Hey everyone, Reecius here to discuss 7th ed in a little more depth. The last post was a bit stream of consciousness as we digested the new rules, this will be more structured.
Overview
So, we have on our hands a shiny new edition of the game. It came fast on the heels of 6th ed, which was unexpected, but it incorporates all of the craziness of December with Escalation, Stronghold, Dataslates and Formations into the 6th ed core rules with some FAQs thrown in for good measure. The game played on the tabletop is essentially the same as it was. Rules mechanics wise, the Psychic Phase is the only really big change to how the game plays. The really significant changes come in the the pre-game of building your army and deciding what mission to play. Here, the game changes dramatically, however, these are also the rules most often changed by players so I look at these with mixed feelings as they will likely not be used that frequently.
In all, 7th edition Warhammr 40K is extremely close to 6th edition 40K. If you liked 6th, you will like 7th as it essentially doubled down on the elements of 6th. You now have even more freedom to make whatever army you like with the benefit of many rules tightened up that were previously ambiguous, and a lot of changes to balance different unit types out. If you didn’t like the free-wheeling nature of 6th, you will hate 7th as it completely takes the lid off and allows you to literally do whatever you want. There is no structure to list building anymore which throws the door wide for both thematic armies and abusive armies. It is left to the players to regulate themselves, for better or worse.
The Good
There is a lot of good in the new edition. Looked at from the perspective of rules mechanics in-game, many things have been cleaned up. Did we need a new edition for that? Not really, an FAQ would have been sufficient. But, it is nice to get answers to a lot of these questions.
Things like answering if Ignores Cover works on vehicles or not has been cleared up, or how IC’s with infiltrate work, etc. We as a community had already answered these questions for ourselves in terms of tournaments, but it is good to have them in the rule book. Nice.
I also like a lot of the evening out that went on, such as with increasing the damage table up to 7 for Vehicles. You can no only one-shot a tank with an AP2 or 1 weapon. Good, vehicles were languishing compared to MCs and this little boost was needed. This combined with things like Smash only being a single attack (which means MCs don’t auto explode any vehicle they touch) encourages players to feel safe in an investment in tanks. While some players such as myself and Frankie were using lots of cheapo transports like Rhinos and Venoms, I believe you will now see a lot more Land Raiders and more expensive vehicles like that. Units like Knights are now REALLY hard to kill, particularly for armies that use assault to destroy tanks. We will be seeing a lot of Knights in the future, is my prediction.
Other changes such as units having to choose to Jink is good, IMO. It is now even and fair and applies to all units that have the rule equally. You choose to get a defensive bonus and lose some offense. Fair enough. FMCs now not being able to assault after flying is fair but it REALLY decreases the likelihood of seeing assault oriented FMCs. Shooting is now the clearly more efficient choice. But, it makes them more balanced in comparison to other units that cannot assault after having moved that fast in a turn. I also really like the decrease in Vector Striking on ground targets to a single AP2 attack as the D3+1 was truly overkill.
I like the opening up of the pyschic table, too, to allow more armies to have more of the powers. That creates a lot more diversity and fun for everyone. Now, some of the powers themselves are ridiculously OTT, but we will get to that later.
It also appears you can go full reserves again, which is awesome as that is a great tactic to mitigate the crushing first turn alpha strikes you can get in a IGOUGO game like 40K. Particularly when there isn’t much terrain, being forced to start on the table going second against a shooty army can mean the game is over before it began, which is clearly not the way the game should play.
D weapons were toned down, thank goodness. They are fairly reasonable now, and more likely to see some play time (although they are still very powerful but only ignore invul saves on a to wound roll of a 6). I think the only other thing to look at before green lighting Super Heavies now, is those units that can ignore armor and cover with large template/blast weapons. They are still incredibly powerful units at often very low price points and can be potentially unbalancing such as the Hellhammer or a Sonic Lance Revenant.
In all, there are a lot of subtle changes like this throughout the book that either clarify language on rules, or bring small touches to help out balance between units. That is good, and will increase diversity on the table. From that perspective, I think 7th ed 40K is fantastic as it is a tighter rule set than it was, with more balance. I would like to write more in this category, but honestly, 7th is 6th with a little lipstick put on it. The good aspects from before are largely all still there.
The Bad
There is unfortunately, a lot of bad in there, too.
For one, the list building section as is, creates the most comically absurd games you can imagine. It’s apocalypse, minus apoc formations. Pure and simple. You can now take, literally, anything you want. Darigo with Swarmlord with Skarbarand with Eldrad. Why not. That type of freedom allows for unlimited ability to create just the army you want, which is cool, but it also throws game balance out the window in entirety. That means different things for different people. For those that build balanced lists to play with friends wherein you don’t try to abuse that freedom, no problem. You can recreate a themed army from any of the books or your imagination and have a blast. In a competitive setting unbound armies are unacceptable. Just imagine an army of 8 Wraithknights, or all Heldrakes, or all Daemon heralds that each can summon another unit of Daemons onto the table every turn. It is absurd from that perspective and as such, I doubt it will be used much outside of novelty games or maybe with young players that love the idea of using any of their models.
The unlimited Force Organization Charts is essentially the same thing. As it stands, you can take as many FOCs as you want within your points limit. Now that everyone can ally together, this means you can take an army with every single book represented in it (points allowing). It in all honesty, isn’t much different than an unbound list. It’s silly. Even allowing 2 primary FOCs means you could take 6 Wraithknights or 6 Heldrakes, or 8 Rune priests, etc. I don’t think many people will want to see that in a tournament/pick-up game/league night. Again though, if you are playing with friends in a controlled environment with a gentleman’s agreement between you, this may be fine, but the ability to break the game is completely unbridled now.
This is further exacerbated by the new rules for scoring. Every unit in the game scores now, but, in FOC armies troops have the Objective Secured rule which means they cannot be contested except by other units with the Objective Secured rule. This is further given to their dedicated transports. For example, a Drop Pod Marine army can drop 18 uncontestable scoring units onto objectives (12 combat squads of Tacticals and 6 Drop Pods). Or, Wave Serpents that score, or Land Raiders that score, etc. I am still on the fence on this one, but, it gives such as HUGE advantage to a player with lots of troops in vehicles over anyone else that it feels out of balance as of now. Time will tell. Being able to hand the Relic to a Drop Pod though, just feels silly.
Some of the more annoying rules issues were not cleaned up such as Ordnance forcing all other weapons to snap fire on a vehicle even if they are Heavy. So, yet again, Leman Russes have no reason at all to take Sponson Weapons and the Monolith is hamstrung, still. Grav Weapons are still confusing, Stomp Attacks on Super Heavy Walkers are still confused, etc. Issues like that still pop up, and will require community FAQ’ing.
The Psychic Phase almost went into the Good, but for one, huge, glaring problem. As of now, there is no limit on Warp Charge. You can quite easily build an army that has 30+ warp charge. We did it last night and made a Daemon summoning spam list and it was ludicrous. The Daemon plyaer had 38 warp charge and by turn 2, had brought in over 1,000pts of new units onto the table and the Space Marine player never got a single power off nor denied a single power as they had 3 Warp Charge in their pool to work with. It was comical. The game took almost 6 hours to play and by the end of it, the Daemon player’s army had gone over 4,000pts. The Psychic phase seemed like it was intended to stop the abuses of 6th, but in some ways it exacerbated them. Without a limit on Warp Charge, psychic heavy armies will have an incredible advantage.
Some of the powers in the new deck are too much, too. Invisibility for example, got hugely buffed beyond the already extremely powerful spell it was. Now, you can only hit an Invisible unit with snap fire, and 6’s in assault. That means a unit that has become Invisible can’t even be hit by Template or Blast Weapons…..yeah. Simple math tells us that a unit that is only hit on 6’s requires a LOT of attention to do anything to it. Considering that the 2+ reroll saves are still in the game (le sigh) that means you could have a unit like Fateweaver that you hit on 6’s, wound on 5 or 6’s, and that then could have a 2++ save that they reroll. That means the odds of hurting them are 1/1296 to do a SINGLE wound. The fact that this is even possible to do is laughably sad. Again, limiting Warp Charge goes a long way to stopping this kind of thing, but as of now, you can do it. That is, clearly, stupid.
The Malefic powers are also suspect. We need to play-test them more, but so far, they are just way over the top. In one game we saw summoned onto the field like, 150 Daemonettes, a Bloodthirster, 9 Screamers, etc. It is just a bit much. One player ends up with the equivalent of 2 or even 3 armies against the other player’s one. And a Space Marine librarian summing Deamons? Or turning into one by choice??? Come on, that just flies in the face of the fluff. We’ll see how it goes, and again, limiting Warp Charge cuts down on this a bit, but as it stands this school of powers is an obvious cash grab to get people to buy Daemons and throws the game balance out the window.
The Maelstrom Mission cards are hugely imbalanced. You draw a deck at the beginning of the game and then at the end of your turn you play any cards you have scored, and set them aside. You then draw new cards to replace those you used. You can also discard a single card per turn and draw a new one if you choose.
A house rule to adjust these will be needed if you want to use them unless you don’t mind losing the game before it starts in some cases. What I mean by that is, some of the cards are literally unusable in the game. For example, you could draw a card that scored you a point if you blew up a building, but there may be no buildings to blow up. Or, destroy a flyer, and the other player has no flyer, etc. If you draw a few of those, you can’t score and have to wait turns to discard them and hopefully draw cards you can use. Whereas if your opponent draws good cards like holding an objective in his deployment zone that he is already deployed on, he or she will be racking up points AND drawing new cards faster than you, thereby increasing their potential to score even more points while you’re still waiting to draw a card you can even use. It is obviously 100% unfair, and it has the side effect of making the actual act of fighting the enemy largely meaningless. The game entirely comes down to drawing the right cards.
In our test games so far, the player that drew the better hand won the game despite getting smashed on the tabletop. What happened in the game was not very important compared to drawing a hand of cards you could actually use. In order for these to be usable in anything other than a for fun game, you must create a house rule wherein a player that draws a card that is impossible to score during the course of the game, may redraw a new card. Also, if these become the norm in tournament play, players using tricks to stack their deck or just flat out cheating by loading their deck with good cards (even by accident), will become a concern.
Solutions
So we have a good framework of tighter rules in general to work with and some cool ideas, but with some HUGE issues in terms of how people make their armies and how the game is won and lost to work through. If you were to play 40K 7th ed right out of the box with no modifications at all, the game would be absurdity. One guy could have an army of every named character he could fit into his army, the other could have all Leman Russes playing a mission where one player scored multiple points a turn and the other never drew a card he could even use. That may sound like a blast to some people, and I am sure it would be, but for structured play that is a disaster. The psychic phase as is, is completely over-powered, too when abused. When you can Fortune a unit and then also make it Invisible while simultaneously completely stopping the other player form even getting a power off, that sucks the fun right out of game play.
Here are my off the cuff ideas for potential solutions. Yes, we are acting fast but we HAVE to act fast before players get used to playing a certain way that may undermine organized events and play. Ask yourself if you want to show up to league night and regularly see unbound armies? I don’t.
- No unbound armies outside of specialized events, such as Ard Boyz for those who enjoy this.
- Limit the amount of detachments you can use in a list. I still feel that 2 is all we should use as otherwise you end up with situations like Adepticon wherein you have 9/16 finalists with Inquisition. I feel that 1 primary only, and then 1 other type of detachment would be fair and fun and allow for a great deal of variety.
- Disallow “Come the Apocalypse” allies as they create totally bizarre and unfun combos.
- Limit Warp Charge to prevent the inane psychic spam armies.
- If that is not enough to stop the worst abuses, also limit powers like Invisibility, Fortune, and some of the Malefic powers.
- Limit the use of mission cards so that you have a fair chance to potentially score in a game. If you draw a card that is impossible to score throughout the course of the game, you get a free redraw. I think this combined with a layered mission such as a traditional mission primary (Crusade, Scouring, etc.) with cards secondary and bonus points as tertiary can create some really fun, varied missions. You would also have to come up with a way to limit tampering with the mission cards.
