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I think even GW recognises that free wargear isn't the way. They had already begun pulling it back during 10th indirectly by splitting up datasheets (which achieves the same thing in a roundabout way, but consumes way more page space and is impractical for complex units) and now 11th edition continues it.

I can only hope 12th edition seals the deal again. The truth is, a unit like Scourges in a free wargear world will just -always- take Dark Lances (occasionally haywires if the meta is -very- vehicle heavy). They had to split off the sheet to make the carbines stop being a troll pick, but that still leaves plenty of guns like blasters, splinter cannons and shredders which will never exist while their big brothers are free.

Special/heavy weapons are at least an ideal case for differentiating options as sidegrades rather than upgrades. It isn't going to break the lore if Blasters, Splinter Cannons, and Shredders all have respective strengths and weaknesses that put them on par with Dark Lances, so there's a reason to take any of them. Then having the choice of either Shardcarbine squad as fast harassers or heavy weapons squad as fire support is a decent way to split it up.

The reason I chose plasma pistols and power fists on sergeants as my example is because they're an example of a free wargear choice where (1) balancing the options to be functionally equivalent isn't a viable option, and (2) the objectively correct choice doesn't match the lore; it has never been the case that every single Krieg or Scion sergeant is supposed to be packing a plasma pistol.

So the result of this free wargear scheme is that the fluffy, historically standard loadout represents a trap choice that is strictly worse than the competitively optimal one, and an army built to maximize the rules doesn't fit the fluff. It's the worst possible outcome.

In order to balance these options GW would need to either attach significantly useful special rules to the suboptimal options, nerf the better options to be on the same level as the weaker ones (or consolidate their rules), nix the better options entirely... or just attach a points cost to taking the better stuff.

Are options #1-3 actually easier than #4? I doubt it. So GW hasn't settled on a design that makes it easier to balance the game, they've simply decided to focus on external balance at the expense of internal balance.

 catbarf wrote:
Special/heavy weapons are at least an ideal case for differentiating options as sidegrades rather than upgrades. It isn't going to break the lore if Blasters, Splinter Cannons, and Shredders all have respective strengths and weaknesses that put them on par with Dark Lances, so there's a reason to take any of them. Then having the choice of either Shardcarbine squad as fast harassers or heavy weapons squad as fire support is a decent way to split it up.

Are they going to be on par though? Not every role is equally viable. Shredders are a close-range, anti-light infantry gun, and that's not what people are clamouring to get more of in their lists.

You'd have to give it obscene stats for it to contribute the same value as a dark lance does, and then you'd end up making life even worse for said light infantry units which themselves don't tend to have a very good time at all in this game (there's a reason Termagant swarms aren't flooding the boards...)

There was some talk about some of the wargear points coming back, at least for "big things." I don't know what that means, but some wargear points is better than none.

And I think that at least for marines, sergeant gear matters. Power fist on a marine is a meaningful upgrade over a chainsword. They are just releasing a new intercessors, with a sergeant in a very cool chainsword slashing pose. I'd like to actually use that model and not be punished for it.

I've been saying for a while that a good compromise between the old points system and the simplified-but-unsatisfying setup we have now is to basically break up a unit's wargear options into a smaller number of simplified options. So using scourges as an example, your options would look something like the following. Points values are placeholders:

* Take your basic scourge squad: 60 points.
* Take up to 5 extra bodies: +40 points.
* Let the solarite swap out his shard carbine for options on the solarite wargear list: +10 points.
* One of the following either:
A.) Up to 4 scourges swap their carbines out for one of the good weapons (blasters, splinter cannons, shredders, etc.) for +20 points OR
B.) Up to 4 scourges swap their carbines out for one of the option A weapons or one of the better weapons (lances, haywire blasters, etc.) for +40 points.

So instead of calculating a bunch of different prices for individual models, you just have to add together at most 4 numbers to determine the price of the squad. The designers at that point don't have to try to make blasters and shredders equally as appealing as dark lances; they can acknowledge that the lances are better than a lot of the other options, but they also don't have to agonize over whether a lance and a haywire blaster are *exactly* as desirable as one another as long as they're in the same ballpark and have reasonably appealing use cases.

You'd end up with a feeling of customization and ownership over your unit. You have a reason to not give your sergeants plasma pistols every time (because you'd save the 5 or 10 points per squad that it would normally take to unlock the plasma pistol option). And the designers still get a relatively small number of combinations to stress stress about balancing.

 catbarf wrote:
Special/heavy weapons are at least an ideal case for differentiating options as sidegrades rather than upgrades. It isn't going to break the lore if Blasters, Splinter Cannons, and Shredders all have respective strengths and weaknesses that put them on par with Dark Lances, so there's a reason to take any of them. Then having the choice of either Shardcarbine squad as fast harassers or heavy weapons squad as fire support is a decent way to split it up.

Eh. I get the point you're making but I think even this is stretching it, honestly.

The trouble is, particularly with regard to Shredders and Splinter Cannons, you're having to try and balance around not only their effectiveness in the anti-infantry role but also taking into account that most units in the DE list have basically the same profile by default.

As in, even if the Splinter Cannon and Shredder are considered as good at anti-infantry as Dark Lances and Blasters are at anti-vehicle/monster, the ubiquity of anti-infantry weapons in the DE list mean those options are still likely going to be inherently less valuable than the anti-monster/vehicle weapons.

Anyway, not disagreeing with your overall point. Just wanted to point out that, even when you're only comparing 'upgrade' weapons, it's still extremely difficult to not have clear winners and losers if they all cost the same.

 Crimson wrote:
There was some talk about some of the wargear points coming back, at least for "big things." I don't know what that means, but some wargear points is better than none.

And I think that at least for marines, sergeant gear matters. Power fist on a marine is a meaningful upgrade over a chainsword. They are just releasing a new intercessors, with a sergeant in a very cool chainsword slashing pose. I'd like to actually use that model and not be punished for it.

Definitely. In 5e I mained Orks (ah, how time flies) and my favoured strategy was flooding the field with Orks.

