We’re in the endgame now. This is the worst of the worst, things that happened in 9th edition that irritated and alienated a lot of players with 40k.
Welcome to the last part of this series, if you want to read the other installments you can find them here for The Bad and The Good.
I’m going to compliment sandwich this one because I don’t think 9th edition is as bad as what I’ve heard people say on the scary bad interwebs. As a new player, I still enjoy 9th edition. To be honest, I think the balance of 9th might be the best it’s been since I started playing. Just taking a look at the Meta Monday post of the Warhammer Competitive subreddit shows how much diversity we actually have as of right now. No army is over a 60% winrate or completely dominating the scene and multiple different armies are making it into the top 3. There’s a lot happening in the scene right now that makes the game feel like it’s balanced. However, I believe the problem is that it’s just kind of too late.
The rest of 9th edition leading up to now has been a very bumpy road that has had people move on from the hobby to play other games like Legion, Marvel Crisis Protocol, Age of Sigmar and/or A Song of Ice and Fire (which you can all buy products of in the FLG webstore at 15% off MSRP hehehe). Long story short, 40k has competition and it looks like they’re here to stay. So every lost player could possibly switch to a different game and just never return to 40k.
However, 9th edition as a whole has been generally a net positive in my eyes. The idea of 9th edition is fantastic, faster rules, more active balance changes, interaction with the competitive scene, grand tournament, it’s been great. The execution has just been lack luster which I suppose should be expected considering it’s their first rodeo to do this.
THE UGLY
No More Electronic Books
Why did this happen? We want to be able to access our books electronically. No, we do not want to keep lugging around 4 different books for each event that we go to. With the launch of the warhammer app-which was, let’s face it, incredibly lackluster the day it came out-but the removal of electronic books felt like we took one step forward and two steps back. Additionally, adding in the code of a new book onto the warhammer app isn’t intuitive at all. It’s 2022 GW, give the app a QR code that people can scan on their phones to add the book to the app. I know that might sound like complaining, and that’s because it is. When every other application is capable of doing this, why can’t this be able to do it when we’re ALSO PAYING FOR THE APPLICATION?
I get that the books are probably one of their highest earning pieces of revenue in their business. That’s totally fine to try and get the most bang for your buck. It’s capitalism, I get it. However, why not just provide an electronic version of your books when it literally takes up 0 inventory space in your warehouses. Sure people can rip the book, but people are already ripping the books anyways.
To be fair, the app has also been updated since it’s launch is getting better which is good.
Pricing & Too Many Books
Pricing went up. Understandable, every business pricing is going up. I live in California and gas is almost at $7.00. With every business prices going up, warhammer books go lower and lower on my priority list. However, let’s do a fun exercise: Let’s take Tyranids as an example okay. We get into the hobby and purchase the Tyranids book in 8th edition, that’s about $55. We then purchase a Psychic Awakening book, that’s another $40. 9th edition drops, alright time to buy the Core Book, that’s $60. Got that, alright Chapter Approved and Grand Tournament – another $40. An Octarius book drops for Tyranids with new rules, $55. White Dwarf with MORE rules, $11. 9th Edition book, $55. That’s $316 I’ve spent in JUST books for Tyranids. $161 of which is no longer usable and just takes up bookshelf space.
Let’s not even take into consideration other armies. Let’s not even take into consideration buying models. Let’s not even take into consideration buying other codexes to see wtf other armies even do. You can just read the Waha which totally helps you stick the information in your head more so than the book does amirite fellas.
Having new rules to your army get added in all these weird and stupid ways only for them to be FAQ’d or shot down while paying large sums of cash is insane. The price can stay the same, but please require us to own less of these books. Having so many books also leads to confusion when your rules are all over the place to the point where it’s easier to just look up the rules on Waha instead.
Special, Special Rules
Invulnerable Saves are more common, Introduce ignore invulnerable save weapons, introduce worsen armor penetration, introduce ap6 ignore invulnerable save weapons, introduce daemonic saves that ignores ignore invulnerable save weapons. Do you see how ridiculous that both sounds and looks? There’s so many intricate rules to the game that happens that whenever I play a game against someone and it gets to their command phase my eyes just gloss over. In fact, I don’t really even pay much attention to what they say.
