New 40k

I can see though a chase action of some kind, so that if you´re baited to charge and then the bait unit falls back you can attempt to chase it, and if you manage to do so then you get a bonus of some kind in CC

 

Either that, or a mechanic that causes them to fumble their retreat, or flanking & driving people into terrainso they get stuck in a corner becomes immensly important.

 

So now we've got Morale rules released on Warhammer Community. It's exactly the same as Battleshock. Exactly. I.... don't think I like this. I do think that morale/leadership in 7th edition needed some serious fixing but I don't think "lose more dudes" is the way to go about it. Personally I haven't played enough AoS to really know how much of an impact Battleshock makes on the game (I've only played a handful of intro games using the starter set), but I think this is really going to hurt armies that use large units of low quality infantry. Cultists, Infantry Platoons, Ork Boyz, Tyranid infantry and the like have the potential to suffer high losses from a failed Morale check simply because they got messed up in earlier phases.

I like big squads. I'm one of those weirdos who runs Khorne Berzerkers in units of 15-20. I love the idea of fielding massive units of Chaos Space Marines, there's just no real reason to do that under the current Codex. I'd use maxxed out Cultists if I had the models. I really don't like the idea of losing 5-6 more models in a unit just because they did what they were supposed to and soak up bullets in the preceding shooting phase. I've never had problems with facing off against large units myself, as they tend to either be fairly weak on a per-model basis (like Infantry Platoon blobs), or they're a large number of points (aforementioned 20 man Berzerker unit clocks in at almost 400pts before upgrades) and won't have a lot of supporting elements. I guess I just don't want to see an "MSU or bust" meta again, which I feel like this kind of morale system will promote.

I'm happy to have my opinion changed by any AoS veterans out there, no doubt you guys have more insight into the effects of Battleshock than I do.

 

Likely won't affect Tyranids too bad,I think if they have a hivemind tyoe thing going. Definitely not an issue for the bloodbound, so I imagine Khorne Marines won't be an issue. There's always ways around battleshock, and has very rarely been a deciding factor in the games I have played. Skaven have low bravery, but I almost never get battleshock on the hordes because of command or latent abilities.

 

Fair enough. Realistically Chaos can be effectively immune to morale as it stands now, so I won't be suprised if they have high Ld or some kind of shenanigans to minimise impact as well. We're still waiting to see what the command abilities are going to be like, so we could see some stuff like "Inspiring Presence" from AoS.

My post was a bit of a knee-jerk but really everyone's opinion on 8th will be based off an incomplete picture until we actually have the rules, and even then until we get some games in I suspect there will be a lot of cries of "this game is stupid!". Not as bad as AoS copped on release, but I do see people whinging about 8th ed 40k a lot on forums already. I'm still very excited and can't wait for this to be released! I'm hoping early next month so I can cash in some sweet sweet birthday money for more plastic crack (that my wife will ultimately disapprove of).

 

Personally I have absolutely no stake in it but from what I have read online, the response seems to be fairly positive. More positive than I've seen for a new release in some time.

It seems that people are pretty much fed up with what is considered a bloated 7th edition. I haven't played 40k for many editions now (the edition I was playing was the one that featured the "Battle for Macragge" starter box... anyone know what edition that was?), so I can't say either way.

 

There are 2 big problems in 7th edition (in my opinion) that has resulted in its current unpopularity. The first is rules bloat. At its heart, 7th edition is the same as 5th (which is very similar to 4th). Each edition more and more rules were added on, added layers of complexity snuck in. Example: Jump Packs no longer simply moved 12" and ignored terrain, now they could choose to re-roll charge distances instead. If they chose to do that, then they also gained Hammer of Wrath. Seems like a small change right? Nothing too bad. That's true, but apply similar changes to EVERY unit type and things start getting out of hand. Then you have all the pre-game book keeping generating Warlord traits and psychic powers. Again, not too complex if everyone only had access to the traits and power in the rulebook but you saw new power and traits creep in through Codexes and Supplements. Then there's the random effects of objectives, Maelstrom of War missions and other such craziness. All little things that by themselves don't impact much, but when added up slow down the game and really have minimal effect on the game itself.

