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2025/11/04 23:06:32
Subject: Would You Still Play 40k if they adopted the AoS Combat System?
An Ogre Irongut swinging its Great Weapon does D3. If it’s just walloped some W1 rubes? That’s three going splat.
From a Cinema Of The Mind perspective, that’s wonderful. Huge, powerful swings absolutely buttering smaller beings.
It's just moved the attacks value to the damage value instead though. This is allowing 1 hit/wound to cause 3 hits. I'm not sure that's better than the maths requiring 3 hit rolls with damage 1 each. If it at least required you to roll to wound the additional targets that would be something, but it collapses all the uncertainty from multiple hit and wound rolls into a single roll generating a huge outcome.
So I only have the 9th GK book. I thought I had 9th and 10th Ksons, but right now I can only find my 10th ed; some of the campaign books had psychic rules, but I'm not so sure I'm down for that much of a deep dive just to post about it.
Some of the 10th Crusade stuff for Ksons is pretty cool- high power rewards that allow you to choose two targets for powers instead of one on a high enough roll are common, and provide on in-battle choice related to the psychic test, and this can effect both buffs or offensive powers.
But 10th is out of scope for the conversation, so I didn't go deep.
As for 9th ed GK, it's worth noting that there where TWO psychic disciplines plus dedicated Brotherhood psychic abilities, and yes... That's a list building choice BUT:
Wardmakers had a strat that let them do a game long swap of a Dominus power they didn't know for Any power they did- cool, because it gave units that did not normally HAVE access to Dominus powers a way to use them... But once you use it, it lasts the whole game.
They also had a Warlord trait that made their psychic powers immune to Deny the Witch provided the psychic test was passed and the roll was unmodified 8+.
Another Generic Strat allowed a Paladin unit to swap a Santic power it didn't know for any power it did.
There was a generic strat to roll three dice for the test and pick two.
There was a generic stat to extend the range of a power.
There was a strat for Captains to grant +1 to tests of any psychic unit with 6 inches.
There was a strat that let you manifest an additional power.
Not all of these affect or are affected by the psychic roll, but they are all in-game choices with opportunity costs that enrich the psychic environment of the game.
There was a relic that made Deny the Witch succeed on an 8+ and another that made any enemy unit with 18 inches suffer Perils on any double, and a third that prevented units within 9 inches from ever suffering perils.
Now yes, those relics are CHOSEN at list building, but which units they affected was an in-game choice determined by positioning.
There was a Chaplain power that added one to psychic tests made by units within 6 inches and another that allowed one unit with 6 inches to cancel the effect of an enemy psychic power and be immune to psychic powers for the remainder of the phase.
There was another effect that allowed you to cat a power more than once, but each time you did it added one to the psychic test- I saw it the first time through the book, but damned if I can find it a second time, so I don't know if it was from a strat, a warlord trait, a relic or crusade relic.
The generic psychic fortitudes for crusade were cast an extra power, make and extra Deny or know an extra power.
The GK psychic fortitudes were cooler- one let a psyker measure the range for a power her was casting from an allied psychic unit with 12 inches rather than from himself.
Another added one to a characters strength for the remainder of the turn if it successfully manifested any powers in the psychic phase.
Another allowed a psychic unit to do a mortal to any unit that tried to Deny one of its powers.
Obviously, not all of these are what people are looking for- I know people want generic psychic phase rules that provide some variety and flexibility to the generic casting rules.
But all of these abilities do add complexity to the psychic environment, and well many of them are CHOSEN during list building, actually USING them once they are chosen does involve positioning and opportunity costs, etc.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2025/11/05 02:59:28
2025/11/05 07:51:44
Subject: Would You Still Play 40k if they adopted the AoS Combat System?
An Ogre Irongut swinging its Great Weapon does D3. If it’s just walloped some W1 rubes? That’s three going splat.
From a Cinema Of The Mind perspective, that’s wonderful. Huge, powerful swings absolutely buttering smaller beings.
I hate it, because it removes a possible lever for balance and player choice. It makes figuring out the best weapon purely a case of maths rather than thinking about the profile of likely targets, the general popularity of 1-wound or multi-wound units and it means there's no concept of trying to deal with a big scary melee unit that deals 3 damage per swing with a horde of little critters.