I could fit 180 Boyz into a standard FOC's troops slots, and it set me back just over 1000 points naked. It was completely overwhelming for many enemies to deal with and incredibly effective. 6 points for 4 S4 WS4 attacks on the charge killed plenty of things, including mowing down whole Terminator squads before they could fight back.

But when going more restrained, you could see how the options really mattered. I could take a mob of 10 boyz and they're a fair, effective infantry unit, cheap, great at using cover saves since they waste little of their power budget on armour, and easily bodying other units in their weight class such as Hormagaunts.

On the other hand, I could buy them a Nob (+10 points) and give the nob a Power Klaw (+25 points). Now the unit is quite a bit more expensive, but drastically more dangerous, to the point its role is basically completely transformed. Extremely few things in the game wanted to deal with a PK nob sitting behind 10+ ablative boyz in melee.

Making the Nob free and the PK free would have made the game play way more shallow and boring. The naked boyz mob had plenty of purpose.

Disappointed, now that all games are using terrain layouts the game is cooked. It'll be minimum 6yrs of not playing, which at that point there will be no going back to my once hobby.

 vipoid wrote:
For one, if the game wants to focus on the squad-level then it seems weird to not only permit but actively enforce having as many different weapon types in a given unit as possible.

I honestly don't see the difference between a big tank or walker having a bunch of different guns and any of your examples.

Both the kill rig and the battlewagon have three ranged and three melee profiles they can use at the same time.

The game pieces are squads now, often single or double sized. How many different profiles they have, and whether that makes sense is a discussion completely detached from that.


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 Ashiraya wrote:

Tyel wrote:
I'm not sure the difference between 0 and 0.5 points is meaningful to a game.

Because the point isn't that it should be half a point. The point is that some people will go "omg, if they weren't free, I would never take a plasma gun on my guardsmen squads" and I think that's extremely narrow-minded. If the plasma gun was half a point you can bet I would take it. It'd make its points back 20x with every shot. That's a good investment in my book.

There are a bunch of free plasma pistols scattered over the DG codex. They have caused less than 10 wounds over the course of 10th edition, and most of those were inflicted on the shooter themselves. If those pistols were 0.5 points and a bolt pistol is 0, I would never bring a single one of them.


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 Crimson wrote:
There was some talk about some of the wargear points coming back, at least for "big things." I don't know what that means, but some wargear points is better than none.

They were talking about role-defining wargear options like the main guns of big walkers. It enables them to make both guns on a tank like the repulsor executioner relevant, while also not needing 20 datasheets to cover all versions of the leman russ. Outside of those cases, they seem to be fairly happy with the results of removing datasheet costs.

 Jidmah wrote:
There are a bunch of free plasma pistols scattered over the DG codex. They have caused less than 10 wounds over the course of 10th edition, and most of those were inflicted on the shooter themselves. If those pistols were 0.5 points and a bolt pistol is 0, I would never bring a single one of them.

Cool. I'd not force you to bring them. I sure would, and by mathhammer, at 0.5 points they would be probably the most insanely undercosted thing in the entire game. To put it this way, if you could pay 50 points to give 100 cultists plasma pistols, would you? I sure would (assuming I am doing a cultist horde in the first place). Boom, these 100 cultists have now gone from a moveblocking nuisance to a Problem that will delete whole squads if ever left to shoot. Or hell, imagine seeing 50 Black Templar Crusaders who -all- have been given plasma pistols for 25 points total. Horrifying!

You might go "oh, but that's 100 plasma pistols, 100 plasma pistols might do something but 1 plasma pistol won't". Okay, but this is Warhammer. Prices in Warhammer don't scale. The maths here are genuinely additive. Two plasma pistols do twice as much average damage as one. Yes, in tactical practice there all manner of considerations involved, but the game has never and will never price around it. Your third Lictor has never been cheaper or more expensive than your first. Your 100th boy has never been cheaper or more expensive than your first. That's just not how Warhammer works*.

(*exceptions for occasions where units have been X points each for the first Y models and then Z points each for every model beyond that, but that's mostly a thing in 10th to compensate for frontloaded wargear, and is otherwise rare.)

Crisis Suits, 9th Edition, had guns cost X for the first copy, X+Y for the second, and so on.
So not 100% accurate, Ashiraya. But mostly accurate.

For what it's worth, I don't think the jump from Laspistol to Bolt Pistol is worth even a single point. But going from Las or Bolt to Plasma should, ideally, cost at least a couple. Not much-it's uncommon for it to be used. But something.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Definitely. In 5e I mained Orks (ah, how time flies) and my favoured strategy was flooding the field with Orks.

I could fit 180 Boyz into a standard FOC's troops slots, and it set me back just over 1000 points naked. It was completely overwhelming for many enemies to deal with and incredibly effective. 6 points for 4 S4 WS4 attacks on the charge killed plenty of things, including mowing down whole Terminator squads before they could fight back.

But when going more restrained, you could see how the options really mattered. I could take a mob of 10 boyz and they're a fair, effective infantry unit, cheap, great at using cover saves since they waste little of their power budget on armour, and easily bodying other units in their weight class such as Hormagaunts.

On the other hand, I could buy them a Nob (+10 points) and give the nob a Power Klaw (+25 points). Now the unit is quite a bit more expensive, but drastically more dangerous, to the point its role is basically completely transformed. Extremely few things in the game wanted to deal with a PK nob sitting behind 10+ ablative boyz in melee.

Making the Nob free and the PK free would have made the game play way more shallow and boring. The naked boyz mob had plenty of purpose.

That's not how I remember it at all. During 5th I already was writing tactics on this page and dakka was kind of the top tier WAAC competitive community, similar to what goonhammer or r/warhammercompetitive is today.