- Limit the stupid 2+ reroll saves that are still going to be so prevalent as we have already done.
There is still a lot to learn with this edition and hopefully GW releases an FAQ soon to address some of these issues but as of now, this is where we are at.
What are your thoughts on the new edition?
I say no malefic powers. No until bound and cap warp charges to a reasonable 111
Yeah, as of now those Malefic powers are nuts when you spam them out. You really need to limit the amount of warp charge in the mix.
I think 11-12, maybe 13 being the cap.
Yeah, Fantasy caps at 12.
Is that base rules or House Rule?
Rule-book rules, I believe.
Yes, fantasy caps power dice at 12 at any given time. There are situations where you can have more than 12 over the course of the turn, though.
If you peril your phase ends seems a good solution
What if instead of capping the dice you cap the number of psykers that contribute?
This would mean a limit to the dice but armies that bring high level psykers get a few more dice. Also as the high level psykers die the lower level ones get to contribute.
Start at a cap of like four.
Means four level threes contribute 12 dice plus the random, but spammed level ones would only get 4 extra dice. Is this a possible compromise? Heavily psychic races would keep more dice longer but it would put two level twos on the same footing as four level ones. Scaling might be an issue…but with a base line at around 1750 I think this is workable.
My common Tzeentch list has:
Fateweaver, (who generates 8WC in 7e)
Three PML3 Tzeralds
Two PML3 Princes
Pink Horror unit
That’s 24WC. More than lots of armies, waaay less than a Psyker-tailored list can bring.
In 6e, I could reliably get off 15 powers a turn.
In 7e….
If I want to cast Iron Arm, Endurance, Warp Speed, Life Leech, and Psychic Shriek, that’s 10WC already (to make sure to pass). Now I have 2xPrescience, so that’s another 8WC (to make sure to pass).
Now I have 6WC left for ALL my Flickering Fire and ALL of Fatey’s shooting. Nowhere near enough. Previously, I could roll around 10D6 shots for Flickering Fire, from the whole army. Now? I’ll be lucky to get off 4D6.
Tzeentch builds got a serious nerf with the new way of doing things.
A hard cap is just a really dumb idea.
A cap on Conjurations might be a better course, but capping WC limits the entire way of Tzeentch–they’re so weak without Psychic, that it’s basically unplayable.
Why does fate weaver get 8wc?
Fateweaver only generates 4 warp charges, not 8.
In Codex: Chaos Daemons, under Fateweaver’s entry, it specifically states ‘he only generates the Warp Charge points for a single Mastery Level 4 Psyker, not two.’
As a Daemons player for several years, I thought the same thing when I first read the 7e rules, but no – the codex limits him to 4.
Also, a one is always a fail, no matter rerolls
i agree, how about any 1 you roll in your warp pool fails that power. also, spawned units do not generate WC points, or score.
I was playing Daemons last night as a test, psychic powers are harder to get off but certain ones are ridiculously powerful. Limiting warp charges could help, but also invalidates things like pink horrors which will just never shoot or do anything at all… Someone suggested 12 but that’s just not realistic for certain armies who are supposed to be psychically powerful and were designed with multiple psykers in mind. A cap of 24 (keeping with the multiples of 3 and 6 that is common) might work alright and keep things sane enough while still allowing psychically strong armies to seem so.
As far as maelific powers go, what about limiting armies to one successful conjuration per turn?
The thing with 24 though, is that if the other guy only has 1 or no psyker, he is totally helpless to stop you. It makes the psychic phase completely one sided.
Limiting the number of conjurations helps, too. But even just spamming out on Greater Daemons is so crazy by turning Heralds into them.
Reecius, in this case I think it’s reasonable to consider that in 6th your opponent was largely incapable of stopping ANY power you tried to cast, making the psychic ‘phase’ completely one-sided. Even so, I think 18 is a number that we might be able to settle on–that’s a lot of freaking dice to throw at something, but not so many that an army with one (or none) psyker is powerless against everything. Instead, it will be powerless against ALMOST everything.
As for summoning, why not limit the number of summoned units on the board at any one time? 3 seems good to me. I also thought about having an escalating ‘instability’ roll based on what turn it was: Starting turn TWO, they disappear on a ‘6’ (per unit), on turn SEVEN they AUTOMATICALLY disappear at the end of your (player) turn. I realize my second idea is semi-ridiculous, just felt fluffy….
True, that is a good point, but, you could DtW against a power that targeted you. That has actually gotten harder to do in some situations.
Limiting the amount of summoned units on the table at any time may be the right choice. That would be a simple fix.
How much does retaining a (traditional) DtW vs. Curses (maybe not witchfires, etc.) much things up? Misfortune, Enfeeble (still in the game?), etc. wouldn’t require ANY warp charges to deny.
In response to the below post about limiting per GAME: Sounds good to me! But I have to admit to a conflict of interest. 2 per game makes it seem like it would barely be worth taking the summoning power (or taking the risk of casting it). Could be wrong. /shrug
What about a cap that you can summon? Like only two per turn
per game i mean
Honestly it’s not like things were getting stopped before, and psychically strong armies *should* dominate the psychic phase a bit. A limit like 12 that people have been suggesting just completely invalidates taking more than two psykers, and some armies are intentionally psychically powerful.
Maybe instead of a direct cap you could give the defending player the normal amount of dice -or- half of the attacking players dice, whichever is higher? That way one librarian still gets a bonus, going from x+2 to half of the large amount there is. Dtw rolls aren’t supposed to always work you just should have a chance at denying a power or two. Even casting isn’t so solid anymore, so I don’t know if its that important other than for the couple of specific powers mentioned anyways, and I that case, maybe there should be more focus on those specific powers?
“DtW rolls aren’t supposed to always work….” < Exactly. I think the focus is more on how an army with a lot of Psykers will dominate an army with only one not only by being able to force through more successful casts but by ALSO being able to throw tons of dice at denying the one teensy-weensy power that lone Psyker is going to try to cast during his turn. Being able to dominate your own Psychic phase based on the makeup of your army makes sense. Being able to shut down everything your opponent does during their's is (I think, if I'm understanding the direction correctly) what doesn't seem right.
In 7th, I can attempt to the DtW against any power, cast anywhere on the board, regardless of LoS or what power is being attempted (Blessing, Malediction, etc.). That seems odd given that I can't cast Blessings on my own units without LoS–heck can't even cast Blessings on units sitting right next to me in my own transport (*Wave Serpent* /cough).
Okay so then how about half warp charges count for dtw pool?
I think I wouldn’t mind regularly seeing unbound armies at a league, assuming that they weren’t too far out. I know a few folks who are planning some more jump pack heavy raven guard armies, which is unbound but nothing truly special or ugly. There are plenty of ways to build a cool unbound force that isn’t an eye-rolling disaster. The question is whether a players in general use this newfound freedom for good or evil. I think that the outlier rude builds wouldn’t make it to the table that often because no one would want to show up with a list that would be refused in a friendly game outright.
Yeah, someone taking all Jumpers is fine for sure, but, that depends on people regulating themselves to the standard that you believe to be acceptable. Different people have a different gauge for what is or is not an acceptable level or power. Without defining it clearly, if you have an open format for unbound, you are asking for conflict.
As for the mission objectives, for tournaments, restrict the objective generation to rolling on the D66 objective chart. No cards allowed in competitive play.
How does that change it? You could still get a snotty roll. And that slows the game down a lot more.
I see the Chaplains point. You can’t rig a chart like you can stack a deck. And to Hotsause’s point you can still use Reece’s idea of being able to replace un-useable objectives if that’s what you roll. And with a piece of paper at the table with the chart on it, throwing in a few more dice rolls won’t slow the game down.
Reece if you kept your ten point system and had winning the card based missions be the lesser end game points. Pretty much replace the secondary mission in your system with it?
Yeah, exactly. Use the cards as the three point portion of the missions, keep the rest the same. And like Chaplain said, roll out of the book to limit errors.
I posted in the forums (silly me) regarding the new mission cards: What if you could only score ONE of your mission cards per turn? If you hold a lot of objectives, it is easier to score points, but you can’t score more than 3 (on a lucky roll of the die) in any given turn. A player with only a few options to choose from would still have a hard time keeping up, but wouldn’t necessarily be buried by turn 2.
Thanks for posting those, I saw them!
And yeah, there needs to be come kind of way to level the playing field with cards or simply not use them.
Good early summary – been waiting for it. Sad that there are such issues with the new edition. When I first heard about unbound I almost rage-quit, but that was because it was made out that there would be no FOC. Luckily there is a choice. Psychic phase sounded promising as well. Just a question as I do not have a new rulebook yet, and my country only expects them in 10-20 days: how do GK handle the phase? Do brotherhood of psychers and psychic pilots also generate warp charges?
Yeah, Brotherhood of Psykers/Sorcerers and Psychic Pilot do generate warp charge, yes.
The mission cards are the real bummer for me. It still run around and drop your models on these totally arbitrary and abstract tokens… what happened to forge the narrative in terms of wins and losses. The whole mechanism of winning the game is so wonky and uninspiring.
Seriously if I had one request it’d be to create a completely original “Frontline Gaming Missions” which focuses on making a better way to win the game. I don’t know if the solution would be going back to old 2nd edition win conditions where the player who destroyed the most points worth of units wins the game or something else but man these win conditions SUCK right now.
Yeah, “out of the box” the missions are super unbalanced.
I think if we layer them though, it will be ok. I like the idea of the cards a lot but as of now they are so arbitrary and random they create a totally unfair game.
I’ve read through most of the new rulebook now and I must say that it is going to be really hard for me to be enthusiastic about playing 40k in the 7th edition. You need to do an ITC tournament ruleset that tones down the game. Here are some things that I think need to be done.
1. Limit warp charges to a cap of 10 per player turn.
2. Do not allow Desperate Allies, as it is just too stupid.
3. Keep the 2+ rerollable save to a 2+/4+ re-rollable.
4. Keep the 2 detachment cap.
5. No Unbound.
6. No Invisibility (magic does this all the time)
7. Do not use the random mission cards.
8. Jean shorts are mandatory attire. The higher, the better.
Don’t worry if people threaten not to come to the ITC tournaments. Who cares if they want to go anyways? They can have fun playing with the same 2 guys in their garage on the weekends. Also, don’t worry about what other non ITC events are doing. That’s not on you and shouldn’t influence your decision to create your own tournament rules. If you do not do something like this we will see the end of competitive 40k in a year’s time.
2. Do not allow Desperate Allies…..no edit function (========3
)•)<====3
I agree, we need to take a page from fantasy and do what they do
#8 for sure.
But yeah, I agree with you on those ideas for the most part. We need to take the reigns on this.
#8.
I’d rather not envision Reece in daisy dukes….
…..and now I think I am scarred for life.
lol!
Speak for yourself!
“I just read through the rule book and I know what we need to do. Here is my list of suggestions which will remove almost all the 7th edition rules and make tournaments effectively 6th edition again”
😉
Come the Apocalypse… GOD DAMMNIT
The Come the Apocalypse horse shit has most certainly got to go! Mind you, using my Berzerkers as some form of Bloodangel in a Drop Pod may mean they actually get a tad more table utility…
Fluffplenation; So bloodthirsty are the followers of Khorne that the other clearly more mentally stable genocide junkies of the Dark Gawds fear to tread within 6″ of them…
I don’t know.
I was hoping the living objectives were going to open the game up when it came to list design, exterminating the castle and forcing people to start taking more mobile elements… It was a terrific idea, it’s just implemented by a bunch of chest thumping assholes.
I was generally enjoying the shit out of 6th, it had its belligerent hiccups but this has all kind of snowballed… I was remarkably hopeful for this edition, mostly looking forward to GW embracing CC a little bit more (don’t get me wrong, I think close combat should be a far less lethal alternative to having someone slinging HE shells around, it’s just…).
