Like Space Marines but don’t much care for the teachings of the Codex Astartes?* Well, brace yourself, as thanks to the efforts of the Warhammer 40,000 team, your Chapter of choice is about to be rewarded with loads of new units and many of the awesome rules featured in Codex: Space Marines as part of an official errata! Let’s take a look at some of the highlights…
This article was originally published on the Warhammer-community site.
New and Improved Units!
Last week, we revealed which new units in Codex: Space Marines will be joining the ranks of the Blood Angels, Space Wolves and Dark Angels (and, in the case of the Repulsor Executioner, the Deathwatch too). Well, there’s more! In addition to the aforementioned Vanguard units and powerful vehicles, many of your existing units will be improved by additional rules and enhanced wargear profiles.
One of the most hotly anticipated improvements is that Drop Pods will now be universally exempt from the Tactical Reserves rule in matched play. Loyal Space Marines can once again live up to their epithet as the Angels of Death, crashing down from orbit into the heart of the battle, just like they do in the lore. Whatever happens, though, don’t forget about missions that use the rules for Sudden Death – not even Space Marines can win a battle if they’re not actually there!
Another unit to benefit from some of the new enhancements is the Intercessor Squad. If you thought their standard bolt rifles were awesome thanks to the Bolter Discipline ability, auto bolt rifles are now Assault 3, while stalker bolt rifles pack an even harder punch at Damage 2. Whether you choose to sit back and snipe, advance while unleashing a steady hail of fire, or dart from cover to cover, guns blazing, Intercessors now have the tools and flexibility to blast apart the enemies of the Emperor with merciless fury.
Other welcome tweaks include all Gravis-armoured models (such as Aggressors and Inceptors) gaining an extra Wound due to their hefty bulk, and flamestorm cannons benefitting from an improved range of 12″ – fans of the Baal Predator and Land Raider Redeemer rejoice! And, of course, all Adeptus Astartes will be gaining a bonus Attack in the first round of combat with Shock Assault. This will make powerful melee units such as Death Company and Wulfen deadlier still, while greatly increasing the overall hitting power of Space Marine armies in melee.
Other Armies
Today’s updates don’t just affect non-Codex Chapters. So far, only the Ultramarines and White Scars have their own codex supplements, meaning that there are some unique Characters from the previous edition of Codex: Space Marines – such as Captain Lysander of the Imperial Fists and Vulkan He’stan of the Salamanders – who no longer have in-print datasheets. You’ll be pleased to know that the full datasheets of these mighty heroes (including their updated matched play points values) are also available as a free PDF download.
Finally, we promised that the Heretic Astartes would also be gaining the Shock Assault ability, but that’s not strictly true… they actually gain the Hateful Assault ability instead, though it works in exactly the same way!** Believe us when we tell you that Khorne Berzerkers are about to take extreme violence to a whole new level in the Fight phase…
That’s enough of us ranting excitedly about these game-changing updates – download them below and see for yourself what lies in store!
Errata
All the updated abilities, wargear profiles and rules clarifications for non-Codex Adeptus Astartes Chapters and the Heretic Astartes – as well as their respective Forge World units – are included here.
Download if…
- …you play Blood Angels, Space Wolves, Dark Angels, Deathwatch or Grey Knights.
- …you play Chaos Space Marines, Thousand Sons or Death Guard.
- …you use units from Imperial Armour – Index: Forces of the Adeptus Astartes.
- …you use units from Imperial Armour – Index: Forces of Chaos.
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Space Marines Character Datasheets
This file includes datasheets for all of the unique Characters that are not in the new edition of Codex: Space Marines, as well as the Black Templars Crusader Squad.
Download if…
– …you play Imperial Fists, Crimson Fists, Raven Guard, Salamanders or Black Templars
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Space Marines Summer Update
The datasheets for the Vanguard units and vehicles from Codex: Space Marines that are available to non-Codex Chapters are included in this file.
Download if…
– …you play Blood Angels, Space Wolves, Dark Angels or Deathwatch.