The bloat continues with special rules... all of a sudden we have 20 odd pages of "Universal" special rules, but so many represent the same kind of thing but in a different way. Rage, Rampage, Furious Charge, Hatred. Zealot, Crusader. All pretty similar concepts right? But each and every one of them works differently. Then you get nested rules like Daemon, which grants a 5+ invulnerable save and Fear (so we need to know what fear does). But really not many Daemons have that rule, most will have something like Daemon of Tzeentch which grants the Daemon rule AND some other bonus. So one rule now has 3 effects. I could go on but I think the point is made - there's a lot to keep track of. I don't mind this, but if I have a unit that has Fearless and Hatred, just tell me it has Fearless and Hatred instead of calling it something else!

More bloat comes in to play when you start looking at building an army list. I've brought it up before, but I often use 3-5 different sources of rules for a Chaos Space Marine army. No allies, not even Daemons. Just Chaos Space Marines. At $80 a pop for a Codex and slightly less for a supplement I can't afford to keep up that kind of pace. Ultimately I often fall back to "pure" Chaos Space Marines simply because I don't have access to an official rules source for the units I want to use, and outside friendly games I need to show I own the codex I'm using. It also makes building armies HARD. You've got detachments and formations. Detachments utilise Unit Roles (Troops, HQ, Elite etc) as a way of oranising your army into a cohesive force. Except sometimes they don't. Formations are a group of specific units that form a detachment of their own, except for when they're part of another detachment, or they're a formation made from other formations. Some units exist outside normal detachment limitations, except for the ones they're not allowed in. If your entire army isn't part of a Detachment you're considered to be "unbound" and get no detachment bonuses. Unless you're using formations, then you're ok. It's all just so haphazard and frustrating

The second problem is imbalance between armies. I've never seen it so obvious as it is now, and the offenders are OBVIOUS. I'm not going to whinge about the competitive state of my army because frankly I feel it got pretty good towards the end, but I know firsthand the sting of having a suboptimal codex squared off against the "Big 4". It's not even that the "overpowered" armies are broken as a whole, it's individual units or aspects of those armies that are problematic. I think Necrons would be fine if Wraiths dropped to a 4+ invuln. I think Tau would be fine if Riptides had a 3+ armour save and didn't have access to Feel no Pain. Space Marines would be perfect if Grav didn't annihilate vehicles, get free units and be able to make unkillable death stars. I also think that paying points for Formations al la AoS Batallions would go some way to curb the more terrible things out there.

Wow that rant went longer than I expected to. A bit of mental diarrhea there, sorry if it's disjointed nonsense!

 

Which armies make up the Big 4?

 

Tau, Eldar, Space Marines and Daemons.

Tau seem to occupy a spot purely because of how crazy hardcore Riptides are. I've had a very inexperienced Tau player annihilate my Chaos Marines (admittedly not a super hardcore list, but not soft by any means) essentially with 2 Riptides. I was able to quickly shred most of his infantry and vehicles to bits, and he TOTALLY FORGOT to use his 10 Broadside suits one turn, then thought charging Crisis suits into my Lord's retinue of Terminators would be a good idea. But those two Riptides tore me apart. I didn't have enough firepower to kill them outright, and they were too fast to engage in combat. Even if I made it in they're T6 with 5 (I think) wounds, a 2+ save, potential for a 3+ invulnerable save and 5+ Feel No Pain. All for significantly less points than my usual Daemon Prince setup (which I didn't field that game actually).

Eldar are nasty. They CAN dominate the Psychic phase but some of their other big tricks are: Massed Wraithguard with D weapons, Jetbikes with Scatterlasers (ALL of them can have Scatterlasers) as Troops, and the ever dreaded Wraithknight. I've only faced Eldar a few times in 7th, and they DO have some nice builds that don't rely on the broken stuff but there is such a disparity between the performance of "good" units and the "overpowered" ones that I've rarely seen them.

Space Marines have a few tricks. I've been on the receiving end of Grav spam on bikes, MSU "free transport" Gladius, and Smash-F*er Deathstar. None were particularly fun, but I found the Free Transports particularly grating. My army spent 200ish points on Transports and this guy got his for free? Hell even if he didn't take transports he'd be 200pts ahead of me in firepower but to have an extra 400ish points just because he took a formation? Not a fan.

I've never seen Daemons do well personally, but I see a lot of internet moaning about it. I might just be thick, but I don't see why they're so powerful. Yeah they can summon more Daemons... but so can I? What's the deal? Invisible Screamers? Cool, I can have invisible Spawn with a beatstick Chaos Lord in the mix. I don't know, I can't wrap my head around it. Whenever I see Daemons pop up in the top 3 rankings of a tournament I just think "why didn't you just shoot them?". But people complain about them, so there must be something I'm missing.