If you were playing to win, PKs, boss poles and nobz were mandatory in boyz mobs, full stop. Units of 10(12!) had no place outside of trucks, 'ard boyz and stikkbombs were a trap choice and large mobs were usually best played as units of 20 because otherwise you would loose out on nobz, clump up around terrain and often couldn't get everyone in combat. Shootas were vastly more powerful stronger than choppas.
The classic green tide was nothing but a skew list that won against badly prepared opponents. Many competitive armies like guard, GK, space wolves, BA could easily handle them. It wouldn't have survived a single balance dataslate if those existed back then.

The only true choice boyz offered was whether you spent 10 points on a rokkits or not and whether you were willing to spend more money to build shoota boyz instead of using your bucket of AOBR boyz you found on ebay for $4. Everything else was just the illusion of choice, baiting you to spend points to get an objectively worse unit.


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 Ashiraya wrote:
Cool. I'd not force you to bring them. I sure would, and by mathhammer, at 0.5 points they would be probably the most insanely undercosted thing in the entire game. To put it this way, if you could pay 50 points to give 100 cultists plasma pistols, would you? I sure would (assuming I am doing a cultist horde in the first place). Boom, these 100 cultists have now gone from a moveblocking nuisance to a Problem that will delete whole squads if ever left to shoot. Or hell, imagine seeing 50 Black Templar Crusaders who -all- have been given plasma pistols for 25 points total. Horrifying!

You might go "oh, but that's 100 plasma pistols, 100 plasma pistols might do something but 1 plasma pistol won't". Okay, but this is Warhammer. Prices in Warhammer don't scale. The maths here are genuinely additive. Two plasma pistols do twice as much average damage as one. Yes, in tactical practice there all manner of considerations involved, but the game has never and will never price around it. Your third Lictor has never been cheaper or more expensive than your first. Your 100th boy has never been cheaper or more expensive than your first. That's just not how Warhammer works*.

(*exceptions for occasions where units have been X points each for the first Y models and then Z points each for every model beyond that, but that's mostly a thing in 10th to compensate for frontloaded wargear, and is otherwise rare.)

Congratulations, you have understood why units must be costed as a whole and why costing single pieces of war gear does not work

I know the debate of Boys vs. Toys was still an open debate in 5th, and had proponents on both sides. Even as a non-ork player. “The best upgrade you can give a boy is another standing next to him” Now people might have been unyielding in their camps convinced that there was only one correct answer, and I cant speak for performance at the tournament level. But my recollection was is was not codified into a final absolute.

As a marine player I was alway in the boys camp. More squads was generally better then fewer, overequipped ones. That said, you needed to make sure they had the tools they needed to get their job done. But there was a place for a sternguard squad just pumping out special ammo, and not combi-weapon spam. Or bare-bones scouts vs. camo cloaked snipers. The tac squad does not need a sword or a fancy pistol, but a combi to match the special in the squad was worth the points to get the unit to function at it’s job better.

 Jidmah wrote:
Congratulations, you have understood why units must be costed as a whole and why costing single pieces of war gear does not work

In the same way that armies must be costed as a whole, and costing single units does not work.

Which is to say that 'does not work' here just means 'doesn't achieve the strawman of Perfect Balance(tm)'. Who cares. Imperfect points are better than not trying at all.

 Jidmah wrote:

 vipoid wrote:
For one, if the game wants to focus on the squad-level then it seems weird to not only permit but actively enforce having as many different weapon types in a given unit as possible.

I honestly don't see the difference between a big tank or walker having a bunch of different guns and any of your examples.

Both the kill rig and the battlewagon have three ranged and three melee profiles they can use at the same time.

So literally half the number of ranged profiles as Hand of the Archon. Which makes them the same for some reason.

 Jidmah wrote:
The game pieces are squads now, often single or double sized. How many different profiles they have, and whether that makes sense is a discussion completely detached from that.

I think we must be talking at cross-purposes because "The game pieces are squads now" would otherwise appear to be blatantly wrong.

Taken literally, it would suggest that the game has changed into something more akin to Apocalypse wherein you have a single model that represents an entire squad. Instead, each model in the squad is still individually represented.

So instead I can only presume you are talking about how the game handles squads. Yet even here the argument would appear to fall flat.

Wargear is still based on individual models. So rather than 'the squad' having a plasmagun, a specific marine within the squad will have a plasmagun. If that Marine is killed, the plasmagun dies with them.

Indeed, a squad's firepower is entirely based on the individual models comprising it. There's no abstraction - you literally count all the models with Gun A, all the models with Gun B etc. Again, one might think a squad-based game would abstract the squad's firepower (especially when it comes to, say, small-arms).

It's a similar story with e.g. LoS in that LoS is measured to and from individual models. e.g. Models A1 and A2 in squad A may have LoS to models B3 and B5 in squad B, whilst models A3 and A4 in squad A don't have LoS and so can't shoot at squad B. One would think a squad-based game would instead be based around what squad A as a whole can see (not the individual models within it). This also goes back to the above point in that, rather than a squad having a rocket launcher that one of them can use, an individual model has a rocket launcher and so whether or not it can fire is based entirely on what targets that specific model can see.

It's a similar story with damage inflicted to a squad, which is dealt to individual models within the squad, which are then removed one at a time. Again, I would expect a squad-based game to have a more abstract damage system (based on the squad taking damage, losing morale etc.). As opposed to damage being 1:1 vs. the individual models in the squad.

Frankly, if this is supposed to be a squad-based game then it's so flimsy that GW haven't even reached the 'half-arsed' point. I don't think we're even at a 10th of an arse yet.

 Jidmah wrote:
That's not how I remember it at all. During 5th I already was writing tactics on this page and dakka was kind of the top tier WAAC competitive community, similar to what goonhammer or r/warhammercompetitive is today.

Okay. It worked well enough for me. I might not have won any tournaments (I didn't go to any) but it worked just fine even if it wasn't cut-throat optimal. I am cool with that standard.

Congratulations, you have understood why units must be costed as a whole and why costing single pieces of war gear does not work

Huh? Is this a reply to the wrong post?


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 catbarf wrote:
Which is to say that 'does not work' here just means 'doesn't achieve the strawman of Perfect Balance(tm)'. Who cares. Imperfect points are better than not trying at all.