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More to Come
Believe it or not, this is just the start of things to come. In addition to more codex supplements, there’s a little thing called Psychic Awakening on its way. We can’t say much more about it for the moment, but things are definitely about to heat up in the Era Indomitus…
In the meantime, if you favour a more traditionalist Chapter or a successor Chapter, remember that you can pick up the new Codex: Space Marines in stores worldwide tomorrow!
* Even though Guilliman’s ingenious organisational and strategic magnum opus arguably saved the nascent Imperium in its darkest hour? No? Well, we tried.
** But with loads more anger, bitterness and as much as 10,000 years of spite!
And remember, Frontline Gaming sells gaming products at a discount, every day in their webcart!
I play Grey Knights. My “Chapter of choice” does not feel like it’s been “rewarded with loads of new units and many of the awesome rules featured in Codex: Space Marines.”
Deathwatch really missed the boat on the new units. I can understand the Grey Knight problem since they don’t have primaris, but DW have primaris and are also supposed to be a concentration of all the best specialist gear. That they now have none of the newest specialist and tacticool gear is lame.
Space Wolves getting to take infiltrators as troops is an enormous buff for their codex, but without the -1AP on turn 2 onwards that SM get I don’t see infiltrators or incursors being used as anything other than speed bumps (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, just less versatile).
The new dreadnought seems particularly good with SM and BA, who can buff up its turn one charge.
Space Wolf scouts make infiltrators great.
We have no units that can infiltrate for board control (looking at you Wolf Scouts in the elite slot).
Giving up hold more on turn 1 is just life for us.
Other astartes may have better options but infiltrators will be a great boon for us.
I don’t care if they spend all game hiding in a building sitting on an objective. It will be worth it to me.
What I find odd is they changed the wording of the Aggressors firestorm to use “this turn” instead of “their turn”. No idea if that was intentional or not. RAW the Aggressors never move during the “opponents” turn so they will always be double firing.
Yeah, that one struck me as strange- Aggressors always get to double-overwatch, unless something really weird has happened on the enemy turn. Considering they were arguably the best of the Primaris units already, that’s a big power jump when you add in their extra wounds and attacks.
Aggressors count as having moved when they get out of a destroyed transport, that’s the only thing I can think of where they will be shooting 1 time in Overwatch instead of 2.
Not even carrying over point changes is weird.
Nice if you‘re souping BA smash captains, as they remain cheap with a freebie extra attack. Painful if you actually wanna bring Tac Marines or Reivers or so for a mono-army and they not only lack Doctrine-equivalents (and Doctrine+ Scions of Guilliman, etc.. equivalents), but are also more expensive.
It makes me wonder if there’s a second update for the non-codex books. Even if it’s in Chapter Approved 2019 in a few months. Also, read somewhere a good comment, if the intent is to give bonuses for being mono-faction, BA/DA/SW/etc will likely get some version of Doctrines. Since right now, there’s no penalty for still running BA, Guard, and Knight detachments in an army.
I suspect all the other marine armies will get codices in due course with their own extras to balance things out, just gotta wait and see 🙂
Well, that didn’t work out last time.
Space Wolves players patiently waited like .. 18 months or so? Playing straight index with no strats or Warlord traits or anything .. while Marine and Chaos Marine players had fun, rocking tournaments for all of 2017 and into 2018 with Guilliman, Storm Ravens, Alpha Legion rush, whatever .. only to get a book that would’ve been medicore in June 2017?
And now they’ll have to wait another 18 months? Again for a book written likely to Summer 2019 power creep, not Spring 2021 power creep, or whenever it’ll drop? Probably 3 weeks before Marines Codex 3.0 or just straight 9th Edition … great
Lol, you’re a real ray of sunshine, Zweischneid.
So, what, you think the Marine dex isn’t going to cut it in the current meta even though it was written during a previous meta? I think everyone sees it will. Space Wolves perform a bit worse than normal Marines in the now old dex but that is almost entirely because of Bobby G. If you took him out of the equation, old dex Marines would be about the same as Wolves. The logic that if Wolves were to get a Marine like update in their time that wouldn’t hang while Marines do doesn’t hold, buddy.