It's one of the reasons I wish GW would expand the range of stats on melee weapons in 40k. Everything's in this really narrow range of D1-3, S4-8, A3-4 and AP1-2. Quite often Damage, AP and S all increase together, too. Why not something like A2, S9, AP0 D4? Or any number of combinations that might work? Flawless Blades were an awful unit on release. They got an update to make them thoroughly OK. That update literally added 1 Attack. I'd have pushed for a completely different damage profile. Give them fewer attacks but a big damage number. Then they need to go hunting big, worthy targets but are comparatively less good at killing units of 1-2W infantry. Unfortunately, for these ideas to work GW would likely have to massively scale back on the number of Invulnerable saves.
2025/11/05 08:08:05
Subject: Would You Still Play 40k if they adopted the AoS Combat System?
So I only have the 9th GK book. I thought I had 9th and 10th Ksons, but right now I can only find my 10th ed; some of the campaign books had psychic rules, but I'm not so sure I'm down for that much of a deep dive just to post about it.
Some of the 10th Crusade stuff for Ksons is pretty cool- high power rewards that allow you to choose two targets for powers instead of one on a high enough roll are common, and provide on in-battle choice related to the psychic test, and this can effect both buffs or offensive powers.
But 10th is out of scope for the conversation, so I didn't go deep.
As for 9th ed GK, it's worth noting that there where TWO psychic disciplines plus dedicated Brotherhood psychic abilities, and yes... That's a list building choice BUT:
Wardmakers had a strat that let them do a game long swap of a Dominus power they didn't know for Any power they did- cool, because it gave units that did not normally HAVE access to Dominus powers a way to use them... But once you use it, it lasts the whole game.
They also had a Warlord trait that made their psychic powers immune to Deny the Witch provided the psychic test was passed and the roll was unmodified 8+.
Another Generic Strat allowed a Paladin unit to swap a Santic power it didn't know for any power it did.
There was a generic strat to roll three dice for the test and pick two.
There was a generic stat to extend the range of a power.
There was a strat for Captains to grant +1 to tests of any psychic unit with 6 inches.
There was a strat that let you manifest an additional power.
Not all of these affect or are affected by the psychic roll, but they are all in-game choices with opportunity costs that enrich the psychic environment of the game.
There was a relic that made Deny the Witch succeed on an 8+ and another that made any enemy unit with 18 inches suffer Perils on any double, and a third that prevented units within 9 inches from ever suffering perils.
Now yes, those relics are CHOSEN at list building, but which units they affected was an in-game choice determined by positioning.
There was a Chaplain power that added one to psychic tests made by units within 6 inches and another that allowed one unit with 6 inches to cancel the effect of an enemy psychic power and be immune to psychic powers for the remainder of the phase.
There was another effect that allowed you to cat a power more than once, but each time you did it added one to the psychic test- I saw it the first time through the book, but damned if I can find it a second time, so I don't know if it was from a strat, a warlord trait, a relic or crusade relic.
The generic psychic fortitudes for crusade were cast an extra power, make and extra Deny or know an extra power.
The GK psychic fortitudes were cooler- one let a psyker measure the range for a power her was casting from an allied psychic unit with 12 inches rather than from himself.
Another added one to a characters strength for the remainder of the turn if it successfully manifested any powers in the psychic phase.
Another allowed a psychic unit to do a mortal to any unit that tried to Deny one of its powers.
Obviously, not all of these are what people are looking for- I know people want generic psychic phase rules that provide some variety and flexibility to the generic casting rules.
But all of these abilities do add complexity to the psychic environment, and well many of them are CHOSEN during list building, actually USING them once they are chosen does involve positioning and opportunity costs, etc.
Which all kind of highlights the problems more. Firstly, the psychic phase was so poorly integrated into the game as a whole, only very specific armies got anything added that affected it. If you played Necrons or Tau you basically just sat there and got hammered by MW for the entire game with no way to interact at all. It's some of the least fun times I've had playing 40k. GK and TS were just terrible play experiences for the most part because of the limitations of the psychic phase.