Right. GW is never going to achieve perfect balance. It's effectively impossible, and it's not the point. The point is ensuring no option feels like a troll pick. Right now a sergeant with a chainsword is a troll pick, a Retributor with a heavy bolter is a troll pick, a Scourge with a Shredder is a troll pick, a Nob with a Choppa is a troll pick. This state of affairs is not making the game better.

 catbarf wrote:
Imperfect points are better than not trying at all.

That's a perfectly valid opinion to have.

However, in the context of GW being in charge of 40k, all evidence points toward no points for upgrades being just as good or bad as having points for upgrades, except GW is now doing a better job at balancing the game as a whole. Whether that is related or coincidental is a matter of opinion.


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 vipoid wrote:
Taken literally, it would suggest that the game has changed into something more akin to Apocalypse wherein you have a single model that represents an entire squad. Instead, each model in the squad is still individually represented.

So instead I can only presume you are talking about how the game handles squads. Yet even here the argument would appear to fall flat.

Wargear is still based on individual models. So rather than 'the squad' having a plasmagun, a specific marine within the squad will have a plasmagun. If that Marine is killed, the plasmagun dies with them.

(note that I cut the rest of your post so others can read mine better, not because I didn't read it.

I understand where you are coming from, but a gun disappearing over the course of a game isn't a new concept and not related to flight level either. There used be a damaged weapon status and there still are one-shot weapons. Vehicles and Monsters feel different from infantry and mounted units because they react differently to taking damage.

And, of course, GW is inconsistent about applying this concept, and they are still have baggage from decisions taken decades ago. But GW being inconsistent is very much like the sky being blue.


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 Ashiraya wrote:
Okay. It worked well enough for me. I might not have won any tournaments (I didn't go to any) but it worked just fine even if it wasn't cut-throat optimal. I am cool with that standard.

Consider yourself blessed. Your average game was probably much more fun than mine during 5th. Though I loved the tactical challenge, most of my opponents were the kind of people I would avoid today.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Huh? Is this a reply to the wrong post?

No, I was not. Your example of the plasma pistol spamming cultist just perfectly illustrates one of the reasons why it's impossible to put a price tag on a single gun. The exact same pistol is worthless when brought four times and game-crushing overpowered when brought a twenty times.

Right. GW is never going to achieve perfect balance. It's effectively impossible, and it's not the point. The point is ensuring no option feels like a troll pick. Right now a sergeant with a chainsword is a troll pick, a Retributor with a heavy bolter is a troll pick, a Scourge with a Shredder is a troll pick, a Nob with a Choppa is a troll pick. This state of affairs is not making the game better.

100% agree, but points have failed to fix this problem for decades now. The only thing which fixes "troll picks" is fixing the weapon profile to make all options equally valuable.

 Jidmah wrote:

No, I was not. Your example of the plasma pistol spamming cultist just perfectly illustrates one of the reasons why it's impossible to put a price tag on a single gun. The exact same pistol is worthless when brought four times and game-crushing overpowered when brought a twenty times.

But it's not worthless when brought four times? Why would it be? It's a fifth of the strength when brought twenty times.

In some situations it will be much better than when it's brought twenty times, because the sixteen guys with no plasma pistols are cheaper ablative wounds for your guys with actual strength, AP and damage on their pistol.

Sixty Primaris Crusaders are a terrifying force. That doesn't mean ten Primaris Crusaders are such a trivial force that they may as well be almost free? What kind of logic is that...?

100% agree, but points have failed to fix this problem for decades now. The only thing which fixes "troll picks" is fixing the weapon profile to make all options equally valuable.

For those decades GW has largely not done much post-launch balancing. I should remind you that if it had been abandoned to its launch state, 10th edition 40k would rightly have a level of infamy comparable to 7th by now. It was beyond atrocious. Admech paid 12.5ppm for a body with guardsman stats whereas Aeldari could wipe out whole armies without having to bother with such trivialities as "line of sight" or "rolling to wound".

Free wargear has not fixed the troll picks. It has created them. Heavy bolter Retributors were never optimal (and will never be optimal, their role just isn't as useful in the kind of game that 40k is) but pre-10th they at least had the bloody decency of being cheap, and you surely see why that's an upgrade?


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 JNAProductions wrote:
Crisis Suits, 9th Edition, had guns cost X for the first copy, X+Y for the second, and so on.
So not 100% accurate, Ashiraya. But mostly accurate.

True. That was a truly fantastic system and solution to the age-old problem of managing Crisis loadouts. It landed a bit unpolished, the numbers needed further tuning, but it was the ideal answer to how you resolve their equipment balancing; you can build the spam-one-particular-weapon loadout that's always been meta, while paying an appropriate cost for doing so, and if you do want to build a fluffy box cover-style mixed gun unit, your unit is much cheaper to compensate for its loss of rules efficiency.

And then 10e flipped the table and wargear locked the unit, splitting it into three separate squads, one of which you can't even build out of a single Crisis box, while making the box cover unit unplayable. Sodding hell, I hate this edition.

 Jidmah wrote:
However, in the context of GW being in charge of 40k, all evidence points toward no points for upgrades being just as good or bad as having points for upgrades, except GW is now doing a better job at balancing the game as a whole.

I don't think there's enough evidence to actually conclude that. I think you, and GW, have simply chosen to accept worse internal balance in favor of better external balance, and shift it to the player's responsibility to pick the obviously imbalanced best choice and avoid the obviously imbalanced trap choices.

I'm sure better external balance is an improvement for competitive play, where it's a given that you take the best of the best from your codex and ignore all the weak stuff that, like you said, GW does a poor job of recognizing and elevating.

But there's more to the game than tournament play. So I don't accept the implicit premise that a change primarily to the benefit of competitive play constitutes an objective improvement for the game as a whole.