And the Storm Raven list lasted a few months only, it wasn’t very long. Marines were good very early 8th, I agree, but it faded rather quickly, unfortunately.
I can understand his frustration. Whether a codex is good or not feels like a crapshoot. That is to say, there actually is very little codex creep in 8th edition and you can wait a very long time for a mediocre codex.
I understand that GW has to employ different writers for each codex to streamline their output, else they’d overtax just a few writers, but there seems to be very little consistency within the writers as to what is needed for a complete codex. That close combat armies can get published without a 3d6 charge start or shooting armies without a double shoot strat seems like a fundamental error. We know that GW employs style guides to make sure that all of their codices hit the 8e aesthetic, is it so hard to do the same thing for rules?
Well, there are some assumptions going on here. I’d love to explain more but can’t.
You’re seeing things that you don’t like or think are bad and then drawing conclusions about the why of it which is normal but doesn’t necessarily reflect competence or a lack thereof. The design team does things with intent and sometimes it just comes down to a difference of opinions on design philosophy. And, if you look at the data, which its awesome we can now, you’ll see that apart from a few exceptions, the factions in the game perform very closely to one another in regards to performance.
“a few months only” is quite a bit. There are several factions that would kill for a run like that (which was only one of the early 8th Marine builds that did. Raven Guard Aggressors won a Warhammer World Heat early on).
I am sure the new Marine Codex will cut it in the meta.
But it is in many ways just plain better. White Scars encirclement is literally Cunning of the Wolf, but not limited to Infantry only. White Scars 3D6 Charge, Drop the lowest is literally the Space Wolves Vigilus Strat, except not behind a Vigilus paywall and not limited to two units or having to make another charge first. Etc…
Stuff like that is just plain better for units with the same profile. How is there any design philosophy outside powercreep that could explain that?
Replacing underpowered strats- which I think that most people would agree the two examples you mentioned are- with more balanced ones is not power creep.
Except they weren’t replaced.
They are still the status quo of one faction you need to balance again.
As are D3 shot, 12” bolter-things on BS 5+ Wulfen at twice the point cost of a Storm Bolter.
What assumptions am I missing there?
At least thus far, that’s been the standard.
When Genestealer Cult got their version of “Vect” for 3 CP, while Dark Eldar had the same stratagem at 4 CP, it was obviously a mistake. People expected the Genestealer version to go up to 4 CP as well. GW instead added a different limitation to it, making it once-a-game-only, giving it a different dynamic to the original Vect. Either way, the end result was to not give one faction a version of the strat that is just plain better.
Ultramarines Rapid Redeployment is a copy of Phantasm. That is fine, because they are identical. If the Ultramarine version were just 1 CP or could re-deploy 5 units instead of 3 or whatever, it’d be a problem. It would be the same game effect, but just plain better.
Which is the case with the White Scars encirclement stratagem example. It is just plain better than cunning of the wolf. Thus it should either be made identical (Infantry only) or it should have different limitations (higher CP costs, once-a-game, etc..) to be balanced against cunning of the wolf.
Assuming SW ever get another book, it is reasonable to think that their versions of the strats will be updated as well.
However, that’s missing the main point- power creep only happens when the _top_ end of the spectrum is brought up, not the bottom end. Unless you are arguing that SW were the top end of the 40K power spectrum, what does or doesn’t happen to them is essentially irrelevant to power creep.
You could, of course, argue that the new SM book represents a level of power that stands above what we currently have or have seen before, which _would_ be power creep… but given what the meta has endured previous to this I don’t think that is a very strong argument to make, as Ynnari, 30pt Malefic Lords, Assassin Spam, and many of the other things we’ve seen featured before this would run roughshod over the current SM book.
Powercreep doesn’t depend on the top end of the spectrum, but the average.
