Even as a guard player, I have to admit it’s a bit of a good thing the Guard don’t get new codexes more often. The reason for this is that every time they get a codex the guard tend to break the meta. There are several reasons for this:
- The army is an older one and thus has picked up a lot of models over the years giving them a greater chance of having accidentally (or purposefully) broken units. This is doubly true when you start looking at Forge World.
- There is a great deal of variation in the types of model’s abilities. You can skew into high toughness vehicles or hordes of infantry. You have a lot of indirect options as well as strong normal weapons. Mobility can be an issue but this has been addressed by orders and certain units.
- The army has waxed and waned in popularity but has a large player base. Many people have complete or partial armies they can round out via borrowing from friends or buying a few models.
- The historical weaknesses of the army (close combat and leadership) have been nerfed a bit by the changes since 8th edition. The ability to fall back and shoot (either with that unit using orders, or a different one) really benefits the guard army style. Furthermore, morale continues to not matter much especially for horde armies. If anything, the change to morale made them more viable.
With these historical strengths, it has been a bit troubling to see how the leaked changes in the new book are exacerbating things. Additional indirect fire options, with almost guaranteed damage, the ability to fire out of combat with turret weapons, etc. these appear to make the guard quite a strong army. At the same time, I don’t think it’s wrong for the guard to have a good codex. They only get one every 5.4 years on average (median number of years is 5) and they are a core army. I just believe that they are a profoundly hard army to balance. I believe the guard codex will be similar to the Tyranid one in that it has a lot of strong builds that may require multiple rounds of nerfs and adjustments to balance (both internally and externally).
We are coming to the end of 9th edition and that has several implications. For one, it should mean that all of the armies should be close in power balance (given what was promised at the start of the edition). It would be interesting to go back and see how un-nerfed codexes would do when they are all pitted against each other. It also means we should get 5-6 months of competitive play without any new codexes, which should settle the meta a bit (although GW will likely release supplements in the mean time for narrative and financial reasons.) We should also get one last balance update to address any lingering issues. I think this data slate will be key to watch as we will see what GW has learned after the countless number of nerfs needed in this edition. Have they gotten any better at understanding and fixing issues without causing more?
I still need to do a retrospective on 9th edition but I think it has shown the limits of the deign space created in 8th. I am not sure GW can make the game nay more complex without turning off players as the growth of stratagems is as or more toxic than the old lists of USRs (at least USRs carried over between armies). GW has made the game exceptionally deadly but this has also come at the cost of reducing army variety (everything hits on 2-3+ these days, has access to a 5++) or woefully reducing the effectiveness of any army that cannot keep up. GW may reset the environment in 10th and it might be necessary. However, I worry that GW has being compromising every new system it introduces in 40k and at a faster and faster rate.
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