Hi all,
To begin this threat, I want to explain who I am and why I am writing this:
I started playing 40k in 4th Edition when I was 14 and since then it has been a large part of my life. Back in 5th Edition, I started playing tournaments regularly and a bit later I also found my joy in painting. Some might know my Instagram account and the people who attend tournaments in southern Germany will also probably know me.
Yesterday we tested in our club the whole day and 5/7 games ended turn 2 or earlier. I played Eldar and there was not a single list who could survive, I played against Belakor, CSM, and Sisters with 700 points more. And these games were completely noninteractive, because of indirect weapons, lone operatives, overwatch, towering, etc.
I’m mainly writing this because I am deeply frustrated with the game design and some of the design choices of 10th edition. And since I love the game and the hobby, I think it is our responsibility to express our opinions to GW.
Now let`s get to the problems of 10th edition, I will subdivide my thoughts into different categories:
Core Mechanics and Boundaries in Games:
Every Game is defined by its boundaries. These boundaries should be set and never crossed. For example, in chess, each player has a move and then the opponent does his move. With 10th Edition GW has, yet again decided to cross some of these boundaries and by doing that, they have, in my opinion, worsened the game significantly.
Movement/Shooting in Enemy turn
GW has done this mistake many times before and every single time, you were allowed to act in the opponent’s turn, it broke the game. Doesn’t matter if it were Ynnari in 7th or Cerberus Raiders in 9th. Now with 10th edition, A LOT of units have the ability to move during the opponent’s turn, either at the end of the movement phase or when an enemy moves closer.
Now just imagine an army that plays fair (No indirect weapons, etc.), you just want to move up your melee units or shooting units and shoot some guys of an objective. This is impossible when the enemy unit just moves away/behind a building/etc. Of course, these kinds of rules become especially powerful when combined with lone operatives or similar rules. You can screen your whole army with a unit of infiltrators or rangers and most armies in the game have no way of interacting with them.
Then, of course, there is “Overwatchâ€, a mechanic that punishes the player who has to extend his army and rewards a passive playstyle. There was absolutely no reason to allow overwatch in the movement phase, it is a mechanic that adds nothing to the game and actively disrupts it. Now when you play Dark Eldar for example, you will sacrifice the first unit you extend to overwatch and the second one will do something. In 9th you had options to disrupt Overwatch by charging with a different unit first, this doesn’t exist anymore now…
Moving/shooting in the enemy turn needs to be toned down a lot. These rules are unfun for everybody and force you to play armies with a noninteractive playstyle. In my opinion, you should never be allowed to move in the opponent’s turn, this should be a set boundary in the game. Also, overwatch should be reverted to the 9th edition version, since the shooting in the movement phase just doesn’t add anything to the game.
Lone operatives
Again, this is a mistake GW has made before in 8th, when at the start of the edition, you could play endless characters, protected by different characters (culexus assassins) or just an endless amount of shield drones. This of course back then broke the game and it was fixed by introducing the rule of three and not letting characters protect each other anymore. Now in 10th the rule is even more busted since there is no condition anymore. Just a single character with lone operative is the single best option in the game for holding an objective in the open or screening the battlefield. Of course, this rule becomes even more broken when you give it to units that actually do damage (Belakor and Friends, Ghostkeel, etc.).
The mind-boggling thing here for me is, how can an “Autarch Wayleaper†WITH Lone Operative and an “Autarch Skyrunner†WITHOUT lone operative be 80 Points? Lone operative alone makes the model 5 times better and this is not at all reflected in the points. And of course, there are armies like Drukhari who do not get any lone operatives at all, they just have to sacrifice a lot of resources to screen and hold objectives, while other armies can just play a couple of 60–80 point characters.
This rule needs to be changed; You need a condition that lone operatives only works when there is another unit in 3â€. Basically, like characters worked in 9th. And of course, lone operative units should not be allowed to protect someone like Guilliman….
Indirect/Towering
Indirect Weapons…. Yet again the same mistake. How is it possible, that they introduce a penalty to indirect weapons (Cover and -1BS) and then nearly every indirect weapon has the heavy special rule and there are a lot of weapons with ignore cover as well?
To be quite honest the problem with indirect weapons in general originated in 9th edition, since GW has increased the lethality of the game so significantly that you were forced to play with giant ruins, which completely block line of sight. In the older editions, they had meaningful cover rules, the lethality of the game was far lower and you had a bigger battlefield with lower weapon ranges. Back then indirect weapons were not nearly as popular, also of course, since most indirect weapons had templates and it was nearly impossible to kill a whole squad with blast templates if you placed your models correctly.