Mainly, though, that list contains a host of non-choices or laughably useless abilities. Not able to Deny the Witch if I roll high enough that you wouldn't have tried anyway? Brilliant! I think in the entirety of 8th and 9th I probably Denied a grand total of 10 powers. Rolling extra dice is a classic example of an always-use strat that requires no real forethought at all. That also highlighs one of my problems with strats that are integral to an army. All they actually do is force players to keep CP aside to use them. There's really not much strategy or choice there. The system didn't even allow for proper scaling. WH had a built-in limit with the way Winds of Magic worked, that allowed more powerful wizards to feel powerful, but prevented them from being spammed because eventually you just ran out of dice to cast. So you had to think about the trade-off between power, flexibility and efficiency at army construction and you had to manage your resources in the magic phase. The increasing cost of a power you mention were the basic rules for Smite. Every psyker could take Smite and it had a rule allowing it to be cast by multiple casters per phase because at the start of 8th it needed that otherwise armies with more than 1 psyker would run out of powers to cast (did I mention how poorly implemented the whole psychic phase was?) Instead of getting rid of the most boring power in the game once armies got access to their own disciplines, they stapled on a handbrake to its power that didn't really do much because it was cast on a 5+, so the first three casts were pretty much fine. I played against Nids often enough that I saw multiple attempts at 10+ Smites because the system was so mindless there was no reason not to attempt them.
2025/11/05 08:21:45
Subject: Would You Still Play 40k if they adopted the AoS Combat System?
I think the reason melee profiles tend to gravitate to a certain profile is that they need to work on most (all?) things.
With ranged weapons and free split fire you can position and shoot what you want. With assault you've got to get across the board and successfully make a charge. You can fail. You can be screened. You can be shot or counter charged on the way over. If you make your way through all that then find "woops, these don't work on this target" then the unit has too many fail states to be successful.
Maybe this is something you can solve by points, but a unit that can chop 90% of targets is just better than one that's only good into say 20%.
Since it's all sequential you can to a degree manipulate the inputs but the outputs need to be broadly similar.
2025/11/05 09:15:36
Subject: Would You Still Play 40k if they adopted the AoS Combat System?
I think that's a solvable problem, and it comes back to giving players agency, IMO. Melee has to be more destructive than shooting because it's harder to get there in the first place, but I think there's still room to expand the range of possible profiles. For example, right now very few things are really good into vehicles or monsters without anti-vehicle, lethal hits or absurd level of bonuses that make them ridiculous at killing everything. I don't think it's a problem to have a melee unit that specialises at killing larger, tougher targets with 3+ wounds. Having units that are pretty good into everything makes the game worse.
I think the ease with which units can just leave combat is part of the problem as well. If you could actually lock units in combat you could have additional trade-offs with putting sub-optimal melee units into an enemy to pin them even if you're not going to kill them quickly. With everyone being able to just fall back and leave the melee unit exposed you have situations where you have to kill your target in one phase or it's just not worth it.
2025/11/05 13:41:40
Subject: Would You Still Play 40k if they adopted the AoS Combat System?
[DCM]
Chief Deputy Sub Assistant Trainee Squig Handling Intern
One of the main advantages of HTH is you get to dish out some damage in both player turns. Shooting, typically, can’t. And of course, unless the rules have changed? Once you’re engage in fisticuffs, ranged units can shoot into it.
We saw the game skewed heavily in HTH’s favour in 3rd ed. Melee dedicated armies got speedy, and could comfortably be knocking heads by turn 2. From there? They could follow up or overrun into combat after combat after combat, ending up well insulated from ranged attacks. Too insulated. Blood Angels were notoriously dull to face, as they had very few problems getting into Melee incredibly swiftly, and once there it was pretty much game over for an army that wasn’t itself melee centred.
Black Templars likewise. Cheaper ablative wounds in their squads, and if you shot them up, they may end up running toward you even faster.
So, there does need to be a balance. I’ve no problem with devastating combat or shooting units, provided the underlying rules provide me with at least a chance, and don’t heavily encourage speccing into just one.
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LunarSol wrote: The problem there though is points are a stat all of their own and you will NEVER pay for a better pistol. It's just way too niche of a choice. That's always been the problem with wargear points and very much what min/maxing is all about. You strip every bit of extraneous wargear to buy more generic bodies with generic stuff. I personally think the game is better when sergeants have cool pistols they never use over generic pistols they also never use. It's not like the generic pistols are gone from the game. It's just what you see on the grunts.
I'm not sure I agree. In 10th, I'm constantly wishing I could fill in my remaining points with some upgrades rather than dropping whole units to finagle my list into a decent shape that doesn't a ton of extra points unspent. Using something like the devastator approach in my previous post, I think people trying to build optimized lists would basically end up with a lot of units that look like 10th edition units sans the sergeant upgrades, but then they'd have the option to go through and spend those last 30 points unlocking power weapons and special guns on their sergeants, etc.
