Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So the dust has settled and no matter how some people may feel about it, there's clearly a decent portion of the community who don't care for 3.0, so the question becomes what to do about it.

I'm kind of torn. I won't give up 30K - not least because between printing and Tortuga I don't need to give GW a red cent to stay involved - but given the choice between trying to fix 3.0, 2.0, or 1.0 there doesn't seem to be a slam-dunk solution. For myself, fixing 3.0 is a non-starter for certain; quite apart from the fundamental aspects of it that aren't to my taste, even *learning* a new system knowing the applecart will almost inevitably be overturned again in 2028/9 is a dispiriting prospect, nevermind spending half that time trying to hammer it into a more pleasing shape with houserules. The easy option would be to fix 2.0 - I know it already, I have all the books(and they're still generally fairly easy to find & affordable - as "OOP" GW products go - if I rope new people in locally), and the actual issues with it aren't really all that complicated to fix(Brutal applies after saves rather than before; bump the cost of Thunder Hammers; remove Talons - one Dread one FOCslot; restrict access to Interceptor Reactions; some light-touch points adjustments to tweak the internal balance of SAux and Mechanicum) . But, a lot of the people who're stepping off the train with 3.0 do seem to much prefer 1.0 and were only playing 2nd edition for the "supported game" aspect, so it's worth considering whether 1.0 is fixable as well.

The issue comes in that it's been years and years since I've played it, and I remember the problems being pretty intracable - pieplatespam, TSons being overtuned and the psychic phase being pretty pointless for anyone else, Custodes being pretty ridiculous, Mechanicum having some pretty monster builds as well, internal balance getting worse and worse in the later Black Books, and while it has lots of options many of them seem to be traps(eg, several of the power weapon subtypes) - and that taken together they made playing the kind of army that should really be the mainstay of the Heresy ie Loadsamarines pretty unpleasant. So what I want to discuss is essentially, what are your personal bugbears about 1.0? Where does the balance slip beyond the normal GW variance into truly gamebreaking territory? Are there any aspects of the *core* rules you think need addressing? Have you seen or tried yourself any solutions to those issues that you feel worked well? Essentially, I want us to imagine we're Forgeworld back before 2.0 and we're planning "1.5" - what would you change and how?

The editions of GW games that stick around aren't the ones with no flaws(since those don't exist), but the ones where the flaws are identified and broadly agreed upon so that, even if this or that group has a slightly different houserule on a given issue, everyone's trying to fix the same issues. That's the consensus I'd like to build about 1.0.

For what it's worth, I think 3.0 is the best 'bedrock' system we've seen for heresy.

It has LoS rules beyond TLos "model's eye view" garbage and instead tosses that out the window. It's not perfect (vehicles block LoS to infinite height, gunning down a squad because you can see one guy) but it's a good attempt. Like wise, the return of area terrain is a god-send; making it so that you can play the game, and have functional LoS blockers, without having to load up on L-shaped walls with no windows. Good gak.

Like wise it HAS solved a lot of problems. Dreads are tough against plenty of stuff but not unkillable monsters. Terminators actually fulfil their fantasy of storming points in a withering hail of gunfire and beating the survivors to death with big huge weapons. Psychic powers are useful but not insanely game breaking.

Most importantly, Statuses are a massive step in the right direction. GW's mainline games have ALWAYS had a big problem in that almost all 'interaction' between the armies is killing. Being able to deal with multiple target types via pinning them down and other effects, letting you control the field without having to load up on the killiest guns and just focus fire, is a huge development which makes 3.0 the most tactically nuanced version of 30k / 40k to come out since 2nd edition. Probably even more nuanced than most iterations of fantasy, tbh.

Which isn't to say it's perfect, it still has problems. Vanguard and Line make it feel board-gamey, the complete removal of RoW is a fething travesty, double gutting deep strike gives it only one use, dreads are now specialists who don't have the BS or WS to do their job's well, ect.

Frankly, I'd say 3.0's biggest problem isn't the rules itself, it's the removal's. Gutting of legion armories, removal of multiple squads, knee-capping options, so on and so forth. 3.0 played with the options of 2.0 (and maybe the deep strike of 2.0 / 1.0) would be a helluva game.

Anyway, on your question:

You've identified the big issues with 1.0 pretty well. First and foremost the ease of access to pie plates that killed MEQ and TEQ on mass, making any squad not in a vehicle essentially dead-meat. Secondly the power of psychics in general, but also then that T-sons basically had a whole other phase that no one else could participate in against them. Also custodes.

It's worth noting that the red books did a solid job of making 1.0 more balanced. They tweaked points, redid some rules, and nerfed some very egregious options (lorgar transfigured being the best fighter in the game, invisibility in general).

So if you were to use the red books as a basis, I'd say reining in the templates and psychics would make the game pretty solid. After that maybe overhaul LoS and such, basically using 3.0 with a modification, and you'd be solid.