The Space Wolves book would’ve been decent in June 2017, but was exceptionally weak in the company of things like Drukhari, Knights or other 2018 Codex, which made other Summer 2017 Codex look weak in comparison.
If that’s not the power creep, I don’t know what is.
The very fact that the 2017 Space Marines Codex was “the bottom end” strongly points to power creep, since the power of books statistically correlates with their publishing date (even if it doesn’t correlate perfectly and there are outliers like Astra Miltiarum or, as mentioned, Space Wolves).
If there was no Power Creep, early Codexes like the original Space Marines, CSM or Grey Knight dex would be sitting somewhere in the middle of the pack of the 20+ books we have now. It seems improbable that two years go by without at least a couple of books being notably below the early Space Marine or even Index baseline if the aim was to make them balanced against all books.
Sean’s right that there isn’t very much power creep in this edition. I was thinking about it more after reading Reece’s response to me earlier and decided to take the 40kstats data and just graph it. I don’t think there’s a way to easily embed images in this, so here’s a link: https://imgur.com/a/dSP1Vwc
I only used armies that have codices, so no Sisters or Ynnari here. And I didn’t include Renegade Knights because they’re so new. The winrates are since the most recent FAQ.
To the extent that there is any appreciation in winrates over time it’s almost certainly because marine based codices came out earlier. If you remove the codices that use T4 W1 Sv3+ basic troops, which I highlighted in red, then there is no upward trend in winrates at all. 40k as a game has become very well balanced in terms of average winrates at a competitive level with the simple exception that marine bodies are bad and armies that rely upon them suffer for it.
Exactly right and thank you for doing that.
And yeah, been saying it all edition: the MEQ statline simply doesn’t cut it and hasn’t since like, 4th ed. Maybe 5th. I would have gone about it in a different way but the new Marine dex fixes it IMO by giving them hyper offense (typically). They still die like they did, apart from Iron Hands, but now they hit like a truck.
It’s simple actually, they weren’t written at the same time. Lessons have been learned and the new Marine dex represents a step forward. When/if Wolves get updated in a similar way, I’d expect a similar jump in efficacy.
>Powercreep doesn’t depend on the top end of the spectrum, but the average.
Not true, because competitive players do not take average units- they take the best units. Since the best units, by definition, will be the ones that set the meta and dictate the functioning of the game, it is only by changing those best units that you can “push” the power spectrum of the game up; changing the middle or bottom end of the spectrum may “compress” it, bringing units closer together in power levels, but they don’t increase the experienced power level of the game because they don’t increase the maximum achievable power level.
Think of it like a race- if you have three cars, with top speeds of 50kph, 100kph, and 150kph respectively, the third car is obviously going to win because it is the fastest (i.e. “most powerful.”) If you increase the speeds of either of the first two cars, effectively nothing happens- the time to win the race stays the same. It is only by increasing the power of the most powerful option that the race time (i.e. power level) improves, which is analogous to power creep. The bottom end and middle don’t matter, because as suboptimal options they were never relevant to people who cared about power level in the first place.
(Of course, for people not playing competitively their experience will certainly change if you alter other parts of the power curve, but that’s not the same thing as power creep at all.)
>If there was no Power Creep, early Codexes like the original Space Marines, CSM or Grey Knight dex would be sitting somewhere in the middle of the pack
Why would they necessarily be in the middle? We should expect them to be at essentially random places in the power curve, and in fact biased towards the bottom- because any “overpowered” parts of those codices would have been FAQed, whereas underpowered parts would likely have been left alone.
Also, I will point out that Craftworlds, one of the earliest books printed, has consistently sat towards the top of the rankings since the day it was printed. If power creep were real, Craftworlds should’ve seen a decline, but this hasn’t been the case at all. Similarly, Tau have gone _up_ in the rankings significantly since their debut, not down.
Mind you, presumably the more top performing units you get to choose from in a given faction, the better…. I wonder if there is a correlation between performance of a faction and variety of top competing units available to that faction? Maybe it depends on the time window as a faction with only a couple of top units is very vulnerable to FAQ and CA changes.