A blast pistol in my drukhari isn't very impressive, but it's probably impressive enough for me to spend 5 or 10 points upgrading a hekatrix to have it and a power weapon rather than a splinter pistol and hekatarii blade.
An Ogre Irongut swinging its Great Weapon does D3. If it’s just walloped some W1 rubes? That’s three going splat.
From a Cinema Of The Mind perspective, that’s wonderful. Huge, powerful swings absolutely buttering smaller beings.
I hate it, because it removes a possible lever for balance and player choice. It makes figuring out the best weapon purely a case of maths rather than thinking about the profile of likely targets, the general popularity of 1-wound or multi-wound units and it means there's no concept of trying to deal with a big scary melee unit that deals 3 damage per swing with a horde of little critters.
It's one of the reasons I wish GW would expand the range of stats on melee weapons in 40k. Everything's in this really narrow range of D1-3, S4-8, A3-4 and AP1-2. Quite often Damage, AP and S all increase together, too. Why not something like A2, S9, AP0 D4? Or any number of combinations that might work? Flawless Blades were an awful unit on release. They got an update to make them thoroughly OK. That update literally added 1 Attack. I'd have pushed for a completely different damage profile. Give them fewer attacks but a big damage number. Then they need to go hunting big, worthy targets but are comparatively less good at killing units of 1-2W infantry. Unfortunately, for these ideas to work GW would likely have to massively scale back on the number of Invulnerable saves.
Inclined to agree. I like having weapons that are good at killing tanks without also being particularly good at clearing squads of guardsmen or even marines. A lascannon with AoS's rules is basically an anti-horde weapon in addition to being an anti-big-things weapons.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Which all kind of highlights the problems more. Firstly, the psychic phase was so poorly integrated into the game as a whole, only very specific armies got anything added that affected it. If you played Necrons or Tau you basically just sat there and got hammered by MW for the entire game with no way to interact at all. It's some of the least fun times I've had playing 40k. GK and TS were just terrible play experiences for the most part because of the limitations of the psychic phase.
To play devil's advocate, I think the crux of the issue there was mortal wounds; not necessarily the lack of reactions/interactions in the psychic phase. Not everyone had a reactive strat they could use when being shot at in the shooting phase, and we were all kind of fine with that. Mortal wounds are the same concept, but with the extra sting that they bypassed the defensive stats and rules you'd invested in (Stealth, Toughness, saves).
Fundamentally, there isn't really a huge difference between a set of rules that lets zoanthropes do an average of X damage to you in the shooting phase vs X damage to you in the psychic phase. Both require the 'thropes get in range, have line of sight, and succeed on some rolls on their end. The big difference was just that they did X damage without having to care about the durability stats of the things they were hurting.
Not saying you're doing this, but I do think a lot of people get hung up on psychic attacks formerly being in the psychic phase and somehow end up feeling like they're entitled to more interaction with that phase than they do with, for instance, the shooting phase.
"I'm taking damage in the shooting phase, and I don't have any stratagems or special rules that let me interact with this incoming volley of shots? Well, that's fine. That's simply not a thing my army does."
"I'm taking damage in the psychic phase and don't have any stratagems or special rules that let me interact with this incoming volley of mind bullets? Absurd. What terrible game design."
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2025/11/05 17:12:12
ATTENTION. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
2025/11/05 22:19:05
Subject: Would You Still Play 40k if they adopted the AoS Combat System?
There's some truth in what you say about the psychic phase. There are some fundamental differences, though. MW are the main problem. Combined with being able to freely target any models, it made psychic attacks uniquely annoying to deal with and it represented a fundamental difference to other types of attacks. Against any other attack I could use my positioning or defensive stats to attempt to stay alive. That just didn't work against psychic attacks. In most cases there was literally no defence, so in a very real sense they were fundamentally different.
2025/11/05 22:25:52
Subject: Would You Still Play 40k if they adopted the AoS Combat System?
It has been a minute, but I think most mortal wound generating psychic powers still required line of sight, right? So you'd still factor in positioning in that your distance from the psyker and your ability to hide behind terrain would both still matter.
ATTENTION. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
