SkimaskMohawk

And they sold a ton of those 2.0 8th books due to how broken Marines turned out to be. I'm sure that sales data went a long way to encouraging them to do it again.

I took one thing out and suddenly you've described modern 40k/AoS and model production policy lol

Chaos players in shambles after that Cathay reveal dropped more for them than thousand sons have gotten in 9 years lol. Those bots iffy. Maybe it's the paintjob being completely disconnected from the faction. Maybe it's the design language being disconnected from chaos/marines. It's reminding me of centurion release vibes; a unit that's just bigger and out of place with the rest of the range.

I mean, stratagems in 30k rubbed me the wrong way but they still did it because it widens the appeal, and a wider appeal makes them a ton of money. They did it with fantasy to AoS. They did it with 7th to 8th and 9th to 10th 40k. It's a proven method to them, and that's why they keep doing it.

Ya the entirety of modern 40k and aos has been streamlined to capture a wider customer base, which it has. Stratagems were hugely popular which is why they made it into aos 2nd edition and eventually heresy. Nothing's off the table

LI released in November; TOW released in January of all places. But ya, there's been a persistent through line of the style of book for the HH setting. 1st, AT, 2nd, and LI share the same style of campaign book/supplement. Couldn't imagine them changing that for 3rd, but I've been surprised by their lack of consistency and care for collections before.

Just finished Sins of my Brothers

I mean, i mentioned TOW as well. A specialist game that launched with every faction people previously played with in 8th. Even if you discard the legacy factions GW tries to prevent being used at events, that's still 9 factions on launch. Ya....heresy doesn't have the stamp of quality either lol. The internal balance of factions in 2nd is a nightmare; it went from a sandbox game where you could try many units and loadouts to achieve the same goal, to one where you're actively handicapped by bringing the wrong unit. Reactions play a big part in this since they're so poorly balanced; I've explained the bonus rounds of shooting in the opponents phase thing to hardcore 8th+ 40k players (the types of guys who are on WTC national teams) and they can't believe it. The 40k players think it's unbalanced lol. 2nd is definitely not better than the 1st at the end of its life, and especially not better than 1st during 6th when the mechanics were at their most harmonious.

Rules wise, pretty disastrous. When 1st ended there were rules for Marines, black shields, shattered legions, armies of dark compliance, solar aux, cults and militia, talons, mechanicum, knights and daemons for 10 factions. It took 20 months to be able to play with all of those again, with armies of dark compliance basically evaporating and daemons straight up being relegated to "don't play this in events" status. You compare that to other edition refreshes; 8th 40k got 10 codexes after 7 months, 9th 40k got 10 after 14 months, and 10th got 10 after 12 months. TOW launched with rules for 16 factions. We couldn't even play the full legion roster on launch, because we had to wait like a month for the legacy and exemplary battle units to be released (or many months in the cases of some jump pack options). They admitted to working on some of the factions (militia and daemons) post launch, which means they really did launch the edition without having the factions rules finished. Then there's version control of the print copy of the rules. Or the lack thereof. It's very well documented at this point that some language versions had completely different statlines for different weapons, and the Epub/standalone main rules has differences to the main rules bundled in the age of darkness box. And this was a system where they had cut substantial faq support 3 years prior. They had all the time in the world to have stuff ready to be rolled out in a timely manner, properly, and without the massive balance holes (which i haven't even touched on this post). Model wise they pumped them out, no doubt. Memes about the marine vehicle focus aside, I don't think I've ever seen that many new plastic kits for a GW game system. But the rules? Not well delivered. @Schrödingers Primarch I'm not talking about financial disaster; I'm pretty sure the GW profit snowball is not going to stop any time soon. The rules are definitely not any more streamlined in 2nd, and some of the changes actually make for a much longer game than 1st. Similar thing with LI to SM2 tbh. I'll keep on pointing out that asking for necessary FAQs isn't the same as 40k balance updates that upend faction balance every 6 months. TOWs first faq within 4 months solved more issues than all of HH 2nds put together. There can be a middle ground between neglect and churn.

After the disaster of 2nds roll out and LIs shovel ware status, I don't have any faith in the heresy team to fix anything. These people couldn't even maintain version control across the various languages and production runs of their rules, let alone address it. Couldn't even care to point cost properly after changing stuff from ap2 to 4 lol.

That's exactly it! Thats the vibe I'm getting.

I finished up a few more a week or so ago, and I think I thats all of them, or at least all I can find on the BL site. Much like characters in the novels, I feel like there's been something I'm not quite understanding, and I've been rereading the shorts and going through requiem infernal again to try and see if there's any deeper truth.

There's something I really don't like about this model and I have a hard time describing it. Everything just comes together poorly somehow. Some parts feel very large and chunky, like the cape, tilt shield, wrist flamer, shoulders and chest piece. The scrollwork also verges towards chunky; Aximand has some nice delicate stuff that feels more fitting. And that's kinda the thing, it doesn't really feel that fitting of artistic craftsmanship. Maybe it's just the 2nd edition style, a lot of the power armour characters look super off to me, both in proportions and aesthetic.

Pretty sure the ministorum/echlisarchy/imperial creed have always drawn a lot of inspiration from Christianity, mainly because it's such a great fit. Look at Blasphemous; the penitent stuff taken to the extreme is super grim dark, on top of the body horror that 40k used to have more of a focus on. Like idk, cherubs and gothic architecture are a pretty iconic part of the imperium