Bloodthirster’s unfortunately got tea bagged, Skarbrand or bust now I suppose…
Embrace the age of magical mysteries!
Magical Mysteries, whee! lol
I think 7th will be good fun after we fix it.
Surely by now you have realized that you are doing the demon summoning stuff 100% wrong.
It does not work in any way, shape, or form the way you are doing it.
I would love to be wrong on this, but we read the book multiple times and it seems that everyone else is playing it as we are.
How are you playing it?
Hey Reece, while you can full reserve, you still auto lose if you have no units on the board at the end of any game turn. Also, as someone who has been playing flying circus demons for over a year, the psychic phase is messed up. There needs to be a cap, but it cannot be too low. The reason being, for example, it takes 3 warp charges to get a 75% chance to cast a Charge 1 power, which is still harder to do than a leadership 10 test from before. So, for example, with a Kairos, plus 3 DP list, you lose quite a bit of shooting, which is fine as it was quite good before, but with a loss in the ability to charge, the duality was lost and the shooting from powers reduced. If you limit the number down to ten like rawdogger proposed, you would basically remove psykers from the game IMO. Otherwise, I think you analysis is pretty spot on.
I don’t disagree about FMCs at all, but if you start going way over what the other player has with Warp Charge, you will never fail to get a power off and the other guy will never succeed because you can throw so many dice at him to DtW. It’s a double whammy. As Horrors produce buckets of Warp Charge, a Daemon player can easily skew the numbers dramatically.
Limiting the number of dice you can generate in your opponents Psychic phase, or having different limits depending on whether it’s your turn or not could work, e.g. 18 Power Dice max and 10 Dispel Dice max or something.
That way it doesn’t cut into armies with several psykers too badly when they’re trying to cast, but it stops them being able to utterly dominate the opponents psychic phase too. It’s not a great solution because it makes DtW more difficult when both armies have a lot of Warp Charges, but it stops the double whammy effect you mentioned.
Yeah, the possible imbalance in dispell dice seems the biggest problem to me. I see two possible solutions-
1. Implement the caps on dice some have mentioned, but during the opponent’s psychic phase only, so say you only ever get up to 12 deny dice and can’t just out-psychic the opponent 6 to 1. This way armies reliant on psychic shooting aren’t hamstrung (possibly with caps on conjurations/blessings per turn, but that’s a separate issue).
2. Alternately, you could make casting/dispell dice zero sum. If you spend all your dice casting, you have none to deny, or vice versa. You could even just have each player generate their dice used for both at the top of each game turn. This is probably a bigger departure from RAW, but to my mind is the one that’s better game design, as it encourages more interesting, thoughtful play.
Why not go with a “number of successes” system where if you deny enough dice to reduce them below the required number of successes (rather than have to cancel all the successes) then the power is denied?
Example: I cast a 3 Warp Charge Power with 4 successes on 6 dice. You roll 3 dice to deny and get 2 successes (lucky you). This brings my successes down to 2, which negates the power.
The idea behind it is if that a psi-heavy army really wants to have a power go off, they will have to make sure there are enough extra successes to soak up deny rolls. Not perfect, but worth expanding upon.
Also, i do agree that ML should be the deciding factor on what powers can be used by whom. A ML 1 psyker should not be using WC 2+ powers under normal circumstances.
Also, maybe ML 3+ powers should be limited to “can only be cast once per psychic phase” (cannot be manifested by other psykers during phase once cast). That way, there is a hard limit to one demonic summoning a phase.
82.5% for three dice on wc 1.
Yes, each die increases the odds by 1/2 of the remaining value.
1) if u limit to 1 primary and 1 secondary who cares if come the apocalypse is used.
2) dont restrict warp charge. i think remove demonology in its entirety and powers seen as broken can just add 1 or 2 to casting cost so it makes it harder to cast or just make deny to bring the successes to under casting cost. the whole equal thing requiring 6’s couldnt have been tested. Or just limit broken powers from play.
3) Select 6 cards (same across whole tournament of achievable goals), have players select 2 of them at start of game as additional bonus points possible. Show cards for each, Then play game. So each players objectives will be different to earn bonus points. You can still use a cool idea that was poorly implemented.
4) The 2++/4++ was used and was fine with most players.
Good ideas, thanks for sharing.
1.) Do you want to play against an Inquisition/Daemon combo? That’s why it should be limited, IMO. Or Nids/Eldar? It’s just a bit wonky. I could see IG/Nids or something like that as Genestealer Cult, but in general it is just kind of lame. Like, Black Legion/Ultra Marines or something is just so lame for me. It breaks the fluff too much.
2.) If you don’t restrict warp charge though, even if you increase the cost to cast powers, psychic heavy armies will easily get them off by throwing 10+ dice at a power. I like the idea on making it easier to deny, though, that could help a lot.
3.) I like that idea. That helps a lot to use the cards but not get stuck with something totally worthless.
4.) Agreed.
“or how IC’s with infiltrate work”
Really? As far as I can see the wording is identical. It still looks like they -intended- for an IC to confer Infiltrate to a squad, but the timing of deployment makes it impossible.
Perhaps it is my imagination and I am reading it assuming the interpretation I already understood. I will have to go back and double check that one.
“It also appears you can go full reserves again”
I’ve seen people saying this, but the rules still say you lose if you have no models on the board at the end of a game turn… am I missing something here?
Its at the end of the game turn not player turn, so if you go second as long as something comes on the board you are ok.
How can something come onto the board, though? According to p135 reserves can’t come on until your second turn. Seems like you’ll get to the end of the first game turn and lose.
You are 100% right for some reason that never clicked with me.
Drop Pods, Deathwing Assault, etc. allow you to do it.
That was always the case wasn’t it? But it only really applies to drop pods (and death wing) as every other reserve starts from turn two.
Yes, but now because of the removal of the restriction you can go full reserve and stay in the game because drop pods / etc guarantee something coming in on your turn.
For example an entire space marine army that also has one drop pod could reserve everything and as long as you go second that single drop pod will float you through the first turn as it is guarenteed to arrive first turn.
Deathwing and full drop pod army can go full reserve.
Ah, right, drop pods… I’m allergic to power armour, so I don’t normally think of that.
So it seems that all 6th edition needed was an FAQ – instead GW made 7th… and we’re hoping for an FAQ – i think I’ll pass 😛
All 5th needed was a few tweaks, mainly hull points and new wound allocation. Instead, we got 6th.
So let me get this straight; the official rules let you do pretty much what you want, and house rules have to balance it. That seems a little backwards to me.
The idea that someone thought they needed to release a Rulebook to tell you there are no rules seems remarkably daft to me.
Ah well, you live, you learn. I have played since 2nd Edition, I don’t know if they will have me for 7th, between family life and work I don’t have the time to start figuring all this shit out.
I just stumbled into Bolt Action for the same price as the fucking rules and Psy/Mission Cards… It’s like it showed up at just he right moment.
Yeah, we have folks going to DzC in droves, here.
7th will be fun, but we have to do a lot to get it functioning.
For warp charges, why not just rule that a model’s mastery level warp charges can only be used by that model? So you would generate d6 extra warp charges, but each psyker can only use the dice they generate, plus the extra until they are gone. That would seem to reduce the crazy a bit.
That would help a lot, actually. A lot of the crazier powers require 2-3 warp charge which would cut down dramatically on the amount of uber powers that would be cast successfully.
So a Mastery 2 psyker could only cast using up to 2 Warp Charges then? Worth playtesting, but if a psyker is dedicated to summoning Daemons, wouldn’t they be really adept at doing it? And the more dice rolled, the greater the chance at Perils…..and greater chance at multiple Perils (at least by non-Daemon psykers).
I will recommend that units with Adamantium Will and other Deny the Witch bonuses can use those bonuses against enemy powers that do not target them (Blessings and Conjurations). Many armies have some bonuses like that and that seems like it would help to nullify some crazyness.
The funniest part about this to me is that GW has already written decent psychic phase rules in the past. All these are good ideas, but have been in the game before.
Perils ending the phase, good been in before, psykers can only cast their ML warp charge spells, good, been in the game before. Hell there even used to be drain magic abilities that just ended the phase, irresistible force, dispels.
It baffles me that GW stumbles so bad making new rules and leaving out the really important parts when they’ve done this before and have had good ideas.
A simple solution to the Psychic Phase is to make it so that if you Perils the manifest attempt fails.
That is definitely an idea that may work. It makes the risk/reward factor of throwing more dice at a power more of a risk.
Yeah, that’s very simple, I like that one.
Easier solution to the warp charge instead of a die cap is to limit the number of dice rolled for each power to mastery level plus 1. Yes level 3 Tzeentch heralds will still get 4 die at rolling summoning but would help the ridiculous situation of 9 die fortune etc. Limits Belakor to 4 die invisibility, farseers to 4 die fortune etc. Potentially reduces the impact of the psychic phase.
That is another potential solution, however, it still means one army may have ten times as many dice to try and dispell powers, too. They still have nearly unbeatable psychic defense.
Then have an independent limit on defensive warp charges.
I used to come here for positivity and a nice take in the rules, even though I’m primarily a narrative and BAP player.
F–k me, right?
You guys are better than whiney reaction articles and letting people consistently cry in your comments. The comment section is a big part of online articles, but I find myself having to skip it these days. That makes me sad.
I expect to get reamed with negative comments on this, but it will be a waste of time. I’m not coming back for a while nor will I use the stores services in this time.
I’ll be back in the future unless it still sucks.
Whiny reaction articles? Haha, I certainly didn’t right it that way, but hey, you are free to read it how you choose. You are also free to purchase goods where you want, we have no control over that. But saying we suck because we give an honest opinion is pretty disingenuous and not appreciated. If you react this way to an opinion piece because you don’t share the view, perhaps you should avoid reading them. Everyone here is discussing proactive ways to work with the rules and still have fun, that is hardly negative. In fact, it is positive, but oh well, you see it how you see it.
^ The way you handle trolls & nutjobs is why I hang around here, Reecius. Nice work, man!
Uncalled for going all in his face for stating something several agrees upon Reece..I’m one of them. Will I now be bashed by Raw Dogger?
I also disagree that everyone is chirping in to fix stuff. Half of it is just the regular haters frothing at the majority vocal consensus on 7th being a mess.
I’m signing out as well and will recuperate from all of the negativity (almost forced it seems) on pure hobby blogs/plogs.
Signed,
Troll/nutjob :p
I’m going to Tommy your face!
Tommy, you see this as me being in the wrong? Haha, really? Wow, I responded calmly to someone attacking us and that in strikes you as out of line? That is completely illogical but again, you are free to hold your opinion.
Tommy you are one big D bag. I was enjoying reading the comment’s until I saw this ridiculous shit. Tommy I hope you and fister enjoy your circle jerk just keep it behind closed doors. And no one likes you or wants to hear you opinion.
I’m going to Fister your face
It’s good to know that you’re open minded amd respectful regarding other people’s opinions.
I never understood the people who complain about negativity like this I mean it’s your life and live it however you want but boy we would not get along at all, like I don’t think I could hold a 5 minute conversation with you.
On the topic of Reece and his business, this guy is way positive considering what’s been going on in 40k. I’ve watched the last 7 months of releases through the lens of FLG and when it’s awesome they call it awesome and tell you why it’s awesome. When it’s not awesome they say, hey this kinda sucks BUT THEN they say, let’s find ways to make it not suck guys.
I feel you’re having a knee-jerk reaction here and unfairly denying yourself a quality news source and for sure quality products…all I can say is I hope you already bought your gaming mat cause you’re definitely missing out if not.
Hope to see you back for a qualitative discussion.
As a CSM player a couple of things make me sad:
No more traitor guard – CSM/AM are now Come the Apoco allies. Even in normal play, where all allies are allowed, a 12″ gap in your deployment zone is painful, plus all the other negatives.
Challenge wound overflow – Nasty characters can now charge my units knowing they’ll get challenged (Champion of Chaos) and wreck the unit without any chance of retaliation.
