Well, today’s the day! We’re already pouring through everything, so be ready to get updates on the new edition of 40K! This post will be updated as we go!
So after about 5 games and seeing how the new mechanics play out my overall impression of the game is that we will have to rewrite a big chunk of the game in order to play it in tournaments. The game as it is right out of the book is borderline unplayable. They fixed a lot of the little problems, but the new problems they made break the game without some changes. For example, unbound armies, multiple primary FoC, using the mission cards without restrictions, etc. are not conducive to a fair game.
Some changes that will probably me needed: limits on FoC. Taking an army with one daemons, one grey knight and one Tyranid detachment is incredibly stupid. Beyond creating crazy combos, it’s just not fun. Or, more mundane, but equally fun killing, an army of all daemons heralds that summon thousands of points of daemons in one turn. Also stupid. Limits on warp charge. Unlimitted warp charge creates comically unbalanced situations wherein one player has over 30 warp charge and the other has 5 or so. It means one player essentially has no psychic phase. The mission cards on their own are incredible unbalanced. You often end up with situations where one player draws a good hand and the other doesn’t, and then the game is already decided.
We will also have to limit some of the powers possibly. Limiting warp.charge may solve it, but the malefic powers are crazy.
Invisibility is nutso. That and the fact that the 2+ reroll save didn’t go away means deathstars are better than ever in many ways. Again, we have to limit warp charge to begin to stop this or the game is going to degenerate into combo units again.
More play testing is needed but so far the game as is, is about 100 times worsethan it was for tournament play. With limitations on the crazy stuff, the are tighter in many ways.
I would say on first read through that this is more of an FAQ than an edition change. Now, the changes are subtle but mostly all good in terms of helping to fix things that were annoying which I like. There are some big changes in terms of how you make your army but honestly, most of those will be ignored in organized play as they are incredibly over-powering. The psychic phase is the real change to the game and it is useful in that it makes psychic powers less reliable. However, the game is like 90% exactly what it was before. I like a lot of the changes and you need the book to play the game so that is reason enough to buy it, but this is a pretty minor set of changes in total. The changes that are there largely fix some of the weird rules inconsistencies, some issues didn’t get fixed that needed to, and some loopholes seem to already be rearing their ugly heads.
The art book is pretty, but has very little content.
The fluff book is cool, especially for a new player, but for us older players it is all stuff we already know. I may have missed some new details but it is largely the same fluff as always.
- Malefic powers with Daemons are really, really, really crazy. It appears that you can reliably summon 3-4 units of Daemons a turn which can in turn generate more warp charge. It is quite easy to put a bucket of dice into the psychic phase every turn and simply overwhelm your opponent’s ability to stop your powers. Eldar, Grey Knights can do this too, IG to a lesser extent as well. Combined with a Portal Glyph and possibly Rift Bringer or the Warp Storm Table, you can just keep pumping buckets of Daemons into the game. It is pretty crazy. As of now, it seems OP, but we are playing it out to see how it goes. The powers are still unreliable to a degree, but the possibility of it happening is a bit nuts. UNless we’re missing something or an upcoming FAQ addresses some of this, it feels like way too much.
- Apparently no cap on Warp charge. We’re throwing over 30 dice in a single psychic phase, it’s insane.
- This army is insanely long to play. 4 hours in, still playing a game summoning daemons, it isn’t fun in the slightest.
- Frankie had crated over 1,000 points of new units by turn 2. By the end of the game, it was WAY over 2,000pts of new units.
- That game took almost 5 hours and it all came down to the cards. The Marines had 4 models left on the table, the game ended when they needed it to, they had mostly all cards they could play to score points and the Daemon player had half of the mission cards they literally couldn’t use under any circumstances, and so they ended up tying despite the Marine player had only 4 models left. The cards as a primary victory condition are far too random and they almost make playing the game pointless, might was well draw cards and see what happens, save yourself 3 hours. The missions as usual will have to be changed to be playable in a competitive setting.
- The mission cards are really random. Not so sure about them yet.
- A bit random but they do seem to balance out some of the insane inequities.
- The cards are mega random you need to limit some of categories of cards out of the game to keep the games from being completely pointless.
- You need to house rule that if a player draws a card they can’t score, they can discard it for free, otherwise playing the game becomes almost pointless, it all just comes down to luck of the draw in mission cards.
- Layering the missions to use perhaps a book mission and cards would make for relatively balanced missions.
- Unbound armies are so incredibly crazy that I doubt you will ever see them outside of for fun games. It wouldn’t even be fun in an Ard Boyz style event, really. I doubt we’ll even cover it much it’s so crazy. Unless an FAQ corrects something or we simply missed something important, unbound will never, ever see the light of day in organized play.
- You can no longer ally with yourself unless you use multiple detachments. I highly doubt most tournaments will allow multiple FoC as it gets insane, rapidly. So, no more Tau/Tau, Eldar/Eldar, etc. That also means Super Friends lists within the Space Marine book for example (including supplements) cannot ally with themselves. The BRB is clear that it doesn’t work and even specifies that supplements can’t ally with their parent codex despite the fact that almost all of the supplements say they can. Rules discrepancy…discuss!