Show Notes
Date
5-6-16
Intro
- Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube! Join our Forums, too! If you would like to be a guest on the show, email Reece at Contact@FrontlineGaming.org
- We sell tabletop games and supplies at 20% off! Hit us up for your next gaming order at Orders@FrontlineGaming.org or visit our webstore at FrontlineGaming.org.
- You think Reecius’ T-Shirts are cool? Buy yours, here!
News
- Cinco de Mayo happened.
- GW FAQ
- Things got released. By a company.
- We’re releasing the Battle Damaged Urban Square building and new scenic bases!
Upcoming ITC Events
Rumors: The Rumor Section is gathered from the web and is not in any way information we receive from any manufacturer nor is it necessarily accurate. This section of the podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only.
- Midwest Conquest Prep, Legion Games, Burnsville MN, May 6th, 2016
- 40Kthulhu – At the (Moving) Mountains of Madness, Event Horizon Games, Raleigh, NC, May 6th, 2016
- Mad Hatters 40K ITC Scorched Earth Prep, Tucson Games and Gadgets, Tucson, AZ, May 7th, 2016
- Otto’s May Main Event, Otto’s Video Games and More, Bakersfield, CA, May 7th, 2016
- Lords of War 2, Glimpses, Sherwood, OR, May 7th, 2016
- GT: Greenhad GT, Provost, Alberta, Canada, May 7th-8th, 2016
- NOVA GT Primer, The Portal, Manchester, CT, May 7th-8th, 2016
- ND Open, Montréal, Canada, May 7-8, 2016
Rant Session
Tactics Corner
Rules Lawyer
Completed Commissions
List Review
1850 ITC Legal
Siege of Vraks, The Purge
Renegade Command Squad, Archdemagogue w/Ordnance Tyrant, Chaos Covenant,
Covenant of Nurgle
Renegade Heavy Ordnance Battery, Medusa Siege Gun Carriage x 3 (Each
Separate Elite Choice)
Renegade Heavy Ordnance Battery, Earthshaker Gun Carriage x 3 (Each Separate
Elite Choice)
4 x 25 Plague Zombies
4 x 3 Renegade Rapier Laser Destroyer Batteries, Militia Training
Void Shield Generator + 1 Additional Shield
Chaos Daemons (Daemonic Incursion)
Tallyband
Herald of Nurgle, Greater Locus, Palaquin, Doomsday Bell
2 x 3 Nurglings
5 x 10 Plaguebearers
5 Chaos Furies
I know the guys don’t usually see lists like these, so a few highlights. Ton
of 4+ FNP bodies on the table (plenty to bubblewrap), 6 large blasts coming
down a turn, BS 3 twin-linked rapier batteries…. Daemonic Incursion
benefits with Nurgle daemons corrupting objectives, deepstriking, plus the
Doomsday bell lowers LD by 1 for those pinning/LD checks from the artillery.
Presents way too many targets for the enemy to deal with, plus the Ordnance
Tyrant allows my artillery to target friendly units in combat (with plague
zombies). And the artillery blasts create dangerous terrain when they land.
Fits the fluff of the book as well.
Thanks!
Matt
Im personally happy that grav affects VSG now.
Grav is a tool, nothing else. The hate surrounding it is just stupid. Yes, it ruins armies. But Scatter Lasers do aswell, as does artillery, melta effs up armies aswell. to single out grav because it is new is just stupid.
I agree completely. You still need 6s and either way you have to waste an entire grav cannon or more like 2-3 just to drop the 3 shields. You’ll still see them played.
What Space Marine players actually believe.
Ugh, just missed it. So question here. How would your stance be for someone using those Raging Heroes Sisters models to play some sort of Marine army (they release everything including Terminators, stuff sisters just don’t even have) all with correct weapons and such of course.
Putting aside if the Sisters book is good or not (I’m thinking of using BA rules for heavy flamers for infantry so its not exactly a step up..) I just think the chance of doing something like building a Sisters Landraider with half a cathedral on top would be too cool.
Damn it that wasn’t supposed to go here.
hey AngryPanda, I use raging heroes models that i’ve converted to ‘count as’ my scouts in place of regular scout models. I think if you made sure the ‘counts as’ was easy to understand no one would have a problem.
Don’t lump us all in that. I play marines, and I think grav cannons are over the top good. Good enough that just tossing one into a 5 man+rhino tactical squad actually makes them something of a credible threat instead of the joke they normally are.
Grav kills more super heaviespecially then scat pacKS ever will
I think the fact Grav has instantly replaced all other Space Marines weapon choices should tell everyone something about how good it is. If it was just “a tool” you would still see Flamers, Plasma and perhaps even another heavy weapon now and again. Perhaps even 50% of the time.