 Jidmah wrote:

Right. GW is never going to achieve perfect balance. It's effectively impossible, and it's not the point. The point is ensuring no option feels like a troll pick. Right now a sergeant with a chainsword is a troll pick, a Retributor with a heavy bolter is a troll pick, a Scourge with a Shredder is a troll pick, a Nob with a Choppa is a troll pick. This state of affairs is not making the game better.

100% agree, but points have failed to fix this problem for decades now. The only thing which fixes "troll picks" is fixing the weapon profile to make all options equally valuable.

That might be possible with a heavy bolter and a lascannon but there's no way to reconcile it with a laspistol and a plasma pistol, or a chainsword and a power fist, without fundamentally changing the definition of those weapons in the lore. It's like saying that a game needs to make a slingshot and a glock equally viable.

And to expand on Catbarf's point on internal and external balance, let's say the Ork codex now just lets you take 50 models, whether they be grots or boys or nobs. Since nobs are objectively the best Ork players take nothing but nobs, and the Space Marine players likewise take nothing but terminators. By completely destroying each army's internal balance in this fashion you have actually made external balance very easy: GW only really needs to balance the nobs and terminators in order to maintain balance between those factions, which is far simpler than balancing them when a bunch of different units are viable. Few players, however, would be happy with this tradeoff.

By the same logic, rendering a bunch of equipment options non-viable simplifies the unit just as removing those options entirely would; our space marine character is purely balanced on the assumption that he is taking a power fist and not a chainsword, because the power fist is objectively better and costs nothing. If the character was cheaper but had to pay for the power fist then now there are more variables which makes things more complex and therefore more difficult to balance. But this would likewise be true if the character had a choice between a power fist and a super-chainsword that were equally powerful (and free) but which had very different roles.

Ashiraya wrote: a Retributor with a heavy bolter is a troll pick

B-but I like my heavy bolter retributors! The extra range and rerolls actually makes them pretty decent at throwing around chip damage from relative safety, and they kill meq reasonably well!

Orkeosaurus wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

Right. GW is never going to achieve perfect balance. It's effectively impossible, and it's not the point. The point is ensuring no option feels like a troll pick. Right now a sergeant with a chainsword is a troll pick, a Retributor with a heavy bolter is a troll pick, a Scourge with a Shredder is a troll pick, a Nob with a Choppa is a troll pick. This state of affairs is not making the game better.

100% agree, but points have failed to fix this problem for decades now. The only thing which fixes "troll picks" is fixing the weapon profile to make all options equally valuable.

That might be possible with a heavy bolter and a lascannon but there's no way to reconcile it with a laspistol and a plasma pistol, or a chainsword and a power fist, without fundamentally changing the definition of those weapons in the lore. It's like saying that a game needs to make a slingshot and a glock equally viable.

And to expand on Catbarf's point on internal and external balance, let's say the Ork codex now just lets you take 50 models, whether they be grots or boys or nobs. Since nobs are objectively the best Ork players take nothing but nobs, and the Space Marine players likewise take nothing but terminators. By completely destroying each army's internal balance in this fashion you have actually made external balance very easy: GW only really needs to balance the nobs and terminators in order to maintain balance between those factions, which is far simpler than balancing them when a bunch of different units are viable. Few players, however, would be happy with this tradeoff.

By the same logic, rendering a bunch of equipment options non-viable simplifies the unit just as removing those options entirely would; our space marine character is purely balanced on the assumption that he is taking a power fist and not a chainsword, because the power fist is objectively better and costs nothing. If the character was cheaper but had to pay for the power fist then now there are more variables which makes things more complex and therefore more difficult to balance. But this would likewise be true if the character had a choice between a power fist and a super-chainsword that were equally powerful (and free) but which had very different roles.

Yep. Pretty much this. There's only so much you can do to make a las pistol better before it stops feeling appropriately *un*impressive for its lore. And I don't *want* them to make plasma pistols feel significantly less impressive in order to justify the two items costing the same amount. They really should simply attach a point cost to the plasma pistol or (failing that) have it compete with some other similarly useful piece of kit.

I kind of feel like this is what happened to melta weapons and blasters in 10th. Historically, melta weapons have been able to reliably wound tanks and do solid damage to them, which is notably more valuable than what flamers and plasma guns (which frequently compete for the same slots as meltaguns) are able to do. But because they took away wargear points, they couldn't simply make the meltagun a few points more expensive than its competitors, so instead, they functionally nerfed it by not having its strength increase to match the increased Toughness stats of tanks. So now meltaguns are a gamble when used against what has historically been their preferred target (tanks), and I think it's because they realized no one would ever tank a plasma gun or flamer if they had the option to take an S10+ melta instead. So they made meltaguns less fluffy because they couldn't make them more expensive. At least, that's my theory.

 Ashiraya wrote:
What kind of logic is that...?

The kind of logic where having multiples of something increases the value of each single thing. "bring multiples or bring none" has always been a core principle of 40k list building.

Your 5th edition green tide is the perfect example of that. one ork boyz is no threat whatsoever, 30 ork boyz without gear are trivial to deal with, at 60-90 orks they start causing headaches, at 180 they are winning games.

Same with plasma pistols. Four plasma pistols spread across a tallyman, a noxious blightbringer and two melee squad champions have no impact on the game four out five times, and split the last one between failing hazardous and dealing 2 damage to something of value.

Even in your fictional squad of 20 cultists, 4 plasma pistols just don't do enough to base your decisions for that squad around it. However, once you are able to take 20 plasma pistols the squad is able to threaten elite infantry and vehicles, so you absolutely want to push them forward to deal damage with them.

I should remind you that if it had been abandoned to its launch state, 10th edition 40k would rightly have a level of infamy comparable to 7th by now. It was beyond atrocious. Admech paid 12.5ppm for a body with guardsman stats whereas Aeldari could wipe out whole armies without having to bother with such trivialities as "line of sight" or "rolling to wound".

None of that is related to wargear having point values though? And they did update 8th and 9th after launch, and both were worse in terms of balance, despite them tweaking wargear costs.

Free wargear has not fixed the troll picks. It has created them.

I just listed a bunch of troll picks from 5th edition a few posts ago.

