8th Ed. Warhammer 8th Home-Rules

Possibly, I never played 6th and barely 7th.

It is a weird limitation though, maybe it's to balance the big spells a bit but for the rest it seems unnecessary.

 

Maybe they were thinking this:

“We wrote 48 different spells.
It was impossible to make them all equally good.
If we let the players freely select the spells;
they’ll always pick the very same spells.
They will decide which ones are ‘best’.
They will always pick those; nasty little power gamerz!!!
If they do that they’ll be having fun wrong!
Well, we can write a rule that will fix that!!!”


That must be it. You are supposed to learn, use, and enjoy all the spells.

Anything else is wrongthinking...and they made it punishable.

 

One of my pet peeves about the 8th Edition Magic system is the

Vanishing Spells


There were about 2 dozen variants of them.

Does 6 Strength 5 hits....
Does D4 Strength 4 hits....
Does 2D6 Strength 3 hits....
Does 5 Strength 6 hits....
Does 1D6 Strength D6 hits....
Does 2D3 Strength 3 hits....
Does 4 Strength 5 hits....

All of them ^ endless variations of that formula.

All boiling down to: Dice are rolled, dice for dispelling are rolled, variables are rolled, (perhaps) save throws are rolled...

Basically, a bunch of dice are rolled, models are (maybe) removed.

If it works models vanish.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is too many numbers to remember, too many variants, too many dice... for a boring result: Remove a few models.

Those have always annoyed me. But they are not so broke as to warrant fixing.

 

Well that's fair, but it could be fixed by having better spells in general and not having the big broken ones and casting value. Alternatively you give each spell a points cost.
Ultimately I think it's partly a bit of lazy design and for some reason feeling the need to have dice roles everywhere, even in list building (essentially), however I cannot completely say it's a bad choice, since even if all spells were balanced, all units probably wouldn't be, and then the "best" spells would be chosen on that basis.
Still I do think there is a better option, there is just too much randomness in 8th magic; It's probably part of the idea to make it so random, but the level of randomness and possible power too easily wins or loses games, or at least I believe so from my little pool of knowledge.

Agreed, they aren't exactly interesting.
They would be more interesting if they had some special rules attached, though it just makes them slightly more interesting.
I guess it's just the easiest way to make a damaging spell.