 

Just curious... how powerful are Necrons and Dark Eldar (those were the armies my friend and I played against one another back in the day)?

 

Dark Eldar are pretty low on the power scale at the moment. I haven't played against them myself since 6th edition (and they were pretty potent with their previous codex) but the general consensus seems to be that their infantry is expensive for what they can do, and the army as a whole relies too much on Poison to be an effective all-rounder. HOWEVER.... Now we have the "Ynnari" - a fairly free mix of Eldar, Dark Eldar and Harlequins. I think that the Haemonculus Covens isn't included, but all the more "mainstream" stuff can be taken and they gain access to a few new characters and a fairly nifty ability to perform out-of-sequence actions when things die.

Necron are still going strong. They're not as destructive as the Big 4, but incredibly hard to kill. Personally I'm surprised they're not doing better in tournaments than they are. They have some nasty combos and a very well balanced codex with only a handful of outliers on either end of the spectrum (Wraiths being stupid-good and C'Tan being pretty terrible). They're not an army you can just toss together and expect to win with though - because all of their units are so specialised you really need to think about your army composition before you put models on the table.

 

That's a shame... they were always my favorites (which you can probably tell from my screen name).

Thanks for the info!

 

I used to field the Nightbringer back when it was a 600pt+ monster of death. Good times.

The named C'Tan (Nightbringer and Deceiver) aren't too bad these days, but they're still expensive and dangerous Monstrous Creatures that can't fly. From my brief experience with them before I sold my Necrons about 2 years back, they got targeted and gunned down quickly. If he got in combat though GOD Nightbringer was fun. The Transcended one had better stats, but the random ability was a deal breaker for me.

 

Meh, I can't say I like that... battleshock in AoS is very hit & miss as far as I've seen. Stormforged headed by a lord celestant on dracoth are effectivly immune to it, resulting in a fairly elite army that also can't be broken. Certain cannonfodder units like skaven clanrats, seem to have no particular protection to it. And in between being cannonfodder and cowards could potentially be decimated in a single turn. Then there is other cannonfodder that can get protection against it like bloodreavers backed up by a bloodsecrator, but this immeadiatly makes them immune.

Basicly battleshock seems to only really come in two flavors, either it's basicly irrelevant or will decimate a unit. I do hope they don't copy that. For example add in a rule that being near a hero doubles the bravery of cannonfodder, that way you can actually take some losses without the rest of the unit immeadiatly fleeing, but you don't immeadiatly completly ignore the battleshock face either.

 

Sure, a horde of mediocre cannonfodder should be suspectible to battleshock. But currently battleshock only really works at 1 level, and thats low to medium bravery on fairly elite units. E.g. ardboyz, or stormforged. They won't incur enough losses for them to bleed dry rapidly thanks to how sturdy they are, there should only rarely be anyone fleeing and even then only 1 or two models.. But focussed fire can rout a unit. In every other situation you are either (practicly) immune, or all your losses are effectivly doubled because you have like 4 bravery.

It also doesn't help that there are only a few effects that influence battleshock/bravery negativly, there's no way to force a battleshock test & while the counters against battleshock are suddenly extremly potent and effective (yay immunity in 24" thanks to my celestant on a dracoth)

Anyway, all in all I get what they were going for, but it feels rushed. Similar to several other issues AoS has. For hordes the calculation of losses is just too punishing, quickly doubling your losses, for some it's too easy to ignore the mechanic altogether. And there's essentially no point to it for the properly small units of 3 or less models, let alone the 1 model unit, unless they run into something like a carnosaur.

 

See this is what I'm afraid of. As it stands now Morale/Leadership is largely irrelevant - most armies have some way to minimise or ignore it. I also don't want to see the return of a "MSU or bust" type meta. I like the OPTION to use MSU, but having it as the only competitive way to play is bad.

Aside from Morale Phase and Psychic Phase I mostly like everything else I've seen, so I'm still very keen to see what else 8th edition brings us.

 

I just caught up on the stuff that's been put out the last few days while I have been offline since moving... Definitely sounds a lot like AoS in space, which is what I wanted.

 

I thought that was the Seraphon?