Don’t think I ever played 1st Ed Heresy, and if I did I’ve long since sold the books I had.

But, if the rule didn’t exist at the time, would introducing Breaching to Battlecannons and that, whilst lowering their AP to 4 help any?

Even if it’s Breaching 5+, it can still feel like a suitably chunky weapon, whilst not being a simple Delete Button?

The range and pie plate, plus the high strength will still ensure it’s nicely threatening.

I need to do a little thinking, but Book 8 Malevolance helps a lot with the psyker problems. Nullificators, toxiferran flamers and a bunch of other options take the edge off a lot of pysker problems and imbalances.

Add in the last FAQ they dropped left 1.0 in quite a good position, where they, for example, repointed destroyers, gave them termites, etc.

1.0 was in quite good shape if you could look beyond phosphex and scoria

Original edition is good do not backwards-compatible later mistakes into it.

Phosphex was a one-use thing you had to pay points for at one stage and that was good.
The rot began ironicly with death guard being given easier access - of course people pissed and moaned until everyone got easy access; which is precisely the problem.

Peak horus heresy is 6th edition and the betrayal book which has the apocalypse rules in the back.
Super heavy walker rules were so much better and D weapon rules were just a single auto penetrating/auto wounding hit with instant death that ignored cover and armour saves: no stupid chart with its skewey setup
Super heavies could get affected by weapon destroyed or immobilised results - it was just better.

Interesting, so it seems GW actually bothered to improve it quite markedly in its latter years. I'll have to find all the later material and catch up with that. Did the later FAQs/red books manage to reign in Custodes and improve the internal balance of Mech?

 morganfreeman wrote:
-el snip-

Ehhh, I can't agree. While I like the *concept* of Statuses and was initially overjoyed by the ostensible removal of TLoS, there are just too many overlapping downsides or outright poison pills for me. 4 turns with progressive scoring really narrows the scope of what tactics you can actually use on the tabletop, one DS per-turn does the same, and honestly it feels like they're trying to minimise what I actually want - mass battles in 30k - in order to shoehorn in what they want - acting out the Black Library Daddy Issues Simulator with big named characters in their challenge minigame. The icky "feel" of the edition for me goes beyond just removing options as well, while the new FOC seems more flexible it's also a bit...bland? Even in scenarios where you can pretty much 1:1 translate your army across to the new system, a lot of the time there's a lot less *zazz* than with the old RoW approach. I had thought they would probably make the Legion detachments pretty funky as basically the new versions of RoW but nope, they're mostly just slightly different arrangements of units, occasionally with a Prime Benefit(most of which are pretty meh anyway). And the LOS system is kind of a mess honestly. I very much do not care for the idea of shooting one dude and this somehow deletes his whole unit the rest of which are completely obscured, that feels like another "timesaver" simplification. Plus it also feels like you're either going to be doing a *lot* of bookkeeping in terms of which type of terrain is what to avoid silly situations like two units standing inside a ruin 3" apart unable to see or shoot or charge each other, or else just designating most stuff Light so you don't have to stress about it and that kind of defeats the object. Beyond that there's also things that while I can't clearly say they *will* be an issue seem like they could be, such as it being seemingly much more efficient to try and Glance vehicles to death - in the process almost certainly crippling them with Statuses - than to chance trying to go straight for a BIG SPLOSION, since if you don't get the big bang the enemy vehicle is still totally functional.

I'll look in on 3.0 again in a couple of years and see how it's going for people who like it in practice, but I honestly just don't have the headspace to make it more the game I want and less the game it wants to be.

Getting specific for a sec - the Ksons were definetly an eye-opener on arrival
The things i thought were really unnessecary at the time were the asphyx shells (gives any bolt weapons and rotor cannons shred) and the arcane litanies (ignore the first perils of the warp result). Given the amount of stuff they get i didn't think they needed shred boltguns.
I also thought that perils of the warp is pretty much the only detriment for psychic powers and giving a universally available get-out card makes it too easy for the player; that stuff should be dangerous!

Looking over their legion rules and magnus i think its a bit much you can choose which cult arcana your units get - they probably should be rolled for on deployment just so its a chance benefit rather than a universal one.

I take issue with magnus only getting perils on 3 sixes - should be two like everyone else but let him take an invuln save. Dude has IWND and 6 wounds, he can take it.

 SirDonlad wrote:
Getting specific for a sec - the Ksons were definetly an eye-opener on arrival
The things i thought were really unnessecary at the time were the asphyx shells (gives any bolt weapons and rotor cannons shred) and the arcane litanies (ignore the first perils of the warp result). Given the amount of stuff they get i didn't think they needed shred boltguns.
I also thought that perils of the warp is pretty much the only detriment for psychic powers and giving a universally available get-out card makes it too easy for the player; that stuff should be dangerous!