I don’t think that warp charges should be capped but I do think that units should only be able to use the charges they generate plus a portion of the D6 charges, as the player likes. I.e. if you have a level 3 and level 2 psyker plus roll a 5 on the D6, they get 3 dice and 2 dice automatically respectively and the player decides to allocate 3 more dice to the level 3 and 2 more to the level 2. It would heavily limit the impact of stacking psykers and summoning ability.
I don’t like the way that Invisibility works, fluff wise. Template and Blast weapons should be the ideal way to deal with invisible targets, as they don’t need any accuracy and just effect an area. I would like to see this FAQed so that only weapons that roll to hit require 6s, with Template/Blast effecting the unit normally.
As stated above, if you don’t cap warp charge the psyker spam army still have a bucket of dice to try and deny the witch, which means if the other player only has say, a level 1 psyker, he will never get a power off.
This makes sense though, fluff wise and play wise. Fluff wise, if there’s three lords of change flying around, what would happen if an IG sanctioned psyker tries to throw a lightning bolt? He’d most likely have his head explode. Play wise, an ML3 lord of change with no other options is 255 points, and dies pretty quick to any concentrated fire. An ML3 herald is 95 points, and about as tough as wet tissue paper. Why should have their psychic powers, the only reason you buy them, denied by a 35 point guard psyker? If you pay hundreds of points for high level psykers, you SHOULD dominate the psychic phase.
If I read it right if you only charge In a singular character then the unit can still wail on him even if in a challenge
“Whilst the challenge is ongoing, other models locked in the combat can only allocate Wounds to the models involved in the challenge after all other enemy models that are locked in that combat (if any) have been removed as casualties, even if the models fighting in a challenge are the closest models.”
You attack the unit you are engaged with to create your wound pool. There is nothing in this edition that prohibits you from allocating these wounds to a model engaged in a challenge, as long as all other models in the HTH are dead, if there were any.
The following rules were present in 6th, and are no longer present in 7th under the challenge section.
“Outside Forces
Whilst the challenge is ongoing, only the challenger and challengee can strike blows against one another. ”
“Moral Support (Get ’Im, Boss!)”
Unless you can find a similar rule prohibiting the involvement of a unit in a challenge in 7th that was removed I believe on purpose, then I believe the intent is clear. GW does’t want IC/MC challenging to only kill 1 model to hide in assault from shooting for another turn, and they don’t want an IC/MC to avoid a unit’s attacks by issuing a challenge that some armies can’t refuse (looking at you CSM).
By the same token a super beat stick Chaos Lord can over flow out of a challenge that he is forced to make. I see this as more of a positive thing for CSM
I feel this ed didn’t fix anything. Still loving DZC more and more but this is just…
*The psychic phase is kind of cool. The theory of being able to cancel important powers is good but if a perils of the warp doesn’t stop a power from being thrown there is no point of not spamming powers. This single rule would have stopped people from spamming to much psychic power.
*The objective cards are great and can be a tons of fun. Just some fixing is needed. For instance. Going back to old school objectives with three in the center line between the players and then ignoring all cards that reference to objective 4-6 could make it work. Or that the player can skip one card extra and draw one card extra each turn they don’t score beside the first turn.
*I’m still feeling that allies hasn’t brought anything fun to the game at all in tournaments. Not a single thing. Taudar might be gone but people will not suddenly start taking something that is fun and cool as allies still. Just the new shiny best.
*Psychic powers…what are they thinking?
*Moving into close combat. Still really bad rules for moving through terrain. Why not just decide if the unit is slowed down by the closest model for the first model you move? Then you don’t end up moving 20 models with no 21 being forced to move through diff and then you have to re-move all models….
*I liked the new shooting rules with using different ranges on different weapons when you actually roll for them. Not having a bolt pistol using the range of a missile launcher.
*Still not area terrain blocking LOS. As a matter of fact, they feel like they are more moving away from the single best rule 40k has ever had: area terrain blocks LOS. So we will still have a majority of the battlefields being a parking lot without capabilities to hide. Invisibility is a good example (as well as many other stupid rules like snap fire and monsters falling down) are a proof that they don’t expect people to use good enough terrain.
As posted, I didn’t like 6:th, found DZC which has good rules, LOS blocking terrain so movement is important and rules that I actually can teach someone. 40k is just to extremely complex without any point.
Some whining…sorry. Good write down, Reece.
No worries, dude. A lot of people are frustrated right now, it’s understandable.
DzC is an awesome game, I agree. we have a ton of people jumping ship over to it, right now.
You make good points though and I tend to agree with a lot of what you said.
lets just take the best parts of 6th and 7th and throw out the rest. no psychic phase, no daemonology or malefic, no come the apoc, no stupid cards. invisibilitiy back to 6th edition invisi. and no 2 up rerolls just cause it op.
Yeah, we’ll make it work. It is just going to take some doing!
That’s sort of what I was thinking. Adopt 7th main ruleset but stick with 6th psychic rules.
its in our hands now to create something useable cause this is just crapbaskets. I love this game and they ruined it. I had so much fun w 6th edition despite everyones complaints there was a huge variety of tournament winning builds.
I’ve already begun selling off my 40K stuff on Ebay. No, seriously.
This might seem like a knee jerk reaction, but it’s not. As a competitive player, why stick around with a game that simply refuses to provide sensible rules and balance?
Can the community fix the issues? Perhaps so. But here’s the point. I can’t play the game out of the box! Well… I can play it… but it’s broken. I have no idea what is going to become canon amongst tournaments… if consensus is even possible.
Can anyone imagine spending $75 on Settlers of Catan or Monopoly only to find out that the game is inherently unbalanced? Can you imagine the community of Monopoly players saying, “Yeah, the game is pretty much unplayable as is… but we can probably fix it.”
If it doesn’t work right out of the box, then it’s bad.
If we have to fundamentally alter different aspects of the game, then why not just go ahead and re-write the codexes? I mean really, just give me a shot. I could write a great Nid codex. Reecius, you could certainly out shine anything created by GW. Many of us could.
Sorry to be a downer. It’s just ridiculous.
Yeah, consensus is going to be difficult to reach, but luckily we already have a coalition going of tournaments who are on the same page. Hopefully we can get everyone moving in the right direction and create the game we want to play.
If you are switching games though, I recommend DzC or Warmahordes. They are excellent tournament game systems.
That sounds awesome. Our 40K pick-up games are always much more fun when we’re playing with tournament rules, instead of GW RAW. I can’t wait to see the first set of 7th edition rules agreed upon by the tourney coalition. The more fixes, the better IMO – it creates greater variety in the armies. For simplicity, of course, I can see why we don’t throw in ALL the helpful rules changes that players come up with…but it would be cool if FLG one day made (sold?) a ruleset/FAQ with every suggestion that Frontline has been giving to increase balance (rules like giving CSM ATSKNF, for instance). A complete “how I’d fix 40K” guide.
I appreciate the kind response, Reecius. Right now Hearthstone has my attention. But yeah, if DZC gains traction, I’ll definitely check it out!
Part of me wants to leave because I know it is going to get stupid. Ohwell. I guess I will only be plaing at FLG and tournaments now
Infinity is awesome, too, though it has a bit of a steep learning curve. You’ll run into a lot of things you’ll think are broken, until you figure out how to counter it.
Infinity is a lot of fun. I am still trying to get past the Rambo rule mechanic as it feels broken but I have been told as you get better at the game it ceases to become very useful.
I agree. The game has entered the final countdown. I have been on the fence for most of 6th, and Reece said it best,”If you disliked 6th you’re going to hate 7th.”
The game is broken and horrible and I hate GW for what they are doing to a game system I am so heavily invested in that I cannot easily contemplate quitting.
The golden age of 40k is over.
I feel you, man. All the TOs are already talking to each other from around the world. We are all seeing the same problems and I think we will fix a lot of them for organized play.
I hope you can fix it enough so it just isnt a mess, I think just a fe twerks and it is finw
God this sucks. I have s much money in this game, I dont want it to go all to waste
I’m not of the opinion that capping the warp charge count
will be the best solution. I’d rather recommend to make
denying enemy powers more costly by letting take up
warp charges generated in one’s own psychic phase.
Thus any warp charge heavy army will still have to give
up a good Portion of its power to shut down the entire
psychic phase of a psychically inferior enemy. You would have to
think about whether to sacrifice warp charges to shut down a
power on 5 or even 6 plus or just casting one on 4 plus.
A psychically muted player would still benefit from his psykers
indirectly, especially when he uses lots of blessings.
Equally I don’t think banning powers or even whole disciplins
from the game is a good Option either. It takes away options
that seem great fun and can also be very fluffy when used
correctly. If something seems overpowered, just up its warp
charge cost to balance it out again. Then if you don’t want
non chaotic factions to summon deamons, just make perils
cumulative. People will think twice about throwing seven dice
at demonology when this probably means that they outright kill
their own model.
I don’t know if that is a solution due to the fact that if one player has 40 warp charge and the other 6, and you only generate once per turn, you still have a huge inequity. It does limit the amount of powers you will get off, but it doesn’t solve the problem, it mitigates it. I like the principal though, you are on the right track.
A possible solution to the psychic mega dice pool is to limit the ability to only add a matching amount. Roll a three, you can only add another three. Keep it simple. Some bonus for having psychers but it does not overpower. It also limits casting the high cost powers.
As far as summoning/conjuring, one use per psycher per game. For some armies that can build up, but the dice pool will also limit it.
Or consider summoning/conjuring a power being cast at your opponent, so their deny the witch roll odds improve. The “defender” gets to pick which model makes the roll. This will help for some armies.
Whatever, it should be simple.
Limiting warp charges is equivalent to limiting the number of weapons a side can shoot. Sorry, you already fired your 10 bolsters, no melts for you.
Getting a single power off is much more difficult, and dangerous. The only real imbalance is deamonology summoning, which I would limit to 1 use a turn, and being able to DtW any power. I would also limit the number of open DtW to 1, so that army with a couple of psychers don’t get overly hosed.
No it isnt, Limiting warpcharges allows the opposing player to get powers actually off
i feel sorry for you guys, as the ones we look to for guidance. how do you gently fix this game without getting too complicated. you, the T.O’s are the unpaid “damage control” they just handed you a mess. how do you even play a pickup game with this? (that being said i do like a lot of it, i wanted to go crazy, but they went even further)
We’ll be OK, it’s just annoying to handed something that is so incredibly out of balance.
I really think it’s far to early to call it “completely out of balance.”
Come on, Adam, he called it, “INCREDIBLY out of balance” [my emphasis]. You know, ‘unbelievably’ out of balance. 🙂
Do you really need to play a 40 warp charge army 10 times to realize it is dumb? =)
I packed up my armies today after a long night with the new book. I’ll keep painting models (I do love to paint.) however, 40k is going on the shelf for the forseeable future. It’s just not a fun game for me. I do LoL at the 4000 points of demons. They fixed little and seem to have made the game worse. Amazing.
Ive only got a single game in but I found the changes to be exciting and super fun.
Psychic phase-super fun…could it be abused im sure it can be not sure how the best to fix it…I think its fine structure wise…a cap that is super low is stupid because it just makes psykers aweful as a whole…it should be a risk reward operation…you can throw your dice but you may just perils and die…im guessing the part that really upsets this is simply brotherhoods as they dont die so easily to a perils…also maybe everyone should perils on doubles no matter the army as a potential fix for deamon shenanigans
The card missions I think are great. Can you get things that arent doable? sure, but you can use things like scriers gaze and the new warlord traits to help alleviate the issue. Ultimately your army needs to be rounded enough take on a variety of situations. Can you draw a bad hand to start? maybe…and that might just start you off bad but you can still work to prevent your opponent from scoring points. Perhaps a tourny solution would be to allow one mulligan for free…maybe more at some cost like VPs to your opponent or something. The game my friend and I played was very dynamic and was a ton of fun using these.
The other issue you list is unbound issues…the rules state you need to agree to restrictions and army selection type…boom, problem solved dont allow unbound and if you really think ally shenanigans are stupid or such then limit force selections as you suggested and already have been doing.