And on someone who’s not a Salamander.
Exactly this, if it wasn’t so much better than the other choices, you would actually see the other choices. That’s generally become the problem with many armies, they are given new options, but those new options end up becoming the only option because of how much better they are.
grav would be decent-good if it were single shot.
it’s not single shot, it’s 3-5 depending on platform and spamable, often with rerolls to hit and wound (again, depending on platform). it makes an interesting mechanic way over the top. it metas entire swaths of the competition out of the game just by its presence.
Just timing in to agree. This right here. Grav is ridiculously good and needs to have it shots reduced dramatically.
I agree with one slight caveat.
Grav is ridiculously good against tournament armies. Take away the tournament constraint – mostly the time limit – and grav would commonly hit the thing it is bad against: massed cheap chaff. My massed kroot laugh at grav but even leaving 1/3 of them at home it was a painful grind playing them in a tournament so their competitive career is over.
In a tournament environment daemons are the only likely counter to grav.
To be fair, you can make armies that don’t give a crap about the time constraint, they win all the time now. 😉
@Adam
Yes, a massed chaff army that camps objectives from turn 1 (or earlier) would win games but would be frankly unsporting. You would be designing your army to win because your opponent gets at most 2 turns to do anything about it.
Yes I did momentarily consider taking just such an army but decided that I did not want to be That Guy.
i am aware that less extreme versions of the concept are common and do indeed win tournaments.
Grav is a very interesting tool in theory. An anti-save tool that becomes much stronger as the unit you’re shooting at becomes less and less “elite”, to the point that it’s relatively useless against hordes and the like.
Unfortunately, they also gave Grav weaponry a massive amount of shots and the means to fire at full Salvo relatively easily from a number of units. If each Grav weapon only shot once or twice, it’d probably be fine. Instead, you get something that’s more effective than lascannons against hard targets but fires 3-5 times more, and that number of shots still makes it effective against lower armor saves because you have the volume of fire and AP2.
The mechanic isn’t the problem, that’s fine, it’s the design and pricing of the weapons themselves.
True enough. Salvo has essentialy become a meaningless weapon time as it always gets its max shot number anyway. Reduse Grav to the lower of those numbers and it wouldn’t be as superior as it is now.
Also it relay shouldn’t be able to wound units without armor. Live by your mechanic, die by your mechanic.
and add in ignores cover to push it over the top.
Comparing melta and artillery favorably to grav? You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Grav is insane, and to compare them with scat lazers is basically a joke. If grav wasnt so good, maybe you would see other special weapons on the field from marine players. Weapons shouldnt be effective against every single unit type in the game, it makes taking anything else pointless.
Ok, I see your point but I disagree. Permit me to explain why.
Grav is a very binary weapon, what it is good against it is very good against due to its high rate of fire. If it is good it dominates the game largely throu rendering armour saves and vehicle armour values irrelevant.
Generally I believe in letting powerful things ride but the tournament format itself indirectly makes grav stronger than it would be in normal games. The time limits on tournaments mean that styles of armies that would commonly counter grav without a crutch like the VSG are borderline unplayable. A troops heavy AM list would be a strong counter but who really want to play 150+ infantry models against a clock that was calibrated for games with small elite armies? Small elite armies, with the exception of daemons, die disproportionately to grav.
im not saying your wrong about a horde army being a solid counter potentially, but lets call a spade a spade, horde armes (guard and orcs) are garbage in todays meta. Is it a case of everybody not realising Grav is weak against hordes and slow to react to it by playing a horde force, or is it a case of horde armies even i na grav heavy meta, are still garbage. You dont really need to worry about running into many horde lists at a GT.
Horde armies are really bad in the *tournament* meta.
If you could bring your tournament army to my local club and take on my horde army you might find it is not weak at all. I think the same goes for AM but I have not tried it out personally. The thing is it will probably take 3+ hours to finish the game and i will probably not be winning until at least turn 4 – so my horde army is junk in a tournament.
GW do not only write rules for tournaments and I think it is clear to all of us that they have more casual play in mind most of the time. This does mean that when you frame your games within tournament limits the game balance will skew in certain directions because of the format. Tweaking things to counter the effect of tournament limitations seems reasonable adjustment to me.
I took a cut-down version of my horde to an ITC GT and went 5-0. It was weakened by me cutting the model count but I think sheer unfamiliarity of playing against 100+ models was a struggle for my opponents.
