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The GREAT 40k thread

Some of my thoughts on the "firstborn" stuff getting sunset.

It was unfortunately kind of inevitable ever since they revealed the Primaris stuff back at the start of 8th ed over a decade ago.

Fortunately, Horus Heresy and earlier editions of 40k still exist if you can find people that are willing to play them.

Having said that, how GW framed Primaris in relation to what had come before has been a long-running insult to legacy Space Marine players for that entire time. What could have simply been "Here's better-scaled space marines in a new mark of power armour as a kit update, and maybe a few new toys to play with" instead became "Here's what we want you to replace your models with, and you will like it".

It's for that reason that GW turning around and saying that you can officially proxy your old tactical squads as intercessors and devastator squads as desolation squads feels more like an insult than it should be. Sure, that might fly if you're trying to make a Horus Heresy army as cross-compatible as possible with vanilla 40k these days (since Primaris-like unit-wide weapon loadouts are standard in HH), but I don't think anyone who's collected firstborn units for vanilla since halfway through 9th ever considered having enough "free" flamers, plasma guns, or missile launchers built respectively for MSU infernus, hellblaster, or desolation squads (let alone full-sized squads) when they were building their tactical squads.

As for things that don't make sense: autocannon-toting Suppressors being used as official proxies for bolt-pistol gunslinging Inceptors.
 
ChapterAquila92 said:
Some of my thoughts on the "firstborn" stuff getting sunset.

It was unfortunately kind of inevitable ever since they revealed the Primaris stuff back at the start of 8th ed over a decade ago.
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Funnily, Gabriel Seth was right.
"That is not salvation, that is replacement. These new warriors will bear the colours of Flesh Tearers, but without Sanguinius’ fury they will be Flesh Tearers in name only."
...
"There are few of my warriors left, few true Flesh Tearers. Once we are dead, the Flesh Tearers will be no more, no matter that these abominations carry our name"
 
ChapterAquila92 said:
Some of my thoughts on the "firstborn" stuff getting sunset.

It was unfortunately kind of inevitable ever since they revealed the Primaris stuff back at the start of 8th ed over a decade ago.

Having said that, how GW framed Primaris in relation to what had come before has been a long-running insult to legacy Space Marine players for that entire time. What could have simply been "Here's better-scaled space marines in a new mark of power armour as a kit update, and maybe a few new toys to play with" instead became "Here's what we want you to replace your models with, and you will like it".
Click to expand...
I'm honestly surprised they lasted this long. When they started the campaign of telling us how much better the new marines were and how bad both in game in fluff wise the original marines were compared to the nu marines, I knew they would be discontinued eventually. I liked the size of the primarius as a long term fan of truescale projects but the fluff that replaced the old was rubbish. It didn't help me accept them with the action figure giant weapons and having multiple weapons, it just looked silly to me. The boots are actually my biggest dislike and I loathe that design esthetic and that helped make me turn away from marines in general and 40k specifically. 30k started its scale creep and with the rules being what they are right now it's a dead game in my area. I wish all the best for those who like this path but I'll stick with older editions and models, maybe I'll get some decent deals with gamers unloading old school marines. I need some older terminators for my Space Hulk game.
 
Killer Angel said:
Surprisingly, i don't dislike it.
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The fluff? I will say they have improved some of it but too much of how it was presented was poorly done to my taste. I was honestly hoping that they were going to have them be Alpha Legion and we would have another civil war. The civil war would also have sone of the Primarius turn coat and fight against their programing. Sadly this was not to be.
 
BrotherSutek said:
too much of how it was presented was poorly done to my taste.
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indeed it was done poorly, but the idea itself wasn't bad and there was potential.

Belisarius is a genius and he was working on this project for 10 millennia. IMO in truth he was not able to "improve" the Emperor's work... but he was able to improve a project that was done purposelly in a suboptimal way by the Emperor himself. (not a small achievement by cawl, btw)
The real masterpiece of the Emperor were the Custodes... the thunder warriors were a tool, and the SM were just a more advanced tool, but even them were probably meant to be disposable. In the lore there are many hints to the fact that a herely was almost planned, but at a later moment.
 
BrotherSutek said:
The fluff? I will say they have improved some of it but too much of how it was presented was poorly done to my taste. I was honestly hoping that they were going to have them be Alpha Legion and we would have another civil war. The civil war would also have sone of the Primarius turn coat and fight against their programing. Sadly this was not to be.
Click to expand...
What I find to be the biggest inherent problem with Primaris isn't that they come across as "new and improved" blood for "Firstborn" marines to shake their fists at as "those darn kids don't know nothin'" - they get enough flak as it is in the setting by loyalist and traitor astartes alike on that very topic - but rather that their tabletop representation, which for the duration of 8th and 9th has been woefully piecemeal, went out of its way to feature them be segregated into their own bespoke Primaris units rather than demonstrate attempted integration one way or another with the Firstborn, both in and outside of lore.

It's ultimately a flanderization issue, in part by the Warhammer community but mainly driven by Games Workshop itself. However much of this was wrapped up in copyright shenanigans, shareholder pressure, or some other aspect of the business is beyond me, but the end result is that there was definitely an arbitrary division that had no reason to be there in the first place, sparking a lot of animosity in the process, and, like I said before, could simply have been resolved from the beginning with saying "hey, your old models are still playable, just with these new squad layouts as options".

Sure, Phobos, Gravis, and the hover vehicle units throw a bit of a wrench into that, but that could always be brushed aside as "here's some new toys for you to play with", just like when the centurions were first released (and boy were those mocked hard at the time).

In a way, the fact that they didn't do that from the outset, and instead retained the older units as separate "firstborn" units, suggests to me that they were gun-shy after what they did a couple years prior to Warhammer Fantasy and didn't want to risk rocking the boat that much.
 
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