What my thoughts are now with 40k after Adepticon 2018

[Herkamer63]

First off, I just got home, and had an awesome time at Adepticon this year. A bunch of new games I learned about and picking up, and I can't wait to get more games in. Now, on to the main subject: I played in both the 40k Championship and the Team Tournament. I've got a few other games in with 8th edition and at first I thought "well, it'll get better. It has to, right?" Well, coming out of the events this past weekend, 40k 8th ed is ONLY ok, but not great. GW did take a step in the right direction, but so far, the older editions were better. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE OLDER EDITIONS ARE BETTER?! THERE"S NO WAY!" Oh yes, there need to be changes in these areas. Maybe even revert back to what we had.

Time spent on games: Some people will say that the new edition is much faster because it's so simple to figure out. Now, it is simple to a degree, but it makes players question what their next move should be. Not saying that didn't happen in the older editions, but in this new edition forces the longer times. We're talking about rerolls on almost everything, all units able to wound all units (the amount of rolling), rolling random shots/damage/attacks/saves/etc. The Championship was 2 hours and 45 min, and there were games, including mine, where they didn't even go 3 full turns, whether someone gets wiped out or took time moving, or what have you. So this claim that it's a faster edition is bull crap. The older editions, you can get done with a game in about an hour and half, maybe 2 hours, tops if you know what you need to do. You didn't have as many rolls you needed to make in this edition. The randomness kills the time and it needs to stop. I remember tournaments being 2 hours and 15 min, which made much more sense. If the longer play times are here to stay, let's start putting chess clocks rounds. That would make it interesting.

The AP System/ Weapon Skill: I'm going to come out and say it, and that's the current AP system SUCKS. I mean I hate it with a passion. "Oh but it give people a chance to save their guys." Yeah, but lets make some sense here. For example: a bolter, for all intents and purposes, is a mini grenade laucher, and a guardsman's flak armor is like paper. You're telling me that getting hit by an exploding grenade, with thin armor on, in the gut (or face), means a chance of survival? Last I checked, armor doesn't mean much if it's only okay against basic firearms. This minus modifier business doesn't make sense at all, and it also goes back to the first point I made (time). The old AP system is superior, makes sense, and it speeds the game up. Go back to that. Same goes with WS. I don't like the fixed "to hit" when it comes down to hitting someone up close. Skill needs to be demonstrated and the old way shows that better than the current system.

Randomness: I understand that there already is randomness to the game with dice rolls in general, but how much of it do we actually need? The weapons that use to use templates now have to be rolled? Why? The templates made it easier to show how may guys have actually been hit. The damage system itself makes a little bit of sense, but there should be no reason to roll. Make it a straight whatever damage for whatever the weapon is.

I'm not saying 8th edition is the worst, but to say it's so much easier and faster is a crock. I won't drop out of 40k because I love the game, but I'm hoping to see changes soon. Hopefully I'm not the only one that feels this way.

[shabbadoo]

Big events sure are fun!:cool: As to 8E, certain things are easier, and certain things and faster. Some things are not easier, and some things are slower. Net gain is about nil, time-wise. As to how things work, they could change close combat to work like wounding, but with Attacker WS vs. Defender WS: equal 4+ to hit, better 3+ to hit, twice or more better 2+ to hit, worse 5+ to hit, twice as worse or more 6+ to hit. At least it would then scale sensibly. I might also make close combat simultaneous, but with a +1 to hit going to any charging unit. And the rule of natural 1 fails; natural 6 succeeds (excepting armor saves can be removed altogether by modifiers, if such modifier reduce a save to 7+, because stuff gotta die).

Shooting is, overall, the most flawed section of 8E, but not for the reasons you state. Penalties to hit have been added back in, but not bonuses. Bonuses are now represented with re-rolls, but re-rolls on slim chances to hit, or even NO chances to hit, do not function in the game to any reasonable degree. Former blast and template weapons are now a joke. About 1-2 models killed per formerly nasty-now-laughable battle cannon shot (and other similar weapons); if there are no penalties to hit? I disagree about the old AP. It did not make sense. An all-or-nothing system makes no sense, except for speed of play. Armor save modifiers are infinitely more sensible than the former AP system. Sorry, but it is *tournaments* that will have to adjust, not the 95% of other people who play that game that are NOT you. You (plural) do need to take a look at things from outside the tournament box, because it is not all about you (plural), meaning tournament players.

I understand about the re-rolling thing too. Dice. So many dice. I imagine that few people want to play against, or even with, Orks. Frankly, playing with/against Orks in the last few editions has been sort of annoying. Rolling lots of dice, and re-rolling lots of those dice, shouldn't be the Ork "thing." Unreliability should be; in mediocre ways and in both catastrophically good and bad ways. That is where the fun is, not in rolling 40+ dice per unit...which generated the same number of hits statistically as a unit that rolled fewer dice but had a better BS. Fun! And in 8E we have added penalties to hit, rolling even more dice (helped in no small part because the old twin-linked feature gives double shots now), and there are more ways to get re-rolls, such that the dice fumbling is even more drawn out. Even more fun! Gork forbid somebody plays Orks against Astra Militarum in 8E.

Ork Opponent: "Okay, It's your movement phase, followed by your shooting phase. I'm just gonna go to lunch now, and hope you are close to being done by the time I get back. No, don't worry about me saying you were slow-playing. I get it. No, I trust you about the rolls. I just don't want to have to be here for the soul numbing drudgery of your Green's Tide moving and shooting."

Ork player: "How can you say that when YOU play ALL INFANTRY Astra Militarum?!"