For friendly games most of these issues arent very apparent as its friendly and not bent on waac or trying to win for prizes etc.
my 2 cents
Also…sorry about the poor grammar on the first post…I was on my phone and eating dinner.
Anyways…
I like [/slight sarcasm] how people are complaining or upset about deny the witch when we gained the ability to actually stop any power! Is it hard? You bet! You argue/state that a player could throw 20 powers at a power…well first they definitely (within all reason) periled. Second…great they wasted all that dice on 1 power. One unit…could be a deathstar…well that’s where the missions come in. You don’t need to destroy everything, certainly a good thing still to do but its really all about finding alternative ways to win. If this still isn’t the answer you are looking for then perhaps you need to change how perils work. If the risk isn’t enough for you then have it work such that all 6’s beyond the first rolled cause a perils. For example: I roll 12 dice for a single WC3 power…I rolled four ‘6s’, 3 5’s, 3 3’s. I passed the test, but I also roll on the perils table 3 times because I rolled 2 additional 6’s past the initial perils. Certainly would up the risk for spamming dice at a power.
Or maybe for every set of perils (requiring 2,4,6,8, etc 6’s to perils multiple times on one power).
Another option, would be make any perils cause the power to fail…there also goes WC spam on a single power.
Any of these changes goes towards fixing the issue if you really have a problem with it. Some of the powers are ridiculous…invisibility was awesome on my TH/SS termies today cast by Loth…since he can choose the powers muhahaha. The nice part about these changes is that all it does is equal out more of the risk/reward issues without changing the powers or overall way the psychic phase works.
I think tactical objectives are a good idea, just that they’re not well improved. Maybe if you limit the results to d36 instead of d66, and if you don’t allow to deploy them less than 6 inches away from any deployment zone, in the mid range of the table, or if you don’t allow them in a deploy zone, and start to generate them when hitting turn 2.
The main problem with them is with results 41 to 66, because of the randomness. I specially hate number 41, is really annoying…
Half the tactical objectives are based on controlling objective as it is, the other half are a variety of different tasks. That’s already a pretty huge emphasis on grabbing objectives. Also, at the end of every turn you can discard an objective card. It’s not like you’re playing these games with a single card at most times, the missions are usually played with 3 or more cards. I think the game is going to require a lot more playing before you can just call it broken. Is it different? Absolutely, but at this point there is no way anyone has played enough games with the new rules to be able to call the changes broken.
Weren’t you all for Super Heavies being in the game until you got clobbered by a Revenant Titan? I feel you really need to go against some of the ridiculous builds that are now legal before you stop apologizing for GW’s terrible rules writing.
Nope I was all for super heavies even after losing a game against a Revenant. 🙂
My problem is i can’t even go play at my flg anymore, because the game is so bad that everyone feels they have to house rule it, and they’re right, but everyone wants to do it differently. Seems to me the only place you can play this game is at a big tournament, who has the infrastructure to put clearly defined rules out there for people to learn. Trying to play with anyone else just doesn’t work around here. My FLG just doesn’t have the communication skills to make a playable game out of 40k.
I know Im going to ask before each game “Do you mind if do no unbound and no summoning deamons?”
Throne of Skulls at Warhammer World UK will run there tornaments as follows:
The points values for armies shall remain the same (1,500). We will be using the ‘Battle Forged’ rules to select armies, from page 117 of the rulebook. You can only take the “Combined Arms” Detachment on page 122 once at a Throne of Skulls event. There will be no other changes to the standard Battle-Forged rules. We will be using the Eternal War missions as stated in the Events Pack. – See more at: http://warhammerworld.games-workshop.com/2014/05/24/new-warhammer-40000-rules-and-our-events-in-2014/#sthash.mcGy7yz0.dpuf
There we go, They are not allowing unbound armies
Hey Reece, I am confused as to why you think Leman Russ and Monolith’s are “hamstrung”. Both of those vehicles are Heavy, and page 88 says Heavy Vehicles can only ever move at Combat speed and for the purposes of firing weapons are always treated as being stationary. I interpret this as those vehicles can only move 6″ and fire ALL of their weapons at full BS. Am I wrong?
it s the ordnance weapon rule that hamstrings them
But I am a heavy vehicle, I shoot everything as if I was stationary. Seems to contradict.
The reason I point this out, is because the Ordnance rule on page 73 is referring to “Moving And Shooting With Vehicles”. It also seems to infer that you are moving the vehicle that shot the Ordnance weapon.
Yeah actually I asked a question to FW last edition and they responded pointing out that those rules are referring specifically to moving and firing ordnance. Not that it makes it official, but at least it’s an answer.
I would be very happy to be wrong on that one!
Thanks for the look-over of the book, some interesting things although unbound seems totally crazy!! Love the movie reference btw 🙂
I don’t think you can cap warp charge. I need the warp charge to shoot as a daemon player. I need the warp charge to cast the powers that keep me alive because no one is proposing any restrictions on Astra Militarum putting out unholy amounts of shooting, or loading up on Wyverns and eliminating a unit per turn.
Did you notice barrage is no longer blocked by ruins at all now? You can’t hide from barrage weapons anymore. You’ll need to house rule that back in and make sure all ruins have ample ceilings to hide under because we’ve both seen what three Wyverns can do.
Invisibility is indeed broken, but I need some way of realistically surviving that because those things are completely busted. If you ban invisibility, you cripple my survivability against AM and Eldar because cover won’t work, I can’t hide very easily if at all. So I need Invis or a 2+ rerollable until I can get across the board and take the stupid Wyvern out.
There are serious balance issues with the game right now. Serpents score uncontestably and are hard as hell to remove, and my Chaos army no longer has any way to kill even a single Imperial Knight short of a lucky turn with Be’lakor.
I agree on not capping Warp Charges. We had a guy at the FLGS today running Daemons and he had about 20 ML points before the roll. He brought Horrors and attempted a WC3 Flickering Flame. He threw 7 dice and rolled four 6’s. Sure it went of, but Perils is a great balancer for the Psy Phase now. When he rolled on the table he took a wound (big deal on 15+ Horrors), but he rolled a “deuce” which took away that power for the rest of the game (he had already lost his Summoning Power from a previous Perils roll I guess). Bam! That unit is now worthless.
There were at least two turns today I wasn’t able to get Catalyst off with my bugs, because I would roll 3 dice and failed to get one 4+. There was also one time I threw four dice, got one success and my opponent was able to roll one 6. So, honestly I don’t think Warp Charge caps are the answer either.
Who cares if you lose a model when you summon then more? Perils is a big risk, but the payoff is massive in comparison.
Did you not read what rolling a 2 does on the Perils table? You lose the power for the rest of the game.
Sure, a random power. That only happens if you roll a 2, also, which isn’t sure to happen. That is a rare occurrence.
What I think will be a rare occurrence is someone not getting Perils when they have to throw 6 or more dice to get a successful WC3 power off.
I should rephrase to include failing the roll as well.
Well, you should only roll one 6 for every six dice you cast, so no, it isn’t uncommon to avoid perils on 6 dice at all, really.
You need to try it with a true psyker spam, with over 30 warp charge. It’s cray, we have summoned as many as 60 daemons in a turn.
Well then you need to ban malefic and invisibility since that’s what’s broken because if you cap warp charge, you’re telling me I can’t use my powers but. I have to spend six warp charge and risk a perils plus the chance to deny just to shoot 4d6 heavy bolter shots and capping warp charge takes even that from me.
Or ban horrors from going malefic.
Reece, you are telling us you got 60 daemons in one turn, and no one periled or failed? What was the exact result? You have to throw 6 or more dice (statistically) to be successful with Summoning, and basically you are saying with 30 WC’s you were successful each time How?. Something doesn’t seem right here.
I think they should errata that Psykers can only cast powers equal to or less than their ML, like it was in the previous edition. That would mitigate the summoning shenanigans of a 10 man Pink Horror squad.
With the Changes to str D and stomp would maulerfiends with tentacles have a chance against knights? The knight drops to 1 attack and the fiends have 3(4 on the charge) and for one turn can re-roll armor penetration. They also get saves unless the knight rolls a 6. This is in addition to being able to buy 3 fiends per knight.
I vote for ditching book missions. It was nice when missions were decent in 5th, it was ok in 6th where the missions were functional, but I see no reason to get caught up on trying to force nonfunctional missions to work.
People are forgetting Eternal War Missions still exist for some odd reson
Everyone wants to try Malestrom missions.
I know, but alot of people are forgetting that they are not the only ones.
I really think this is a great edition with some simple tweaking
Set detachment limits
Set psychic limits
Use the 2+/4+ limit
No CtA allies
There you go. So 4 entire sentences in a tournament pack and a list of acceptable units if you’re doing either IA or Apoc allowances. I really think at the RTT level its gonna pretty easy/fun in 7th ed world.
At the LVO/BAO level? well I’m glad you guys get to tackle ones like that not me. God Bless you
For Deny the Witch you could have the denying player use a psyker to try and deny. With a roll of double 1 the denying psyker suffers a perils. If you make it that the closest psyker is the one that has to deny then it’s also harder for them to spam sacrificial lamb psykers.
Not suggesting that armies without psykers can’t deny though they can still try.
How does that make sense? Capping makes the most sense. I say 13 cap, you can get your powers off you desperatly need that turn. Psychic powers should never be “Oh, I got this and this and this” They are perilous things that must be a lst resort
True, but some armies (Tzeentch Daemons, Thousand Sons) literally are required to use Psychic for their shooting and damage output. Capping dice hurts the legitimate use of WC for these purposes. Maybe the cap should be placed on Blessings/Conjurations? So, like you could only ever use 10 dice on Summoning a turn, for example.
Or 10 dice max on any one particular category of Psychic power. So no more than 10 can be spent on Blessings, or Conjurations, or Psychic Shooting, etc.
Arent Deamons supposed to be Melee anyway? So you can get a few of your shots off and be good. but not as many as before
Please consider including allowing an allied detachment of your own codex in point 2 of your Solutions. If armies with supplements can do it and other armies cannot, then that creates an inherent imbalance even with the special restrictions placed on the supplements.
You cannot have an Allied Detachment from the same Faction as your Primary Detachment – Supplements count as the same Faction as their parent codex. So you can’t actually ally with supplements anyway by the rules.
*with supplements for your codex anyway
With the Malefic powers, how about this for a tourney rule… can only activate each one once? Doesn’t ban something core to the game, but still keeps it in sane zones. Combine this with a Warp Charge cap of 15 or so, and a lot of the troubles go away.
For the mission cards… just make the rule that its open cards and may discard one/draw one each time you begin your player turn.
I agree with limiting the Warp Charge count but it has to be done carefully. I don’t think a hard cap on how many warp charge a side can have would make sense as it would unfairly gimp some army builds. Here are a couple ideas for how to do it.
1. Like Fantasy. In Fantasy you get to roll for each caster and on a 6 you get another magic dice. I think that you could make it so that in stead of auto generating a dice for each mastery level you instead roll a dice for each mastery level and on a 4+ that is how many you have.
2. You could instead of limiting how many dice a side has instead limit how many dice a caster can use to either cast a single spell. I.e. you could make it so that a caster can only use as many dice on a single spell equal to his caster level+2. That would make the stronger spells that are more warp charge less likely to go off without hurting the lower level casters. It would also make high level casters important as well.
3. Limit how many warp charge dice a caster can use in total for casting spells. Maybe mastery level * 2 is how many dice a caster can use to cast a power. For example a farseer at ML3 would only be able to to use up to 6 dice to cast any powers it wants to cast.
4. Make it so that each psyker has his own pool of warp dice that can’t be used by another psyker. If this is done I would have the dice roll of warp charge be distributed to any psyker at the players discretion. It would not limit the number of dice a side can have but you would not be able to feed psykers warp charge by bringing a bunch of chump psykers.
Anyway just a few ideas and food for thought. I agree that the summoning thing is over the top insane. It doesn’t take a lot to create an overpowered list when you can create units the whole game.
