Frankie here to talk to you guys about hero hammer.
In sixth edition it feels like your most important slot is your HQ choice. A lot of armies depend on them to bring the pain down on the opponent’s army. Most lists that I make and I am sure many of you make, begins’ with the most bad-ass character I can find, or the character I think the list should be based around. Armies such as Chaos Space marines and Daemons really depend on these characters to make a list work.
Lets think for a second about all of the top tier lists and the HQ choices they use. Seer council uses two Farseers and the Baron. Ovesastar uses Ovesa, a Commander and sometimes another HQ choice. Screamerstar uses three or four heralds and Fateweaver. Space marines use a bunch of Chapter Masters and a lot of time, Khan. My god, that is a lot of HQ choices that keep all these lists running.
Now lets think back to fifth edition HQ choices were not the main point in most armies. Fifth edition was more based around your troops. Most armies took troops that would contribute to the game and took cheap HQ choices so they could fit in more killy units. Of course there were the armies that needed HQ choices to do well such as Fateweaver Deamons for re-rolls, and Draigo for Paladin troops but for the most part the armies were built around scoring units. I’m also not saying that fifth was the best edition and that we should go back to it but it seemed a lot more balanced than what we have now. Not as many issues with broken lists that you have no chance against. In fifth at least it always felt like you had a chance to win.
Okay so here is my question to all of you: what would happen to sixth if we took HQ choices out of the game? What armies would dominate and do you guys think the Meta would change? Just a silly question.
Eldar would still be the best?
Im not sure I think tau could still get it done!
Still? Tau aren’t getting it done now. They haven’t won a gt since nova. Tau are dead, Eldar are kings. SM and daemons are 2 And 3. All removing hq would do is seperate eldar even more from the pack
Tau aren’t dead, not by a mile. A lot of players have simply shifted their focus to Eldar, etc. Tau can easily still win a GT.
Completely disagree. Tau don’t have the tools to compete at the top of the meta right now. Tau still shit all over mid tier metas, but they can’t handle deathstar 40k. Knights may help them a lot though.
There’s only one way to settle this, sir. Pistols at 10 paces!
Don’t forget the pre duel ritual of hurling bombastic insults at each other ( in a British accent) must keep to tradition my good chaps
They’ve shifted their focus to Eldar because Eldar can not only outshoot Tau, they can outmaneuver them. They can hang outside Tau effective range and poke away, then quickly close in for the kill, to say nothing of the death stars Eldar can field.
Trouble with Tau is that unlike Eldar, Daemons and SM who can get around, with few exceptions, in the most common builds they sit there barely moving and wait for you to walk into a buzzsaw.
And if you can take potshots at them from beyond their range, that’s too bad. And if there is enough terrain to hide behind so you get the alpha strike, that’s too bad. And if the mission requires having to cross the board with any kind of force without getting mauled in assault, that’s too bad. And if the other guy has enough fast assault units to get across the board before their shooting can wipe it out, that’s too bad. And if you have a Screamerstar or Beaststar, that’s too bad.
Tau are easily outranged and/or outmaneuvered and have slow, fragile troops. Unless you’re playing in a wide-open board and Tau go first, the army is at a significant disadvantage against people who can exploit its weaknesses, and big tournaments are full of such people.
Hmm… good question. I think horde armies could definitely put a dent into a lot of other armies, but hordes do rely on HQ choices to not break, or be save from shooting.
I think SM armies would definitely be strongholds in between everything else.
But honestly this is hard to say lol.
Yeah I think IG or Tau would be the top personally but hordes would be pretty good as well.
I think the trend seems to be going more towards a meta where force org doesn’t really even matter. You can take so many different detachments and allies that I am starting to feel that you should just use your points to buy whatever units you want and not worry about the chart.
Its good for flexibility, but I miss the days where filling our your force org created a more balanced and probably more “realistic” force.
Yeah I totally agree that the meta is really steering away from force org.
It would make the game a /lot/ simpler- no Warlord traits, no psychic powers, no Independent Characters sharing rare special rules, much less unique items, rules, relics etc. In some ways it could really strip back the game and make it easier to play – but at what cost?