I think melta guns and blasters got nerfed because monsters/tanks were dying too much. It's not to balance them against flamers.

Then you are getting into fluff Vs game. It may be fluffy for a guardsman to sneak up and one shot a tank with a melta gun shot from the back. But mechanically it's kind of busted. The game isn't a single player RPG.

To my mind recent 40k has been far more balanced than Middlehammer and this can see in the number of factions placing and the variety of units being used. 7th may have been a low point, but competitively only about 20% of factions mattered, and of them perhaps only 20% of datasheets. I don't remember it being much better in 5th. In 7th I'd have labelled the whole Ork faction a trap. The same for DE and Tyranids outside of day mass Reavers with caltrops or Flying Hive Tyrants with devourers.

Yes you could take Scourge with four shredders for 100 points and this was cheaper than Scourge with 4 dark lances for 160. But both sucked so who cares? Maybe you could really squint and if you list tailored into a friend (you monster) the shredders might be worth it but probably not.

If you aren't planning to go to the LVO I feel the vast majority of stuff in 10th edition 40k has been viable into everything else. Which is far healthier for casual players. It's also why you've had such variety in placing lists from competitive players. Not all the time obviously. Is your friendly casual list beating three defilers right now? Probably not. But this is something of an exception rather than a rule.

Part of this is the faster rate of change. If Index Eldar had been in place for 3-5 years a lot more people would have got an Eldar army and the broader meta would have been more cut throat as a result (like 5th-7th). But it didn't so they mostly didn't. But I also think it's due to a changed philosophy of balancing. "I think retributors with heavy bolters should be better for the points" is different to "SoB are functionally unplayable right now into the decent 2-4 factions that make up the competitive meta."

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
That might be possible with a heavy bolter and a lascannon but there's no way to reconcile it with a laspistol and a plasma pistol, or a chainsword and a power fist, without fundamentally changing the definition of those weapons in the lore. It's like saying that a game needs to make a slingshot and a glock equally viable.

GW has made decent shots at balancing chainsword and power fists against each other, by making one be a threat to vehicles and monsters and the other good at killing a ton of badly armored infantry.
If all models of a unit can have both as slingshot and a glock, they need to be different datasheets, because they are obviously not fulfilling the same role. But then again, most units in 40k don't actually work that way. It's usually "one dude in your unit of slingshots can have a glock" and it understandably feels wrong to veterans to have the clear troll option to not take the glock.

And to expand on Catbarf's point on internal and external balance, let's say the Ork codex now just lets you take 50 models, whether they be grots or boys or nobs. Since nobs are objectively the best Ork players take nothing but nobs, and the Space Marine players likewise take nothing but terminators. By completely destroying each army's internal balance in this fashion you have actually made external balance very easy: GW only really needs to balance the nobs and terminators in order to maintain balance between those factions, which is far simpler than balancing them when a bunch of different units are viable. Few players, however, would be happy with this tradeoff.

I didn't want to respond to catbarf's post because he literally just responded "I don't think your facts are real", but I'll address the issue.

First of all, we have hard numbers proving that internal balance is way better than in any previous edition. The amount of units played from each codex has vastly increased compared to any oldhammer edition and to 9th and the majority of archetypes are not bringing the maximum number of any "best unit" anymore unless your codex is just three flavors of marines and a primarch.
The effect you're he described simply doesn't exist. Therefore one cannot argue that removing points from wargear has made internal balance worse.

The flaw in your argument is that you ignore unit composition, split datasheets, existing models and wargear loadouts. A unit where you are allowed to replace every single model with a strictly better one is a badly designed unit.
You could put point costs on the nob/terminator upgrade and there most likely would still be a optimal choice and all others would be traps.
In theory, there should be sweet spot where both are perfectly balanced against each other points wise, but in practice this never really worked out. For some things, it's really hard to find the sweet spot, because it's a moving target - see the plasma pistol discussion above. Some units just have too many options to make them all equal (GW's historical limit is 3), sometimes one option is worth more in very efficient setups, but less in others. Sometimes you never want a specific option because it's simply something that doesn't fit your army's game plan.

It's important to understand that removing wargear costs from the equation is not just "giving up" or "being lazy". Complexity is something which affects everything you do with a system. When you understand that a system you struggling balance too complex for you to handle, reducing complexity is a very valid option to tackle that.
In my opinion one of the reasons why 10th was a much better experience as a player than 9th is because GW reduced complexity to level they are able to manage.

By the same logic, rendering a bunch of equipment options non-viable simplifies the unit just as removing those options entirely would; our space marine character is purely balanced on the assumption that he is taking a power fist and not a chainsword, because the power fist is objectively better and costs nothing. If the character was cheaper but had to pay for the power fist then now there are more variables which makes things more complex and therefore more difficult to balance. But this would likewise be true if the character had a choice between a power fist and a super-chainsword that were equally powerful (and free) but which had very different roles.

That's more or less what I'm trying to argue.
Not having wargear points is not inherrently the superior choice. But in practice, we have seen an edition which was no worse at balancing wargear than any of the seven editions before it.
So, while it feels wrong - nothing was actually lost.


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 Wyldhunt wrote:
Yep. Pretty much this. There's only so much you can do to make a las pistol better before it stops feeling appropriately *un*impressive for its lore. And I don't *want* them to make plasma pistols feel significantly less impressive in order to justify the two items costing the same amount. They really should simply attach a point cost to the plasma pistol or (failing that) have it compete with some other similarly useful piece of kit.

Character pistols are a mess, which IMO cannot be fixed by either points or datasheets.
I'm honestly happy that many DG characters don't have an option do downgrade from a plasma pistol to a bolt pistol in exchange for points, because otherwise I would never play one.