Even against Hordes, Grav gets so many shots that it’s only pushed down to “mediocre”, not all the way to “garbage”. Especially on Centurions, where the other viable option for the arms (TL Lascannon) is almost as bad, and the Grav Cannon at least has the possibility of high damage output if you manage a boatload of 6s.
The only SM Heavy Weapon that’s actually substantially better at taking out Hordes is the Heavy Bolter, which is so terrible against everyone else that it’s not really worth considering.
An increase in Hordes won’t cut down on Grav in favour of other Heavy/Special Weapons. It will create shifts elsewhere, toward Suppression Forces, or TFC, or Allied Wyverns, or Quad Mortar Rapiers, but the Heavy/Special Weapon dudes are still mostly going to be carrying Grav.
Grav is better than a Heavy Bolter against Guardsmen.
I don’t know who you’re playing against, Happy, but it’s really not that uncommon to see 80+ models on the table and there are several very significant armies in the meta that run 100+ models these days. Time constraints aren’t what are killing most horde armies, it’s the fact that most horde armies are bad right now.
Any insight you can give us on ITC and the new flier rules coming in? As an Imperial Guard player who uses Vendettas which are now without rules I’m curious as to how this will run.
The Facebook Warhammer40k-page said, multiple times, that
“Hey X,
Use the new flyer stats for the Valkyrie.
Other options, points and rules remain the same.”
So… I guess FAQ might say something more literal about that.
Any idea when the ITC ranking will be updated, still seeing the same results
Hunnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng Overrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Nice to see your brains start working with the FAQ discussion.
Who buys bases in packs of 5?? Need those 25s and 32s in ten packs
If a unit containing more than one faction is both factions, could they deploy in a battlebrother drop pod, as they’re all the same faction, or no one can as they’re all the other faction too?
They could not be joined together inside a transport, as the BB models would be prohibited from doing so. If only some models in a squad can legally do something, the squad as a whole can’t take that action- consider the similar case of a unit of Infantry models with a Jump Infantry character joined to them. Clearly the unit is not allowed to embark on a Rhino or Land Raider, as the Jump character is not allowed to do so- same thing here.
Yeah the change to void shields makes grav a bit better against it, but keep in mind you still have to roll three 6’s to bring the shields down since they can’t suffer immobilized results. I think the biggest problem with the change is going to be figuring out which shots were wasted on the shield and which went through. I’ll probably play that you roll grav wounds in sets of three until the third 6 is rolled and then the rest go through.
Maybe I’m just not reading it right but is the FAQ (as it stands now) clear on Battle Brother characters that have joined a unit? Can this unit then start in its own vehicle? Or does that keep the whole unit out?
Like say the Blood Angels Feel no pain dude in a unit of Terminators (let’s all pretend they still exist for a sec) in their Land Raider?
If an IC joins a unit he counts as part of the unit for all rules purposes according to the BRB. The unit can go in the transport… IC is part of the unit, so I’d say yeah.
You’re completely ignoring the “units with a character joined to them count as all of the original factions” ruling there. They can’t embark.
Every level on templates in ruins means you have t choose, great cover save better line of sight or the chance to get blown up. Not a liability just a choice.
An actual building isn’t affected by it 🙂
We so disagree about stomp out of combat:) the first time your Titan is held up in combat by a grot or lone marine and then can’t attack something two inches away, it’s hard to say which is crazier
Titans can’t be locked in combat anymore
I believe he means Knight
So, what you are telling me, is that you believe a 3 stormsurge unit should be able to offload its entire payload on a unit that it is not engaged with, while being dog piled on by a termagaunt unit? Epic.
If people want to keep the “Stomp out of combat” change, you could limit it to only enemy units/models 6″ or less from the Knight.
I like the grenade change. That’s how it was in older editions and I think it should have always remained it that way.Walkers and vehicles should benefit from this to the point where you’ll actually see them. That’s huge!!!!
I know I’m a few days late for the conversation, but:
So this whole krak grenade/meltabomb thing… now I am not one to “rules lawyer”, but this particular FAQ (or how the community is interpreting the FAQ) seems intuitively wrong – even though I have read and re-read the grenades entry in the rule book (and it does clearly state what the FAQ reiterates), it really depends on whether you consider a grenade to be “thrown” in the assault phase. The “assault phase” entry has the term “used”, not “thrown”. I think there was an intent by the rule writer that there is a distinction, and the action of throwing is specific to the shooting phase and as an overwatch attack. Unfortunately, the FAQ is still a little ambiguous and merely restates what the rule book says without clarifying that distinction. I’m pretty sure my group will continue to use one grenade per model in the assault phase.