So many of the non-HQ units are “boring” filler – the units you take because you have to (because of the FoC or because they’re needed for tactical reasons). HQ, on the other hand, are the core of an army – an entire force is often designed around the HQ. Not just tactically but their story or simply their aesthetics.
Some armies would crumple without their HQ (Tyranids come to mind) and 40k in general would suffer as the greatest antagonists (e.g. Greater Daemons) would vanish.
As a guard player I wouldn’t be to hurt by it. I would lose some orders but other than that they are not radically adding to my killing power of the army which is tanks and flyers. Throwing a regular commissar in a blob is cheaper than having a lord in it and when your entire HQ options are only T3 (with one exception) there are just far too many instant death things out there to sink points into them.
I could see a streamlined ruleset with no special characters and no duplicate HQ units, but not so much getting rid of HQs altogether.
Another way to avoid a lot of the nasty, and one which I have particularly enjoyed in the past, is scaling back to 1k games. 1.5k is ok too, but 1k is a totally different dynamic, and you can pack in a lot more games.
Lastly, I agree that the FOC has become a bit of a joke, and it seems like 1) scaling back game points, 2) removing allies, or 3) adding more mandatory slots, would all address this issue quite eloquently. You could also tweak the requirements for a unit to count as a mandatory unit, i.e. min size or points, not transported in a flyer, etc.
But at the end of the day, GW is just releasing so many rules and dataslates that its hard to keep up with how you could even keep things ‘balanced’ anyway…
just a few cents
-ibushi
Ah I like it the only thing is most people prefer large games because you get to play with more of your toys on the table :D. But scaling down does take some of the shenanigans out.
The thing with the special character restriction is that it invalidates a lot of armies, invalidates a ton of terrible HQs along with the three or four good ones, and doesn’t do anything to touch 75% of the best HQs in the game. Really, only Coteaz, Khan, and the Baron are what you might consider OP, and Coteaz and the Baron are both really only good in Battle Brothers lists or with their core codex. Plus, Coteaz already gets restricted at the LVO/BAO since Inquisition takes up your ally slot, so very few people bother when he would otherwise be an auto-include. So you really don’t accomplish very much at all by banning special characters.
But then I couldn’t have noise marines as troops. Or Wracks. Or SM Bikes. Or DA termies. Or things and stuffs!
How about 1 HQ per army? =]
DEFINITELY would change the meta though.
I would donkey punch a baby in the nuts in order to get just one more HQ slot for my Orks.
In case you were wondering, that was a vote for giving weaker armies extra FOC slots. LOL
you can always run an Assault on Kastorel Novem list allied to a normal Ork list if you want more slots but still go ‘all Ork’.
Really a baby? You sir need help
1st & 2nd were the beginnings of herohammer. My HQ beats up your HQ as the rest of the minis watch. HQ win = game win.
3rd saw that change a bit. 4th and 5th saw the “balance” created but took away from the randomness of the game (4th killed it for me when they took away the wonky orky weapons).
Personally, I am ok with the mono army builds and would love to do without the allies. Allies are a way of “making up for” an army’s weakness by covering it with another’s strength. That’s mho.
Which Army without HQ’s?… Necrons every time!
The only thing that they will loose out on is the Warscythe and some mindshacle scarabs… Other than that the army is still LD10… Still have deadly Wraiths/Scarabs and skimmers.
Loosing a 200point hq will bring in another troop choice with scythe or ark 🙂
No HQ units? What have Tyranids done to deserve this?!
Reece, I wanted to play some games if I ever made it out there. Now I have to die in a blaze of pistol fire. Sadface!
1 HQ choice makes sense, given that it’s supposed to be the leader of your army and all. Then take all the silly sort-of HQ’s and make them unit upgrades for troops, take away IC and such. Its an interesting idea but there’d be so many problems to work out.
Even though I love hero hammer my standard 1750 Eldar list only uses a single farseer. Three units do all the heavy lifting in my army: my x2 Dire Avengers, standard Wraithknight, and pulse laser hornets. I really don’t need some crazy HQ to do well and I’ve been kicking all kind of ass.
Chaos Space Marines would be by far and away the worst codex 😛
The 155 I spend on a Lolseer would buy me another 8 man Warp Spider unit. Thank you very much.