What if, So Teenzcth can still get a good amount of their shooting, we cap how many you can use for defence and how many for casting. How about 17-20 for casting 10-12 for defensive?
If you go the cap route (or in this case rout) KISS. Hard cap, set it at that. If the cap thing gets introduced ASAP, then the whine of invalidating builds and stuff gets cut off at the pass.
Always easier on the community to lift a restriction than put a new one down. If the GTs with 7th all start with caps on warp charge, the tourney meta will build up around that and all’s good (IMO)
I’m not too sure if I agree with your analysis of psychic powers. While yes, psyker armies have a lot of dice, it actually takes a whopping 4 dice to cast a Warp Charge 1 power with close to the same reliability as last edition (assuming Ld10). Once you factor in WC 2/3 powers it double and triples the number of dice to be equally as reliable. What that means now is that an army with 40 warp warp charge can only manifest 10 WC powers as reliable as before, but takes far more points worth of psykers. When you factor in the significantly higher chance to Perils, I really feel like you’re blowing out of proportion what a psyker heavy army can accomplish.
I couldn’t agree with you more Dude! I think Reese’s example of 60 daemons in a turn was an anomaly. How they got away with not one failure on 30-36 dice (assuming they rolled between 5-6 per cast) is just some super hot dice rolling; which is fleeting as we all know. There is no way that is going to happen EVERY turn, statistically it is impossible. Also, I really feel that GW will errata the rules regarding casting powers equal to or less than your ML, so summoned 10 man Pink Horrors won’t be automatic Pink Horror factories.
Plus, no one is going to just stack up on Psykers, because that is just friggin’ stupid, boring, and probably not a winning formula. TO’s will limit the number of detachments for FoC, so there is no worry for WC shenanigans IMHO.
I agree that Invisibility is broken, and I don’t know what they were think with that. However, besides the likes of Be’Lakor and Sevrin Loth, everyone else that has access to it will have a 1/6 chance.
Sorry, meant to say everyone else will have a 17-33% chance of getting it depending on their Psykers ML.
Dang it! 17-50%, LOL!
And that psyker heavy army he brought went first in a heavy cover table. If that army had gone second against tau or eldar with good LOS, he would have lost minimum half his MLs first turn, because tzeentch daemons are like wet cardboard without the grimoire and powers. That list is like wave serpent spam, or screamerstar (except way more random). It’s irritating, frustrating to play against, but nowhere near unbeatable, and unfortunately its part of the game.
I agree with Adam here. What are you doing wrong?
Remember that a unit can’t use the same power twice. 4 heralds all with summon in a unit of screamers can only attempt on of each summon.
Heralds have two wounds and ld7. They will perils a lot. That table is unforgiving, especially on models with horrible leadership.
Lastly, save your Deny pool for that critical power. If you’ve got a collection of dice there… You can do it!
With 30 dice, mathematically, you should only be getting 2 summons a turn, and not be casting anything else.
Jervis Jhonson needs to be fired. He has been the head of GW’s rule department since 5th ed. GW continues to shed market share. 7th seems to me to be the worst edition yet.
This guy needs to go. He is just awful at his job.
As always your front line gaming guys do a fantastic job. Its a shame you have to try and work with the crap this ass clown is churning out.
Why do you even read about the game if it makes you feel this bitter?
I’m sure psyker spam is bad. but like has been pointed out through out the analysis. 2++ is crappy, invisibility is crappy, tank spam is crappy, wave serpent spam is crappy.
7th is the edition of ALL THE BROKEN THINGS!!!
but hey we’ll ban daemons. *sigh*
Jervis and a dude named Andy Chambers STARTED warhammer. the scratch built the first units. The firsrt land speeder was a deodorant tube with the windshield from a model car. They created Rogue Trader. Before you “fire” him, know who he is.
Sorry, my “reply” was posted to merctioh by mistake. It was intended to be a reply to Dres’s posting just above.
Just to clarify, Jervis Johnson and Andy Chambers had nothing to do with the start of Warhammer. They didn’t even work for Games Workshop then.
Warhammer (and 40k) was mainly the creation of Rick Priestly, Brian Ansell and Richard Halliwell.
Jervis Johnson came to GW just before the time of Second Edition and his first works were mainly Adeptus Titanicus, Space Marine and Man O War.
Andy Chambers joined GW just prior to Third Edition and, by that time, most of the rules had already been penned by Rick Priestly.
Just to clarify, Jervis Johnson and Andy Chambers had nothing to do with the start of Warhammer. They didn’t even work for Games Workshop then.
Warhammer was mainly the creation of Rick Priestly, Brian Ansell, Graham Eckell and Richard Halliwell.
Warhammer 40k (specifically the edition you are referring to) was mainly penned by Rick Priestly (the one with the deodorant bottle and plastic spoon).
Jervis Johnson came to GW just before the time of Second Edition and his first works were mainly Adeptus Titanicus, Space Marine, Man O War and, fo course, the infamous Blood Bowl.
Andy Chambers joined GW just prior to Second Edition 40k and that was his first work on the 40k universe.
Please read the book on your own at least twice. You will notice that the post above has so many errors, that it’s not even funny.
All people need to calm down and read and understand all the rules in entirety before starting the lynch mob.
Hey, sorry if its been covered but a relic cant be passed to a drop pod, only to another non-vehicle scoring unit 🙂
Given what the reveiw seems to say… this may be my solution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=NHWjlCaIrQo#t=197
Following the fluff, warp energies are not an endless supply in the material world. Sure it may be potent on daemon world but still warp creature are unstable because of that very limitation.
Game wise, you can limit number of dice rolled per psycher but 36 dice a turn will still overcome any dice pool on the other side. I like the idea of caping the available warp “energies” per turn. Not sure what’s the magic number yet though.
You still get to have loads of powers to choose from and clearly will dominate the psychic phase however:
1. An opponent will still have a chance of denying that one power he really doesn’t want you to use at the cost of letting the other 3-4 go
2. This is more pragmatic… Psychic phase won’t last hours!
3. The cap can be decided each game to reflect the “warpness” of the location the battle takes place on.
On the bright side… Banshees in venom can now charge out of the transport! 😉
Down with daemons! Lynch Daemon players! Hang them high! Damn, that sucks. As a daemon player, I am now the symbol of OP, OTT and Ubberness tenfold. I am in favor of Warp Charge limits. I am in favor of capping the number of summoned units. I am in favor of banning Unbound in organized play. I am in favor of a fair standardized FoC to be used in organized play. There are asses in every group of people. There are those that will abuse any and every rule possible. There are those that stake their egos on the results of their games. That is the truth if it. I choose to NOT allow those people to rule and/or ruin my beloved hobby.
I wish invisibility just made everyone bs1 when being fired upon. Still hurts blasts but doesn’t completely negate them. Knights literally have no chance against daemons. Flyers are immune as are any unit that can get invisibility.
For missions a gentleman’s agreement to discard/draw another card the ones that CANNOT be completed whilst hard ones still stay in play.
I’ll try different solutions on the main issues and probably will post batreps to illustrate.
Thanks to the frontliners for the cool insight so quick after release.
Locally we’ve done an escalation game organised by the nearby GW store till midnight on Friday and bury the 6th edition. Not too much of an escalation player but once in a while and for the event it’ has its charms.
Cheers
Read the new edition and got my first game in.
1. I agree limiting mastery levels to 12 sounds right. Also I would say that armies with more mastery levela would stay at there max warp charges iinspite of losses. Lost a mastery 2 herald, well I have 2 more so I still have my 12 charges. For psychic brotherhood units perhaps saying they don’t add to the pool and there power is based off of a leadership test, if they fail they take a wound. Similar to 6th ed, but I don’t think Greg knight and deamon players need penalized for taking troops.
2. Malific needs reigned in a bit. Cap the number of summoned units based on the total units the army had to start with? So if you have 10 units you can only summon 20% or whatever the number of your original unit total.
3. Random objectives…not sure but not a fan so far. I was getting beat pretty roughly by my friends flying circus. However I got luckier rolls on the random objectives so I won the game 5-1. Had nothing to do with tactics, lists, or even dice. Just seems a bit wonky.
4. Unbound is just silly…no.
5. Limit X++ rerollables to X+ FNP. 2++/4++ is still statistically insignificant. Its like saying your odds of winning the lottery change meaningfully if you buy two tickets instead of one. All this does is fool the people who are bad at math into thinking they actually have a shot when they really don’t.
Now off to read the rules again and play more games tomorrow ☺
I’m not at all sold on this warp charge capping thing. It might be a simple solution, but I think there are better ways to do so. For instance, one could emphasize the perilous nature of psionics just by making psykers test on their leadership before rolling the warp charge dice to get the power off. But only when the dice used in the psy test exceed their mastery level by two or more. For any further dice used in the test, a penalty of one is put on top of that test symbolizing the psyker’s fear for the uncontrollable Powers of the warp. If the test is failed the psyker did not dare to risk his soul and all of the warp charges that have been assigned to him are lost.
How about each successful dispel dice cancels a single successfully generated warp charge point, and you can not roll more dispel dice than there were dice rolled in the attempt to cast the power.
That will mean you’ll want to be casting with more dice to ensure those big powers go off successfully which increases the chance of perils. But at the same time it also means low warp charge armies can still cast with reasonable chances against an army with overwhelming numbers of dice
Then also allow a chance dispel each power with one dice even once your out of dice in your warp charge pool.
Along with that do as others have suggested and limit the number of summoned units allowed and You have balanced things pretty well I think.
I think you are pretty close to a solution there – don’t limit the total dice in the pool as this penalises psychic armies too much – and as noted above the chances to manifest powers actually require quite a lot of dice to have anything like the chances with the old test being on leadership.
Then limit the amount of dice to attempt to ML*2. This gives some chance to deny at least one spell. Then use the same limit to deny so a weak side doesn’t get shut down every turn trying to manifest 1 or two powers
Also consider this could end up being more lopsided for witchfires and maledictions since the non psychic side would quickly run out of dice to even attempt it.
maybe allow a minimum of 1 dice for a deny attempt even if your pool is empty
In your “BAD” part of the post there are lot of thing, which are wrong. You should re-read this part of the book and edit then.
For example it is NOT possible to take 2 FOCs of the same faction and therefore you can’t take 6 helldrakes/ wraithknights in your bound armies.
Also you should point out, that you can of course use Eldrad with Skarbrand, the Swarmlord and Draigo in an unbound army, but they can’t help eachother with Psi or other things. At the start of the game, you would even have to put them in 12″ distance to each other and throw a dice, if they are in 6″ at the start of their movement phases.
You can take multiple primary FOCs, so yes, you can take 6 Drakes, or Wraithknights, etc.
You are wrong. You can only have one ( 1 ) primary FOC and that’s the one your warlord is in. The secondary FOC must be of another faction. I would like to give you the right quotes from the BRB, but i’m not using the english one, so i can’t.
From page 120: “You can take *any number and type* of Detachments in a Battle-forged army”
While yes, you have to choose one of your combined arms detachments to be the “primary,” you can still take additional combined arms detachments, and there is no rule saying that additional combined arms detachments have to be a different faction. The only rule there is that allied detachments have to be a different faction from your primary detachment, but a 2nd combined arms detachment is *not* an allied detachment.
Every time i read this post i find more errors. Why would a Leman Russ have no reason to take sponson weapons ??? There are lots of Leman Russ varaints in the Astra Militarum, which don’t have any Ordonance weapons, so they can shoot without a problem. The Leman Russ Punisher for example can shoot 29x S5 shots with heavy bolter sponsons ( and heavy bolter in front ). The Leman Russ Executioner can even shoot its 3 S7 AP2 3″ blasts and then go on with its two sidesponson plasma cannons.
Any unit with Ordnance Weapons can only snap fire other weapons, and I said Leman Russ, so no, there were no errors there.
Yes, you can take them on Punishers, sure, but that was not my point. My point was that iconic units in the game can’t even fire some weapons they can take which is clearly silly.