Ork Opponent: "Oh, I know it sounds like I'm being a hypocrite, but I'm not. Feel free to go to lunch when my turn comes around too. Perhaps by turn four, if we've massacred the crap out of each other enough, the game might then become really tense/fun to play. It takes a while to get there, but I LIVE for that! Ta! Be back in 30."

So, re-rolls should have been made a rare thing while bonuses should have been the way to reflect benefits - not extra rolls, just more accurate rolls. Implementing the 2E system of penalties and bonues to hit would do 8E a world of good.

The most egregious thing about 8E is that there are (unfortunately) many units in the game (one whole army even) that can't actually use their weapons to do something against certain other units, because they can't hit them. They could put a shoota in the thing's bunghole and pull the trigger, but because of rule(s) X (, Y, Z) they need a 7+ to hit and so can do nothing. They fixed wounding. I really like that change, and it works really well in conjunction with weapon modifiers to represent any sort of attack vs. any sort of Toughness/Armor. But then they just had to go and screw up the Shooting methods to compensate for it. Great!

Last, apparently some of the folks having to do with *the tournament you just got back from* were involved in play-testing 8E. Somehow they didn't see the main issues the rule set had before it went to print. Or maybe they did, but didn't speak up, or were not listened to if they did. Or maybe they just somehow didn't catch the anomalies that are so apparent. Whatever the case may be, not one, but a few, balls were dropped.

But, the one glimmer of hope is this bit in red:


Our new approach is broken into three parts: 1) regular, corrective updates through codex errata, 2) twice-a-year ‘big’ FAQs to deal with larger issues and address balance in the game and, of course, 3) Chapter Approved.
1: Codex Errata

A couple of weeks after the release of every codex and Chapter Approved book, we’ll review all the questions and comments we’ve received to see if there’s a need for an errata. If that’s the case, we’ll get one out quick smartish! These will address any ambiguities or issues that might have cropped up, such as how new rules and Stratagems might interact in certain edge cases, or when there is a genuine error in one of the rules that stop it from functioning as intended.

Speaking of which, we’ve just uploaded this errata for Chapter Approved 2017.
2: Big, Twice-a-year FAQs

Major game-wide questions will be answered on a biannual basis each March and September when a wider set of FAQ updates will be released. These will be focused on anything that might emerge as more codexes, and thus more unusual interactions, make their way into the game and will address issues across multiple factions and publications. We’ll also use these to address balance issues in the game, so these might include a few changes to rules for overly powerful, or underrepresented units.
3: Chapter Approved

As new codexes arrive, and certain styles of army come in and out of fashion, the relative effectiveness of certain units in matched play will change. So we’ll be using Chapter Approved as a chance to reassess the points values of all units across the game (just like we did with the first Chapter Approved).

Yes. GW left the door wide open to changing stuff that is seen as a problem. And there are problems. We may need to wait for anything major until after the codexes are all released though, as then we will know all that is "out there" to be accounted for.

[WLBjork]

Warhammer is a game of strategy and tactics - as such you should always be planning what to do 3-4 units down the line. If you aren't making any decisions, you might as well play snakes and ladders. Yet so far, I've not really changed my approach to a turn which is to determine what I want to achieve and moving units in support of that aim.

I recently played a 4-way 1500 point Carnage. Allowing for the fact that we don't play as much as we used to, and that we had a completely new player learning the rules, we still managed to complete 3 full turns in 4-5 hours of playing time, so I certainly don't find that the game is any slower.

Fixed WS-hit rolls doesn't really have much effect, after all if you know the WS then you either knew the hit roll (because the table was simple enough to memorise) or took a couple of seconds to look it up. If you don't know the WS and don't know the table, then this method is a little bit faster.

The return to Armour Save Modifiers has taken too long. It is by far the superior system from a balance perspective, and makes weapons more flexible than the Armour Penetration system did.

I like that all basic small arms now allow a save. It means armour is actually worth something - although it also means Imperial Guard and Orks almost certainly need a points increase to compensate. As for the bolter rounds, they're somewhere between a 12.7mm and a 20mm round (GW are on record that a Heavy Bolter is the equivalent of the main gun from the AH-64 Apache which is a 30mm autocannon). Chalk it up to Schizo tech, where man portable armour has improved significantly more than man portable weapons or vehicle armour.

Templates, both flame and blast, could be brilliant or could be messy. They encouraged maximum spacing, which meant slowing the movement phase down in order to reduce potential casualties; and resolving them is in fact no quicker (and in a few cases far slower) than the new system. It wasn't always possible to be sure exactly which angle of the flame template was optimal, requiring a few seconds checking all possibilities and careful counting to ascertain which angle was best, not to mention considering your own units or hitting multiple units. Now it's a simple D6 (usually) hits.
Likewise for blast templates. Place the template (depending on the edition as to how it was placed), then scatter it. Surprisingly inaccurate, even in Space Marine hands, plus the issues that could ensure in matching the angle on the scatter die to the angle of the tape measure. Again, hitting multiple units would slow the game down far more than rolling xD6/xD3 against the target unit, not to mention the potential to inflict more hits than there are models in the target unit.

I suppose the final point to consider is that the change from 2nd Ed to 3rd Ed saw model counts roughly double, and they've gone up a further 10-20% since then, so that will have a slight effect on game speed anyway.

[ValentineGames]

"Warhammer is a game of strategy and tactics".

"The return to Armour Save Modifiers has taken too long. It is by far the superior system from a balance perspective, and makes weapons more flexible than the Armour Penetration system did".

That just made my day. I've never laughed so hard.