Dakka Dakka, changed to what can best be described as just Rapid Fire but worse. Why even introduce that? I get that Dakka Dakka is such a special word for Ork players but introducing a special rule that seemingly doesn’t do much just makes things more confusing. Especially when their values are different depending on what weapon you use. So unlike Rapid Fire where you just double the number, you ALSO have to remember the weapons number value of 3/2, 30/20, 5/3, 6/4, 14/10, 16/12, 24/16, 10/6. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
![15] DA BOYZ OF DAKKA (Orks) Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade Multiplayer Gameplay | SurrealBeliefs - YouTube](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LX4de8YW6UU/hqdefault.jpg)
We just introduced a new rule called Armor of Contempt where you reduce the AP of weapons targeting units that have the trait by 1. Ala the newest FAQ, Chaos Daemons are no longer affected by this change for their malefic weapons. Fight first, fight last, fight on death. The list goes on and on to where I feel like we’re in an episode of Dragon Ball Z where the next transformation is just stronger making the past ones useless. If we’re going to make a rule, let’s stand by nothing can go past it, or have everyone in the rules writing team all be on the same page.
I just want to end off this article by saying, 40k is still an extremely fun game to play. I’ve yet to play another tabletop game that has been the same or scratches my itch for rolling dice and having fun. The hobbying is great, the gameplay is great and the community is some of the best and kindest people I’ve met to date. 9th Edition was a lot to take in and it’s still not over.
In all I enjoyed 9th edition and I think we’re making good steps in the right direction. Just clean up a couple of things, fine tune some detailing and we’re in business. We have some more time before the next edition comes and I just want to say that I hope we get some things like an Index which would help curb this codex creep nonsense.
And remember, Frontline Gaming sells gaming products at a discount, every day in their webcart!
I have to say, a compliment on this is that I am amazed at all the new knobs GW designers have given themselves this edition. Back in previous editions we had the problem that there weren’t a lot of ways that you could adjust a unit’s survivability or lethality. You either 100% ignored a save, or 0% ignored it, so your survivability changed by sharp 16.7% intervals.
But 9th? Just try counting all the ways they now have to change how survivable something is!
– Save
– Toughness
– Wounds
– Cover when not Cover
– -1 to hit
– can’t reroll hit
– can’t reroll wounds
– reduce AP vs this unit
– increase save (either all the time, or vs specific attacks)
– suffer less damage per attack
– ignore wounds lost
– can’t lose more than so many wounds
– Character-like protection
– Reposition when targeted
– Restrict number of attacks that can be assigned
– Inv saves that can’t be ignored
It’s honestly just that last one that is so weird. But like, seriously, that is a HUGE number of knobs they can turn now, and one of the reasons why I think the game has been able to be really well balanced (combined with GW caring about doing so), whilst still allowing armies to retain a sense of individuality.
Many of these were in 5th and earlier editions…
– Save (though it was an ‘all-or-nothing’ approach)
– Toughness has always existed
– Wounds have always existed
– Cover saves were effectively invulnerable saves
– Characters were attached to units so couldn’t be individually targeted
That’s off the top of my head – I suspect there were more.
When playing those older editions, I used to think armour mods would have been awesome. And maybe they are, but GW have screwed things up so badly that I would gladly go back to how it used to be. They either need to wind the current system backwards several notches (ie, remove and reduce the AP of every weapon in the game), or they should scrap the idea of AP altogether and just use previous edition rules.
As for 9th? I think it’s an unplayable mess. Stratagems are cancerous “gotchas” that need to go away. In many instances, revert the stratagem effects so they are part of the unit’s basic abilities (like they used to have). Multi-detachment armies are awful, and thanks be to whatever deity you want, that GW are restricting that disaster (though was it 7th that let you take allies? That was even worse).
The only good thing that has come out of 9th is GW’s increased attention to the customer-base. Even then I don’t think it’s particularly well-focused, but at least it’s a start.