Your point was [QUOTE]So, yet again, Leman Russes have no reason at all to take Sponson Weapons[/QUOTE]
That clearly is WRONG !!!
Leman Russ HAVE a reason to take sponson weapons. You just have no reason to take a sponson weapon, IF !!!! you choose a Leman Russ with battle cannon.
That clearly makes a big difference.
First of all… I’m not a native English man, so this isn’t my own lenguage. Excuses for my grammar mistakes from advance.
After reading the rulebook and surfing the whole web… I fil this comunnity, 40k players, is awesome. We just need 24 hours to find some big isues… how dare GW workers call himself professionals? The real professionals here are the players. We read the whole book and easy find the isues it got, the unbalance and so on. How is it even possible for the GW guys to make some big, and evident, mistakes?
I’m pretty glad than, also, we just need some hours to make some propositions that actually fix the game. I guess it is the good thing, maybe the only one, than 6th edition leaves to us: we know now than we HAVE to change the game. GW isn’t going to do a good job, so we need to take some ideas in comon with all the community and move on. We need to change the game, we need to talk with each other and see what is going on with all the 40k stuff. If we don’t create houserules who make the game enjoyable, it wouldn’t be a fun game.
I guess it wouldn’t fix the whole malefic trouble… but have you minded to exchange the primaris with one of the two wichfire powers of the table? Certainly it wouldn’t make life so much easy, a lvl3 psi will got some of the conjuration powers… but he will need to spend their powers in daemonology. I don’t know… some simply idea.
Going to some more complex idea, I feel the way we need to work isn’t actually to cap the total of warp charges. I feel more fine with the idea of limiting the warp charges generated by the psikers to this particular psiker itself. Working this way it gets extremly difficult to cast more than one conjuration (we got 1d6 to increase the amount of dices a particular psiker could spend… if a 4 was rolled and you want to summon deamons wit 6 dices with a lvl3 tzeerald, you just got 1 single dice to add to any other psiker in your army).
We could also work in that way with the deny the witch isue… the dices generated for some defending psiker could just be used to dispel powers who target them or powers being cast 12″ from them. It is obvious than if you have more psikers than your enemy you have something in your favor, but 2 hided in the corner tzeeralds wouldn’t help you so much to dispel the power. Just some ideas to keep moving on.
I won’t even want to enter to the unbound army list, or even in the unlimmited force chart. I think no one are going to play this kind of games, other than for some fun-beer-chips game. I deffinetly wana try some unbound army: the chaos avengers (Abadon, Typhus, Huron, Ahriman, Kharn, Lucius, Fabius) vs an endless swarm of gaunts and tiranid warriors… but I think it is something than I can have made whenever I want.
Well… keep on the good work, excuse my grammar and we keep reading.
The answer for the psychic phase is to only allow the psyker to cast spells that cost equal or less warp charge to activate than their mastery level.
So need mastery lvl 2 to cast invisibility or lvl 3 to summon.
This way the really expensive caster can still do their thing with the new tools, but the cheapo psyker spammers can’t just summon 1000 more.
I also really like the idea of having perils also happen if you roll 3 or more 6’s when attempting to deny the witch.
There has to be some risk to slinging all that charge around.
How do “cheap psyker spammers just 1000 more” ?? Please enlighten me.
You need to throw at least 3 times a 4+ to cast these powers.
That means to have a decent change of success you will have to throw 6 dice to cast. Throwing 6 dice also means that you have a good chance to get perils and a dead psyker.
Why not just limit the dice that can be used per spell/dispel, Fantasy limits you to 6 dice and add modifiers for DTW like adamantium will/psychic hood. This plus banning malefic fixes the game. Alternatively you can change it so that only one unit of each type of malefic summoning spell can be on the table at a time (one greater daemon, 1 squad of 10, 1 squad of 3). If one dies you can re-summon it, but it stops the daemon player from flooding the board.
Seems like pretty good adjustions for tournament play. I would also suggest borrowing the “only one of each power” from fantasy. At least for Malefic so there’s only one summon per turn.
It’s already in the rulebook, that you may only cast each power once per turn.
Sorry, my fault. Only once per psyker ( which has this power ) per turn.
Exactly. And that’s not good enough 🙂
Not exactly, a unit can only cast one power per turn.
If they are n different units, then you can cast them twice.
You could also adjust the come the apocalypse rules rule more than just not deploying close together. In sixth I would play with kids that wanted to use their Orks AND their dark angels, so we’d play with a modified version of CTA where if units from either army came within twelve inches they HAD to shoot at and assault each other if possible.
For the small tournaments we have here in Fort Myers, I will recommend the following:
1) No Unbound armies permitted
2) Up to 2 Combined Arms detachments and 1 Allied detachment may be taken.
3) 1 Formation may be used, but it counts as the Allied Detachment.
4) Come the Apocalypse factions may only be used in a single ALLIED Detachment. At all times whenever possible they must stay 12″ away from models in detachments treated as Come the Apocalypse.
(This way there would still be able to be some Traitor Guard. Yeah, you could take Black Legion and Dark Angels, but they can’t start near each other, and they certainly can’t help each other much. But if someone wants to play in a 1850 event, and wants to use their small box-set force, that should be allowed.)
5) 1 Lord of War and/or Fortification per army (not sure if those limitations are already present in Stronghold or Escalation, but thought it should be clear).
6) Any Perils result on a casting of a psychic power makes the power automatically fail to cast.
7) Only a single psyker in an army may take powers from any Discipline. Psykers that have rules saying they must take powers from different and/or specific Disciplines do not count towards this limit.
(so only one psyker in the army can take Malefic Daemonolgy, another can the Biomancy guy, another the Telepathy guy, so on….but Fateweaver still can take his required powers for example)
8) Warp Charges from one detachment may not be used by any other detachment other than a Battle Brothers detachment.
I think these would reign in the absurdity (good word for it).
Interesting points. I agree with some but I am still in favor of a flat cap. By limiting psychic disciplines you effectively create a warpnvharge cap but its different for each army.
As an example let’s take eldar who have access to four disciplines and the codex discipline let’s say they take a ML 3 for each discipline the armies WC cap is 15. Now we have deamons who have access to six disciplines and four codex disciplines (for the sake of argument let’s assume the same ML 3 and 1 per discipline); our deamons WC cap is 30.
It just seems more balanced and simpler to say cap 12 WC+d6 per army and allocate the as you please.
Well, I didn’t much care for 6th and 7th isn’t looking much better. It’s really just depressing, as I just love the setting and have a ridiculous collection.
10 WC dice? 15? 20? AND ban invisibility?
Remember that daemons have 3 shooting units (all in heavy support) and everything else is psychic shooting (other than slaanesh DPs who are also heavy support).
Daemons have real trouble doing any actual damage to the opponent. Sure, 20 hounds with heralds might do some damage if they’re invisible (which requires Be’Lakor or luck) or nurgle daemon princes (as they have 2+ cover in the open now) but other than that, not all that much.
Yesterday I played a 1250 game and got 16 WC dice, that turn I got 1 power of. Didn’t make the other ones. It’s very difficult to manifest powers now compared to before.
I also think it’s a little funny how you nag about 2+ rerollable. I’ve never had problems with those units, they don’t do any damage and the screamercouncil will do even less now that they cannot shoot as much. What is really the problem with this unit? Is it the very simple fact that Tau and Eldar don’t win automatically when shooting at it?
2+ rerollable is the way non-shooty armies survive, especially daemons who cannot shoot back.
Truthfully, I think it’s a little early to start restricting or banning things. If people just didn’t remove lords of war from the equation as soon as they read the words “lord of war” then they wouldn’t have as much problems with these things.
I think this psychic phase scare is way overblown. Witchfire, and psychic powers in general that weren’t runes of fate or divination, SUCKED in 6th edition. Now offensive psykers are actually useful, and people are terrified. With flying circus and wave serpent spam taking major nerfs, tzeentch summoning lists are just the new strong build that will be scary for about a week until people figure out how to beat them (shoot the grimoire bearer, then shoot everything else). Play some games before you decide to switch to DZC because the sky is falling.
How about this:
1.MLx2 is the maxium number of dice a single psycher can use to cast a power
2.DTW can only use a max number of dice to deny as the other player used to attempt to cast
This would limit cheap psycher spam from using super powers. DTW would be much less effective for super warp charge armies but at least the army with 1 librarian would have a good chance of getting his power to work.
2 detachments is a good idea and that already limits the warp pool by a little bit. Limiting warp charges overall doesn’t seem fair. The other player is paying for those in points just like you are paying for guns. On a psycher by psycher basis they are weaker already than in 6th ed. It takes twice as many warp charches to have better than a 50/50 shot at getting a power to work. This results in less powers cast, a lower chance of success and on 3 dice or more a much higher chance of perils. DTW stopping blessings is bonus that didn’t even exist in 6th. Overall this is a huge nerf. The problems show up when there is a big difference in mastery levels between the 2 armys and some powers like summoning are just too strong.
This is honestly the worst edition of 40k that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen them all from 2nd edition on. I have never felt the need to house rules any edition of 40k, no matter how many problems I saw with it, but I’m drawing up a list of house rules only two days after I purchased the game. So far my list looks as follows:
1. No Unbound lists.
2. No Malefic Daemonology.
3. One Combined Arms Detachment.
4. Up to one Allied Detachment.
5. No Come the Apocalypse Allies.
6. Only Eternal War missions.
I’m also working on how to limit the amount of power and dispel dice because, as you say, it’s absolutely ridiculous how some armies can get off pretty much any power they want while completely shutting down the other side. I don’t know how they did it, but GW took what was formerly one of the most fun aspects of the game for me and completely ruined it in every conceivable way.
Come to think about it, I’m starting to think that coming up with house rules is a colossal waste of time, and that I’d be better served just sticking to 6th edition.
Agreed so much with you but still not sure on capping dice… I like to think without malefic powers daemons and grey knights will keep the invisability seekers at bay.
I hate tourny Nerfs… It kills one broken thing and just replaces it with another and it usually just take the hard counters out of the game.
What’s the big deal with multiple formations and unlimited force org? It just gives more options to everyone. And honestly limiting dataslates just nerfs nids… the only abusive one is with Tau and everyone is going to be able to take it anyway.
And what if most imperium armies take INQ allies? They paid points for them. You kinda have too or expect to get curb stomped by infiltrating.
As for psychic power. I’m not really against armies with high casting either. You’ll just start seems more storm ravens, crossbows, pysculums and rune priests. 8 rune priests… Suck it.
Also, the tactical cards are great. Sure you can get stuck with some bad draws, but their are also a bunch of new ways to cycle through cards. It also is a big screw you to death star armies.
Things like fourtune / invisibility are just part of the game now. Hell Iyanden / dark eldar are all over it. But on the flip side, it’s not like spirit seers have ghost helms… It’s a lot of points and a lot of risk. Especially with rules like stop that just remove models.
Even with all those nerfs you are suggesting, I can still break the game…
I think with a more open force org, lords of war and crazy psychics everyone just needs to accept that their is more variety and the power level of the game has just gone up hugely.
There is no reason to try to make 7th like 6th…
“There is no reason to try to make 7th like 6th…”. < Except 7th seems to be more aptly described as 6.5. If this is the case, the proposed amendments (changes, etc.) are trying to make it an actual 7.0 rather than a 6.5 with a new psychic phase that smells like a turd right out of the box.
I think for our group it’s going to be putting more work into narrative gaming. That really seems like the only reasonable way forward with 40k.
Remove the Conjuration power all together. Any re-enforcing tactic that gives an edge for one player to break the confines of the points limit of the game is OP. Just disallow it.
Its been a while since I played fantasy but isn’t there irresistable force when dispelling too? And I believe if you fail a casting cost your phase is over. So could we not implement that into 40k? If something is rolled, say you get more dtw 6+s than the required amount you dispell with irresistable force and end the psychic phase. Or if you miscast on like double 1s then the psychic phase is over. This won’t need a cap on power dice as anyone could irresistable force you off with some luck and a decent pool size and if you cast the higher powers cuz you have more warp charges start higher to get them off and let the opponent decide when he will try to shut you down. It doesn’t nullify anything and requires some luck but gives equal defense potential that is tactical without losing offensive potential?