Looking over their legion rules and magnus i think its a bit much you can choose which cult arcana your units get - they probably should be rolled for on deployment just so its a chance benefit rather than a universal one.

I take issue with magnus only getting perils on 3 sixes - should be two like everyone else but let him take an invuln save. Dude has IWND and 6 wounds, he can take it.

Re the bolded - ehhh, I really hate randomising stuff like that. Pretty much the first houserule for 40K I managed to badger my local group into adopting back in the day was being able to choose psyker powers because I hated that my guys would get amnesia at the start of every game and half the time end up with powers I had no use for with the list I'd made. Warlord traits, psyker powers, special abilities - I'd much rather they assign point values and let you buy them if they can't manage to balance them internally any other way than have you roll them up every game.

Okay, i hear you on the randomisation thing but this isnt one of the basic functions of psychic tests- its an additional effect with powerful ramifications that costs nothing and synergises with the other benefits the Ksons get.

I mean, are you going to choose anything other than the 1 increment improvement to invuln saves for your terminators?
Are you going to choose anything other than rerolling 1s to hit when stationary for your dev squad?

The player is too damn predictable to be allowed to choose their psychic capability - you'll find your optimum application and then do nothing else unless the rules force you to.

I ran into this with mechanicum HQs - of course im going to have the abeyant. And of course im going to select the macchinator array
And of course im going to master craft a photon thruster
And obviously im going to take the cyber-familiar...

Just like every praetor has a paragon blade, artificer armour, iron halo and an apothecary nearby, maybe on a bike...

 YodhrinsForge wrote:
Interesting, so it seems GW actually bothered to improve it quite markedly in its latter years. I'll have to find all the later material and catch up with that. Did the later FAQs/red books manage to reign in Custodes and improve the internal balance of Mech?

 morganfreeman wrote:
-el snip-

-Snip-

I'll look in on 3.0 again in a couple of years and see how it's going for people who like it in practice, but I honestly just don't have the headspace to make it more the game I want and less the game it wants to be.

I mean, that certainly is an opinion. I don't actually disagree, everything you mentioned are things I specifically brought up as problems / big issues I have, with the exception of the "shoot one guy, kill the squad" mechanic; which I also do not like.

But I'd also argue that most of those problems are army design problems. Not all of them, such as the the deep strike gutting and the LoS one, but a lot of the issues are liber based not BRB based.

As such, I personally think that 'modified 3rd' is a stronger rule set than 'modified 1st' by a wide, WIDE margin. However that's also just my opinion, obviously.

 SirDonlad wrote:

The player is too damn predictable to be allowed to choose their psychic capability - you'll find your optimum application and then do nothing else unless the rules force you to.

Honestly I used to agree with you. I used to argue on forums that there's no reason GW can't make a game that's both fluffy *and* tight enough to handle tournaments, a game where there's no need to take lesser options for the sake of narrative because all options are equally good.

GW's attempts to actually do that in recent years have changed my mind. Time and again their move when trying to make the game more robust in dealing with your Predictable Player has been to reduce options and choices and I have come to believe that it's actually not because GW are hacks who can't write rules, but because there's a fundamental disconnect between the mentality of your Predictable Player and someone like myself who builds their armies and characters based on a story and only avoids "suboptimal" choices that are so rancidly bad they'd give Stinking Bishop a run for its money, and you can't design for both at once. I think stuff like HH3 and 10th 40K are pretty much inevitable outcomes of treating the player as a problem you can solve rather than a hobbyist you're giving a toolbox to. That's not to say there's *no* point in at least *trying* to get something that *approximates* balance, but at the end of the day if you try to "design out" the sort of person who chooses which weapon to give their army leader based on a statistical analysis of dice roll averages, blandification and shrimplification are always going to be the result.

Also, I don't even really have a problem with the specific example per se; we can choose the loadout for our characters based on the role we want them to have, why wouldn't we also tailor a psyker to a role as well? I don't think it's actually an issue unless there are powers that are outright *useless* rather than merely situational, and of course so long as it's a one-and-done choice which was always the rule in my group; you can choose, but that's it, you *always* use that one in future even if another power would be more advantageous against a given enemy or mission. I know that doesn't really work for people who play with randoms, but GW have shown that they clearly have the ability to influence how most of their customers play their games both by the framing of things in the main rules and any supplementary stuff they use for organised play, so you can mitigate to an extent with that. And at the end of the day, occasionally having to organise a collective shunning of a chancing goober at the club is a price worth paying when the alternative is my Librarian having intermittent amnesia

Is it amnesia or not wanting to draw the same attention from the warp in the same particular way too many times?

Im going to consult the shamen about this Ksons psychic stuff.

So the initial consultation generally agreed with the aspyx shells and the arcane litanies being both auto-includes and too cheap points wise.
We decided to use the emperors tarot for a more in depth perspective sometime soon - i have many militia to paint.