I kind of feel like this is what happened to melta weapons and blasters in 10th. Historically, melta weapons have been able to reliably wound tanks and do solid damage to them, which is notably more valuable than what flamers and plasma guns (which frequently compete for the same slots as meltaguns) are able to do. But because they took away wargear points, they couldn't simply make the meltagun a few points more expensive than its competitors, so instead, they functionally nerfed it by not having its strength increase to match the increased Toughness stats of tanks. So now meltaguns are a gamble when used against what has historically been their preferred target (tanks), and I think it's because they realized no one would ever tank a plasma gun or flamer if they had the option to take an S10+ melta instead. So they made meltaguns less fluffy because they couldn't make them more expensive. At least, that's my theory.

Honestly, I disagree with the analysis of melta. For an infantry-sized gun It's still a good weapon for taking a decent sized chunk out of tanks due to its AP and reliable, high damage. Especially imulti-meltas do see a lot of play. Wounding on fives isn't that bad if you get to ignore their armor afterwards.
What has changed is that vehicles and monsters are no longer one-shottable, so the risk of bringing a melta gun close enough to risk a whole unit simply doesn't pay off anymore unless you have a way of keeping your melta unit safe.
I think it fair and flavorful that meltas are great at melting armor and not so much at punching through completely unarmored deamons and monsters.

 Jidmah wrote:
First of all, we have hard numbers proving that internal balance is way better than in any previous edition. The amount of units played from each codex has vastly increased compared to any oldhammer edition and to 9th and the majority of archetypes are not bringing the maximum number of any "best unit" anymore unless your codex is just three flavors of marines and a primarch.
The effect you're he described simply doesn't exist. Therefore one cannot argue that removing points from wargear has made internal balance worse.

If you have hard numbers proving that units are bringing a greater variety of wargear options than they did in prior editions, and that units taking suboptimal wargear picks are still more accurately valued under the new system than under the old, I'm all ears.

Because I actually like this system on principle. So I'm open to evidence that the new approach of adjusting rules rather than costs is working better than before at providing meaningful options and fairly assessing the value of an army, particularly one that is not chosen according to strict competitive optimization. I'd like to believe that all the little things that stand out to me in optimized lists- plasma pistols and power weapons on every podunk sergeant, Tyranid Warriors being two-thirds heavy weapons, Devourers never appearing because they're worthless when Deathspitters exist- are exceptions rather than the rule and will be cleaned up in the next codices. I'd like to believe that not taking these sorts of lore-unfriendly competitive optimizations doesn't noticeably impact the combat power of an army, and that 2000pts of an army built pre-free-wargear is still in rough parity with 2000pts of post-free-wargear, which has been the sticking point for my group.

But after playing through the entirety of 10th I'm still not seeing it. Hence my [citation needed].

Don't take it personal, but I dredged up the data three or four times in discussion here on dakka already, and each time a post that took hours to write got deflected by a two-liner nitpick, strawman or ad hominem attack.
Considering how your first line is already moving goalposts, I have zero confidence in this being worth my time.

If you are truly interested, search my post history for the post where I went through three months of top 10 tournament placements.

My personal experience is that weapons are much closer than they used to be. I still run a mix of big choppa and PK nobz despite the PK being better, because the difference is not that big. Is still run blighlords with just combi-bolters, because it's one of my best painted units and don't have the spitter and the reaper autocannon painted. I run a winged demon prince despite the one without wings being much better for DG, because by two princes are winged. Same is true for many other units.

And yet, unless I mess around or face a truly great player, I usually win my games by a landslide. This is definitely not something that was possible in previous editions, doubly so with orks.

 Jidmah wrote:

The kind of logic where having multiples of something increases the value of each single thing. "bring multiples or bring none" has always been a core principle of 40k list building.

Your 5th edition green tide is the perfect example of that. one ork boyz is no threat whatsoever, 30 ork boyz without gear are trivial to deal with, at 60-90 orks they start causing headaches, at 180 they are winning games.

Actually, a singular Boy would be an insane unit. It would be the cheapest objective holder (and nowadays, action monkey) in the game by a massive margin, also soaking overwatch, being an insane roadblock in bottlenecks, and so on, and if ignored it could genuinely threaten weak backliners (such as Guard HWTs - they are so bad in melee the solo Boy might genuinely win). Yes, it'd die the moment anything serious touches it, but pretty much anything shot at it will be massively overkill, wasting the enemy's firepower, and you can hide the Boy to create even more headaches.

So it's not that simple.

Even comparing, say, 30 to 180 it's not as trivial. Yes, 180 are objectively stronger. But the points you save by not taking 150 boyz can be spent on something else that makes the 30 boyz way harder to deal with. They absolutely still have their place.

Same with plasma pistols. Four plasma pistols spread across a tallyman, a noxious blightbringer and two melee squad champions have no impact on the game four out five times, and split the last one between failing hazardous and dealing 2 damage to something of value.

I am going to be perfectly frank here; you having bad dice luck is your experience. I don't want GW to balance around your dice luck. It sounds like this particular gun never does anything for you, okay, so don't take it. Let the rest of us who might want to have some fun. What do you care? You seem to hate plasma pistols anyway and insist they do you more harm than good, so why would you mind if they have a price tag? You'd just not take them (as I assume you don't take them now) so nothing'd change for you.

Even in your fictional squad of 20 cultists, 4 plasma pistols just don't do enough to base your decisions for that squad around it. However, once you are able to take 20 plasma pistols the squad is able to threaten elite infantry and vehicles, so you absolutely want to push them forward to deal damage with them.

In isolation. This is why points exist. Everything contributes. A squad of 20 plasma pistol is made up of 1 plasma pistol, 20 times. I am not sure if that's fundamentally sunken in here. Each and every one of those plasma pistols contribute to something impactful. Should I stop going to my job because a single day's salary isn't enough to afford me anything exciting? Should my work stop paying me anything because in a single day's work I ultimately don't achieve anything groundbreaking?