Only 38 power dice? Pssshhhttt! You guys weren’t even trying. I built one with 57, plus the d6 you roll every turn.
I read through many of the comments on this and thought for a while on what and how I would comment on this post to try and continue the discussion in a positive manor. On paper I think that many of the points brought up are accurate and insightful. I think reecius is intelligent and very insightful, especially when it comes to 40k and wargaming in general. That being said I have a feeling that we are all acting upon a knee jerk reaction to changes to our game. This is not uncommon among a player base as a reaction to changes made to a game, especially when they do not follow a predetermined path. I am not immune to its effects, my initial and continued thoughts are that this needs to be fixed, but their is a part of me that thinks I might be jumping to a predetermined conclusion. This happened to me when Lords of War came into the game but after, not only playing against them on several occasion, I saw the end results of throne of skulls where a drop pod blood angles list took the win over Lords and forgeworld models I started to question my gut reaction.
I played several games against lords with my tournament list and found that I could pull victory 50% of the time. This to me seemed to me to not be as unbalanced as I originally thought. or at least not a severally unbalanced as my gut told me it was. With 7th we see a taming of the lords and I think that it will be more balanced than it was.
No this seems of topic but it lends itself to my on topic point. WE don’t have enough playtest data to run out and start changing things. We may be rushing the gun a bit and need to truly test to find where actual problems are and fix those.
To me what needs to be done is to play tournament games in tournament settings to find out if there is a problem in the tournament scene. not pick up games or games against the same 2-3 friends in the basement, but actual tournament style settings. it is through this that we can find out what needs to be changed. no on on these comments including myself can say that he has never been wrong before, what if we are jumping the gun?
My proposal is to launch a series of tests across many of the ITC Stores to gather data to see where the problems lie and then analyse that data and come up with a solution. I am not saying that a solution is not needed but I don’t want to give in to a mob mentality without supporting data to back it up.
My hypothesis is that in a 1500 point tournament game with a balanced scenario that we will see various lists winning and not one all powerful list.
I do not feel we will find a balance at 1850 or 1750 or levels above this maybe we will but I think 1500 should be the start of the tests. This is where the game was playtested for in times past and this is the level that causes many people to think hard about what goes into there lists as not everything will fit. spam lists can be done at this level but they are narrower in function and this may cause pause when building for a tournament. I have built for many tournaments and points level and time limit really affect the way a list is built.
The second thing I think is needed is a balanced scenario that is used uniformly. This is so the data isn’t screwed by extreme luck and so on. This is something that I think is great about 7th they gave a mechanic that can add randomness to our games in a tournament format so the games do not become stale but at the same time we can use a single mission throughout the tourney to make the games themselves setup faster. The scenario I propose is a one with primary, secondary, tertiary goals. The primary is control the most objectives at the end of the game. with 6 objective markers on the the board. this is worth 4 points, the secondary objective is gaining the most points for the secondary objects first blood and so on. This is worth 3 points and the third is gaining the most vp from tactical objectives. Each player gets three face up and can redraw/roll any that impossible to score. this is worth 2 points. ties in any of these categories is worth 1 to each player. the last point is something I have always done in my tourneys and that is comp. each player is judged on the composition of his force as well as paint and given a 1-40 score. when you get to your table you compare your score with your opponents and the higher person gets the 1 point. doing this has made people think allot before doing a non-thematic/un-painted list as they are going into each game 1 point down if they go against it. It keeps the choice there but makes it harder to win, without making it impossible. In these games the deployment zones are 12″ from centerline 24″ apart and the objectives are place 6″ from centerline. these are evenly spaced from the table edges. This means the boards can be set pre-tourney and don’t have to change. it also means that objectives are in potential charge range of second player’s fast attacks.
Of course nothing we do will be truly balanced or give us perfect data but I do believe that this data is invaluable. and tourney mentality is much different that pick up game mentality so I don’t think playing pick up games to gain that data will give accurate results.
well I think that is enough rambling for my first post. sorry for the long windiness and keep up the good work.
Red
Someone call the WUUUÄÄÄÄMBULANCE!
Let’s call the shots right now! Stop playing 7th! I mean all of you must have played a whopping 2-3 games by now, clearly it’s OBVIOUS what’s broken and what is not. You must all know everything. I’m not worthy! Please take my game and rip it apart and destroy it so you can glue it back together in the way YOU see fit. I should just renounce my faith and believe in you guys!
By Odins eye… stop whining and get over yourselves. Play 7th, completely free from restrictions, after you’ve played 30+ games with 20+ different armies, then we can talk about if this edition is worse or better.
Haha, if anyone is overreacting here my friend, it is you. If you are enjoying 7th the way it is, then by all means, continue on with it and we are happy for you. However, we identified some issues for competitive play and are trying to rationally come up with solutions. If you disagree, fine, either choose not to play the way we choose to play or offer an intelligent argument against it instead of resorting to hyperbole and insults which accomplishes nothing.
Regarding Psychic Powers…
I’d like to see a limit to the maximum number of dice you can use to manifest a psychic power.
Maximum Dice = The Psyker’s Master Level x 2
This would allow ML3 psykers to throw a maximum of 6 dice to manifest a psychic power. In the case of Warp Charge 3 powers, you’re looking at a 50% chance at best, and even worse if you’re ML2.
It might be a bit too harsh, however some of the WC3 powers are silly good.
Another option would be changes to DtW where each roll of a 6 cancels out a success instead of the ‘all or nothing’ system that’s in place now. Defenders would have a much better chance of stopping certain powers from going off, but still have to be strategic in their use of Dispel Dice.
Can someone help me find the rules for fortifications, specifically the bastion .
I think I have an easy fix for the conjuring spam daemon armies. How about conjured daemons cannot draw their psychic powers from the demonology malefic discipline and instead have to use their god’s discipline instead.
That is a good idea. It would also prohibit the conjured deamons from choosing their powers in the middle of the battle, which is unfair in the way that aside from demonology you cannot adapt your psykers’ abilities to the flow of the game.
I don’t see the need to limit Warp Charge. Statistically, fewer powers will be cast now than before. It’s simple math. I’m also not sure why the Summoning Daemons has generated so much hate. Your using 360 points of Pink Horrors to have a 50/50 shot to generate 90 points of Horrors. Tyranids have been generating extra models for ages and much more efficiently. That same 360 points of Horros could throw out 6d6 (2×2 WC’s) Flickering Fire shots much more easily. Seems like that could pop more than 90 points worth of the enemies models. What’s the difference between removing your opponents models or generating your own? If your opponent is doing their job, the Daemon player will rapidly be unable to keep up with the casualties given that Shooting is much much more reliable than powers.
I’m also not sure about the rabid hate for Invisibility. It is a good power, no doubt. But the Invisible unit can have stuff scatter on top of it, be hit by Nova powers, get hit by collateral damage from flamers, etc. It is really good in CC since their are fewer ways to get around it (hit on 3+ SW item comes to mind), but Assault needed something anyway. It’s not a big deal if it’s thrown onto a Deathstar. I wasn’t shooting it before, so what does it matter if it’s harder to hit.
@Reecius – Please keep me in the loop with the national TO discussion – I’ll be running the 40K portion of the Salt City Gladiator Games this fall and would like to follow your lead.
Cheers,
Brian B
Why not throw my positive opinion out here. I love this edition. I like the way it plays.
I like the way a mech army is viable once again. Taking objective secure off them is probably the right call. Making everything just scoring let’s new players feel like they still have a chance instead of the oh so awesome last two editions turn 2 “I killed your troops…. I win”.
I feel like this edition is simplified and very fun. But with the exception of the psychic phase. In one simply sentence to fix the whole phase.
“The defending player in the psychic phase generates at least half of their opponents warp charge points a turn.”
This gives you a chance to stop at least 20% of the warp charge 3 spells like summoning.
I think modifying the DtW is the better way to deal with psychic spam lists and this is a very simple solution. Psychic power lists should be allowed to still be powerful. It is just another phase in the game you can tailor your list for like shooting or aussault the only difference in that you don’t alloway get a save like you get in the other two phases. modifying the DtW pool to be have of what the active player has is a simple solution. it is easy to understand and does not completely nerf players who wish to be dominate in the psychic phase. it does mean that they will get allot less dice in their DtW part of the phase, which seems to be a big issue as well.
For the other big one I see that keeps being batted around I don’t think denying unbound or comes the apoc lists should be done. it limits freedom to play what you want. you can easily steer people away from these style lists, without completely getting rid of there choice by having some sort of army paint/composition score in the tourney format as well as making scoring objects more prevalent. Going into a match a point or two down and not have “objective secured” capable models would be a deterrent when building your lists. Any long standing tourney player should know the importance of looking at your list and its viability in the format you are going to play. By adding this score you make people think about there overall standing in the tourney before they come to the tourney and that may deter them from building really bad composed forces, but at the same time you do not squash the freedom to take any given force.
Both of these seem to me to be simple solutions to some of the problems presented without changing the rules drastically.
Red
Hey Reece,
We are actually having a discussion with mostly the same points over on dakkadakka if you wanna pipe in with your all’s findings that would be great. We seem to be relatively of the same mind in most of the suggested modifications.
Brett
Hey Reece,
We are actually having a discussion with mostly the same points over on dakkadakka if you wanna pipe in with your all’s findings that would be great. We seem to be relatively of the same mind in most of the suggested modifications.
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/90/596748.page#6878466
Brett
Limit to warp charges is bad. Daemons rely on psychic powers to be able to shoot in many cases. If you consider that to cast a 1 WC shooting power I need 2 dice to get it off 75% of the time, a cap at 12 means I can make 6 shooting attacks, of which ~2 will fail….it is a huge nerf. It is akin to saying well Tau dominate the shooting phase and it takes a long time, so we should stop that. I also disagree that invisibility was super good last edition, it was situationally powerful toward the editions end because many armies flat out ignored its main benefit. The large issue with it now is that it can stack with re-rollable saves, making super crazy durable units. However, with tons of MSU scoring that most super durable units cannot contest this is less of an issue.
I would say No WC cap.
If and this is an if, summoning is broken it needs to be fixed in another way, either by banning those powers, or as I have suggested elsewhere, limit powers to 1 copy per army much like fantasy has, with the exception being psycich focus primaris powers. Or some other change to the powers in question, a WC cap at 12 means, daemons are severely nerfed.
Also Invis as a fix is easy, again either ban it or switch it to -3 WS and BS against the unit. This will largely have the same effect on most units, but removes the immunity to blasts and template weapons, afterall if an enemy is invisible guess what weapon I use to hit them…a flame thrower.
What about rotating psychic powers? Much like how Obliterators rotate shooting weapons, IE can’t use lascannons 2 turns in a row, why not rotate psychic powers other than Primaris powers?
So while Invisibility is truly awesome it can only be used every other turn.
And this is the reason why I stopped playing any GW game.
GW should redo cover saves. In reality there is a difference between cover and concealment.
Being concealed from view does not mean you have automatic protection from bullets, rockets, etc.
Each type of concealment should offer a modifier to the AP value of the weapon being fired at it. For example.
A concrete wall may have a “armor value” of 4 so any weapon with an AP of 4 or higher will still be too weak to penetrate this “cover” meaning the guy being shot is allowed to make a save.
On the other hand, if your model is behind a bush…you may be 90% obscured, but a bush has an armor value of 6, meaning ANYTHING will shoot through it and there is no “cover save” to be had.
In the military they explain to you that just because the enemy cant see you, does not mean he cant spray your position with a machine gun and by law of probability, youre going to catch a bullet. Its really silly in 40k that you can hide your model behind a shrub, or a single layer of drywall… and its going to give you a cover save against a heavy bolter round thats like a 30mm rocket.