying to gaslight people into thinking GW even just remotely did a decent job with this gak.

Spoletta wrote:
With towering they had 2 possible approaches. Change the rule or make the units capable of abusing the rule less good at it. The first option clearly wasn't viable.

Well doing the right thing was clearly not possible, cause for that they would need to find a halfway competent person who actually understands their game...

Spoletta wrote:
By the nature of this change, there was clearly no possible playtest of the changes.

Right, and as we know GW would definitely never put a rule out without playtesting it XD...

Spoletta wrote:
Changing the rule could have had deep ramifications which could have broke the game and forced them to release yet another emergency fix. Going with point increases was the "Better safe than sorry" approach.

Breaking a broken game with a rule that don't even influences most armies that much is a magic trick i would assume just GW might be capable of, right?

Spoletta wrote:
Now, it sucks for CK, but IK were already stat checking people very hard and warping into the meta into a "How many knights per turn can you drop?" race, so a point nerf to them was already expected with or without towering. The issue with CK is again a different one (faction rules) and they did a good job of not mixing the 2 issues.

Yeah luckily they didn't even try to mix "balance" with actual balance, otherwise someone else except you could have maybe thought they would be not incredibly lazy and incompettent.

Spoletta wrote:
For a (necessarily) rushed job, they did a good one IMO.

I would even say they did so far a great job at crushing any hope for balance in this Edition.

Dudeface wrote:
Oddly they did get that right to a degree for the chaos knights as the rampager wasn't changed as it has a stubber to it's name for ranged output. So they do know this but I doubt the moral quandary over the wraithknight actually gave them pause though.

At this stage them getting anything right is less likely to be a conscious choice and more likely to that whole "broken clock/twice a day" thing.

Slipspace wrote:


I also think the Blast rule probably needs to change to only kick in for units above 5, but that's a minor grievance at this point.

Isn't that how it currently works?

It's for every 5, including the first 5.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
It's for every 5, including the first 5.

Ah, I see.

But would changing it from 5 to 6 really improve matters? It just seems to make many marine units e.g. terminators become exempt where they probably shouldn't be.

I don't think there's anything to fix.

The 9th Edition blast rules made taking units above 5 models a liability, or units above 10 even worse, as there were these set jumps in power for blast weapons.

Now it scales per unit size, +1 for every full 5. It's a simple system that impacts everything in exactly the same way.

And any number you pick, whether it's 5 or 6 or 10 or 11 or 3347858.7 is going to be arbitrary. Better to just stick with full 5's.

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with 5s and the blast rule was one of the more reasonable ways of executing it (even if it does scale weirdly with a D3 vs a 2D6 blast weapons)

I’m fine with the Blast rule giving benefits every five models as it does, and that’s despite me currently being obsessed with twenty four man Necron Warrior units. However I would have made the rule Blast X, to allow different weapons to gain different amount of hits per five targets.

We're living in the intersection of 3 major problems. The points system is not granular enough. Several core universal rules are on their face problematic. And thirdly, the indexes are inconsistent at best(a sub problem being I think all army and detachment rules were treated as equal for costing units when they are most definitely not equal).

The last two options are compounded by the stacks of printed product that go with them, and I expect no one wants to be the guy to tell the boss that millions of dollars of fresh product are incorrect as written. I have a sneaking suspicion that the next few codexes won't even change the composition of the printed indexes in any significant way.

So if you can't change the rules, and you can't change the indexes, all you're left with is the points. And points is a hammer because you can only alter per-unit costs in this system. So even when points are arguably the right call for the fix(say towering, more or less) you end up with a lot of collateral damage.

There are just some units that are broken at any points that are playable. They are auto-includes or a dead unit because every selection in your army is a step function. You can't run one less model. You can't take less wargear. So the point increase means you bump some other unit to a cheaper option, and you only stop taking them when you have to give up a whole other unit. (and probably not even then since some units are just better than any other 2 units you can take in your army).

Their problem is the unit is bad, their interaction with core rules are bad, and power level is bad for balance. But we can't change any of that because it will make someone at GW eat too much crow.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 alextroy wrote:

Indirect Fire: Indirect Fire got you down? Let's make them all less points efficient with a points raise.

Towering: It worked for Indirect Fire, so let's put a big points increase on Towering models.

And if your unit has non-indirect options that suddenly went up in cost, or your towering unit has a pure HTH build that wouldn't really make use of Towering, well then I guess that's just too bad!

"Simple, not clever."

/Ugly-crying in GK Purgation squad

Now 2 ppm less than SM Desolators for a max squad loadout of 4 24" range HW, 6 S.Bolters & 6 NFWeapons...and they can only "Indirect Fire" if the target unit is visible to another GK unit...smh.

 CaulynDarr wrote:
And points is a hammer because you can only alter per-unit costs in this system.

An entirely artificial and self-imposed restriction. There is no reason they couldn't change this tomorrow.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 CaulynDarr wrote:
And points is a hammer because you can only alter per-unit costs in this system.

An entirely artificial and self-imposed restriction. There is no reason they couldn't change this tomorrow.

Agreed,

I think this is a case of this being someone's baby, and they will not accept that the baby is ugly.

All these issues come from bad decisions in both the game design and product development stages at GW. Admitting how bad these decisions are probably puts some peoples' jobs on the line.

They should have made the melee and ranged Knights different units - not sure why they did not....

It was obviously part of their design style and if they can do the same for each and every any minor variant of a Marine Lt...

 Mr Morden wrote:
They should have made the melee and ranged Knights different units - not sure why they did not....

Then you could take 6 of them rather than 3.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
They should have made the melee and ranged Knights different units - not sure why they did not....

Then you could take 6 of them rather than 3.

It's like an interconnected matrix of terrible decisions all piling up to make one edition.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
They should have made the melee and ranged Knights different units - not sure why they did not....

Then you could take 6 of them rather than 3.

Which doesn't really seem like and issue - there's two whole knight army lists you can take more than 6 in after all.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
They should have made the melee and ranged Knights different units - not sure why they did not....

Then you could take 6 of them rather than 3.

Nobody needs to take 6 Wraithknights. 1 profile is fine.

You can already take 6 wraithknights with the FW version being a separate entry.

 Daba wrote:
You can already take 6 wraithknights with the FW version being a separate entry.

And I can count on one hand how many times I supported that being a separate entry instead of just an extra wargear option or two.