This isn't really that weird. An army is made up of many pieces. Like, surely it's not that complicated? If we made a singular cultist with a plasma pistol free because a single plasma pistol achieves nothing, would you be okay with me taking a single plasma pistol cultist, a hand flamer cultist, an inferno pistol cultist, a gamma pistol cultist, a pulse pistol cultist, a blast pistol cultist, a bolt pistol cultist, a synaptic disintegrator cultist, a shuriken pistol cultist, a splinter pistol cultist, a slugga cultist, an autopistol cultist, a photon blast pistol cultist, a macrostubber cultist [repeat ad infinitum] in my army all for a grand total of 0 points since they're all supposedly meaningless alone? I feel like that wouldn't be balanced.

None of that is related to wargear having point values though? And they did update 8th and 9th after launch, and both were worse in terms of balance, despite them tweaking wargear costs.

When in 8th/9th? All three editions are rollercoasters. End of 9th was definitely more balanced than end of 10th. Guard were fine once nerfed, whereas Defilers reign unnerfed to this day. Look at tournament podiums, it's a crab rave.

I just listed a bunch of troll picks from 5th edition a few posts ago.

Yes, and now we have even more.

A flamer was always worse than a meltagun. It's still worse, just as always, and now you pay for the meltagun whether you actually bring it or not. This is endemic across the game. The moment the 10e Guard codex released with GW not even attempting to balance, say, multilasers and heavy bolters against the now-free lascannons they compete for sponson and hull slots with, I knew things were cooked. The multilaser was never a great gun (beyond the s6/7 glory days of 6e) but it was objectively better balanced when it was at least cheap/free.

 Jidmah wrote:
Don't take it personal, but I dredged up the data three or four times in discussion here on dakka already, and each time a post that took hours to write got deflected by a two-liner nitpick, strawman or ad hominem attack.
Considering how your first line is already moving goalposts, I have zero confidence in this being worth my time.

If you are truly interested, search my post history for the post where I went through three months of top 10 tournament placements.

My personal experience is that weapons are much closer than they used to be. I still run a mix of big choppa and PK nobz despite the PK being better, because the difference is not that big. Is still run blighlords with just combi-bolters, because it's one of my best painted units and don't have the spitter and the reaper autocannon painted. I run a winged demon prince despite the one without wings being much better for DG, because by two princes are winged. Same is true for many other units.

And yet, unless I mess around or face a truly great player, I usually win my games by a landslide. This is definitely not something that was possible in previous editions, doubly so with orks.

Respectfully, I don't think asking you to support the full extents of the claims you've made is moving goalposts. I've seen the data demonstrating good overall tournament balance and the variety of datasheets appearing within lists, but that does not address the comparative viability of options within a single datasheet, which is the specific aspect of internal balance that's in contention. Nor do tournament lists demonstrate the impact on balance for casual play, which I've consistently articulated as a concern. And I've yet to see evidence that the greater competitive balance between units is a result of the current free wargear system, rather than the simplified design space, greatly reduced options, and greater investment in regular balance cycles. There's a correlation-vs-causation issue here.

I mean, I wouldn't expect you can put hard data to any of this, and that's fine. We're talking subjective experiences and I'm not discounting yours. But you don't get to say there's hard proof that this system is just as good, reference data that doesn't actually substantiate that claim, and then assert that I'm denying facts.

Just for funsies, I grabbed the first five Astra Militarum lists on Listhammer, all of which went 4-1 or better. There's a decent variety of units, even if three of the lists are tripling-up on their star players. But looking at the infantry, there's not a single grenade launcher or long-las across the five lists, and the only flamers are on units that can't take other weapons. Otherwise it's all plasma and melta on every squad (plus a handful of HSVGs), the standard-issue freebie upgrades, and a plasma pistol and power weapon or power fist on every officer. Despite these units still retaining a decent number of options, the outcome is cookie-cutter to a degree that has not always been the case.

These lists track with my anecdotal observation that the current approach creates more always-take and never-take wargear choices than before. I don't think this makes for a great experience, and I am not convinced that putting some coarse costs on the obvious standout choices would create any significant design overhead, or detract perceptibly from balance.

I think melta guns and blasters got nerfed because monsters/tanks were dying too much. It's not to balance them against flamers.

Honestly, I disagree with the analysis of melta. For an infantry-sized gun It's still a good weapon for taking a decent sized chunk out of tanks due to its AP and reliable, high damage. Especially imulti-meltas do see a lot of play. Wounding on fives isn't that bad if you get to ignore their armor afterwards.

Admittedly, the meltaguns-got-nerfed-because-points-went-away thing is mostly just me being salty about meltaguns while wearing my tinfoil hat.

That said, I do find it very annoying and unfluffy that a meltagun that hits a T10 tank will fail to do any damage to it at all 2/3rds of the time. If we *needed* to nerf meltaguns, then my personal preference would have been to let them continue to wound reliably but do a bit less damage. Something like moving the melta bonus from the Damage stat to the Strength stat instead would have done the trick. But that's a topic for another thread.

 catbarf wrote:
the standard-issue freebie upgrades, and a plasma pistol and power weapon or power fist on every officer. Despite these units still retaining a decent number of options, the outcome is cookie-cutter to a degree that has not always been the case.

People will read "it was cookie cutter before too" but in support of catbarf I have to stress that before there were mitigating factors.

If loading your unit up with expensive gear was the meta choice but your unit was naked, your unit was suboptimal, but at least it's cheap.

If running your unit barebones was the meta choice, and you loaded up with expensive gear, your unit was suboptimal, but at least you did get some fancy toys for your points even if they're not top efficiency.

This resulted in a dampening effect on worst-case scenarios, which opens up more options for casual players to do things "a bit wrong" for thematic reasons without completely torpedoing themselves in the process. It also was much more new-player friendly, as it wasn't -catastrophic- no matter how you built the unit; you always had at least a consolation prize, even if you built your unit for aesthetics without knowing what the meta loadout is.

Contrast with the current situation. If loading up your unit with expensive gear is the meta choice but your unit is naked, your unit is not only weak, it's also much more expensive than it used to be, which is ruinous.

If running your unit barebones would have been the meta choice, it now doesn't matter, the unit has its points baked in, so you are paying for that expensive gear regardless (often leading to a unit that's terrible on a full datasheet level).