This is something that you can change with points of indirect shooting units, but as the game is right now, indirect weapons will either be irrelevant or overpowered, there is basically no in-between possible…
Towering is more or less the same problem, but there is something else that really bothers me. In 9th they introduced <Obscuring> which was a really good rule for the game, since it didn’t matter anymore, how you built your models and how your terrain looked. Now with Towering in the game, you have to change your terrain yet again (windows on the first/second floor), and depending on the terrain, towering is completely game-breaking. Of course, it was stupid, that you could shoot knights behind obscuring ruins without them being able to shoot back, but why do they not just remove the rule altogether? Knights benefitting from obscuring will not break the game, since they still have a very large footprint and they have to navigate around the wall etc.
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Design of Different Armies
I was anticipating the rules reset for 10th. Finally, GW had the opportunity to define the playstyle for each army anew and created interesting archetypes for each faction. They even achieved that, but just for some armies, other armies got an army special rule that doesn’t fit the army and also where the army has no synergies with that special rule.
For example, if you look at Drukhari (I will use them as an example since I’m deeply disappointed with this index) in my opinion the army should be fragile, fast, and hit hard. Well at least GW nailed the fragile part, since they are now neither fast nor hit hard. Drukhari Melee options are a complete joke, 5 incubi on average barely kill a single terminator, and wyches will basically kill nothing relevant at all. In addition to that, the army isn’t even fast anymore, because of the new fly rules. A Raider or ravager is around 6†long, when you now deploy behind a ruin, you will not have enough movement to fly from one ruin to another, since getting out of the ruin takes most of your movement. They even decreased the movement characteristic of venoms… But the vehicles are not designed to be able to stand in the open, they will just evaporate, once any anti-tank weapon can draw a line of sight to them. This is also something that is just not fixable with points, you can’t make Raiders 40 points, or venoms 20 points.
The special rules of a lot of datasheets also seem completely uninspiring and do not match the army’s identity. Why is there not a single battle shock mechanic in Drukhari, it was the only army in 9th that had well-designed Leadership based mechanics and now they do not have a single one.
Then of course there is also the vast difference in power level between the indices. Of course, you know Eldar are probably the only S+ Codex, but the difference between Eldar and Chaos Demons for example is far smaller than the difference between Chaos Demons and Armies like Drukhari. It is absolutely wild, that some armies could probably have like 5000 Points against 2000 Points of Eldar and still lose the game since they just have no way of interacting with the enemy army. I am absolutely baffled by the fact, that these indices survived playtesting and I have no idea what the playtesting team at GW is doing. The broken lists are not hidden, anyone who plays the game remotely competitively will see that Night Spinners, Wraithknights, D-Cannons, Desolator, Belakor etc. are completely busted and the points of these units make no sense.
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Points/Power Level
So points do not exist anymore and we now have power levels for units. The reasons for that given in the article from Warcom are:
- Complicated Arithmetic when writing army lists
- You can play all models since you always play the whole box
- Special Weapons are better against different targets and there is no “best gunâ€
I was actually angry when I read this article. In the eyes of the designers, basic elementary-level addition is too complex for players who want to play a strategic tabletop game. Also, the comment that there is no “best†gun, is just straight up wrong, why would you ever take something else than a Cyclic Ion Blaster on Crisis, why would you ever take anything else than a D-Cannon on a Support Weapon? 9th edition showed us that free wargear is just terrible game design in 40k and it doesn’t work. The system works in AoS, since units do not have the number of options units in 40k have. This will be a balancing nightmare and a lot of flavor will be lost because of that decision. At least this is something they can and need to fix in the next Field Manual.
How can you fix the game?
To be quite honest, I don’t know. In its current state, the game can not be fixed with points alone. You would need to change countless datasheets, and core rules and write a whole new edition. In addition to that, the introduction of more and more detachments will lead to even more broken interactions in the game. They created this juggernaut of rules that seems to be too big to fix. But the first step in fixing this will surely be to acknowledge the state of the game and speak with the community about that.
Sorry if parts of the texts are hard to read, writing was never one of my strengths and English is not my first language (Even though i like it more than writing in German 😛)
www.gw-fanworld.net
