Falling out of love with a faction?

[jaxom]

I think this may be happening to me. Has anyone else gone through this experience? How did you know it was happening? What caused it? How did you cope or move on?

[War of the Eagle]

I used to play World eaters way back in... 4th? I think and I loved them. They where a blast. High velocity bumb rushes with high risk and high reward. Then new rules came out and slowed my army way down and made it way less survivable. I tryed to persevere but after awhile I just sold the army. I hated to, and yes I could have saved them back for a glorious return one day, but I was young and dumb. So I started a tyranid army and they filled that void pretty well.

 

So let me ask tho, are tou fallen out of love with your army because how they play or no longer interested in their lore and who the army is?

[Xenith]

Can you describe what youre feeling and to which faction? Is it a rules, models or fluff based change?

 

I've had factions that grabbed me and wanted to start an army, but dropped them fast. But the main factions where I love the lore and background I've stuck with. These are Blood Angels, Thousand Sons and Iron Warriors. 

 

I have an Eldar army because I loved their play style, but essentially stopped using them in 6th ed when they were broken as hell and games were no longer fun. 

[The Yncarne]

I moved on. There's too many unfinished projects to dwell on it for long.

[Tyriks]

It's happened to me a few times. First (and most notably) with Blood Angels. I picked them up in 4th and had a blast for awhile but quit the hobby for a bit in late 5th because I couldn't afford it. Came back at the start of 7th and picked my BA back up. I read all the books I could get to motivate myself to paint. Between the tabletop experience of just being objectively worse than codex Marines and the rather poor showing Blood Angels had in books at that time, it just killed my excitement for them. I started playing with other armies and having a lot more fun. Then that supplement Angel's Blade came out and I briefly got back into them but after a few weeks the Ynnari came out and that absolutely ruined the game for me. I was just starting to feel like I had a chance against my regular opponents (several of which played Eldar) so suddenly getting multiple units shot to death in my own turn with no way to do anything about it was just unbearable. My other armies at least didn't get tabled every time so I just gave up on the Angels. There was just no part of the hobby or game in which they worked for me. And why invest time and money in something that I'm getting nothing out of?

[TrawlingCleaner]

I have an Iron Hands successor army that I started when Primaris came out, I played them through the first marine 8th codex (it was pretty horrendous if you remember). I put so much time and effort into them, I used to play very vehicle/dreadnought heavy because I loved the models. I went to a fluffy tournament 6 months before the codex and came 48th out of 50 2 weeks after the new supplement came out using the same list I came 7th out of 80 (the list had 3 Vindicators and Terminators in). I actually got a lot of flakk for taking IH to the event from people I wasn't playing against and it really took the wind out of my sails. I had games against mates that I took very toned down lists and still stomped them. It turned into an un-fun army for me because they were too good. I only enjoy games if my opponent is too.

I paint the models for this army these days and don't really play with them

 

My hope is that marines get toned down a few steps with the new codex so I don't feel guilty about playing an army I love

[smileyjim]

I was playing orks when I quit the game in 6th Ed. Still love the boyz but the thought of painting a billion orks just sends me cold so when I started the hobby again I went back to my first love, blood angels.

 

Saying that though there's no way I'll get rid of the orks, 40k has a nasty habit of going full circle and I'm sure I'll build a krumping army again one day.

[Snazzy]

This is happening to me in real time with Space Marines.  Too many releases.  Not thrilled about 2W Firstborn.  Overall power rating is just unfortunately high atm.  I too hope this is the start of a new baseline where others will catch up.  My 4 games of 9th with SMs have been 2 blow outs against Craftworlds and Tau, and 2 struggles against fellow Codex marines.  I really hate the idea that this game is so Space Marine centric that it must dominate all considerations of how to play.

 

My mind also wanders into strange territory, like what if someone played Tau in an unorthodox way that put little emphasis on battlesuits and drones?  Things like that usually get me buying the first 1/3 of an army, before flaming out.

[WrathOfTheLion]

I've definitely had the excitement for my first faction, the Space Wolves, tone down quite a bit since I started them in 7E. Since they were the first ones I painted, I ended up having to strip the first ones and all to make them not like junk.

 

With the boost to classic marines coming in the new codex, it has been renewed some though. So what I'm doing in this a bit more uplifted times is set a cutoff and not get too carried away, use that momentum to finish painting what I have so that I can close them out and just enjoy them.

[Marshal Rohr]

This happened when they retconned Templars. It’s devastating.

[Fajita Fan]

Absolutely and part of it comes from force org or gameplay changes. Among my armies I have infantry-heavy Demonhunters (lol Inquisitors), Deathwing, Sanguinary Guard, and 13th Company space wolves, none of whom are supported anymore. In the case of DW and SG they’re no longer codex legal and running pure blobs of SW infantry without heavy armor or vehicles is/is not competitive depending on the edition. Heck I can’t even read the new fluff about the Wulfen, it’s pretty bad. Inquisition have been a distant afterthought since the the Bush administration (aka just run Gray Knights!!!!).

 

It’s a cycle, once you’ve sorta “mastered” an army you only have two options - add more stuff to run different lists or start a new army. If you’re the Nid guy in a gaming group you pretty much expect to face tailored lists when people know they’re playing you. If you invest in a faction like GSC only to watch combat resolution become more important and all the BS4 guns out there get deadlier then you can face the short end of the stick that way.

 

There’s no real solution to this besides put an army on ice and try something else, is there? That’s part of the sales strategy.

[Magos Takatus]

I started collecting Blood Angels in 2nd edition and when 3rd hit I dropped out of the game because I didn't like the ruleset and it took several editions to get back into playing the game. When 3rd edition came round I just started collecting Crimson Fists. I just hopped from one nobly doomed chapter to another. My old Blood Angel army never got any assault marines and just had footslogging Death Company so when Blood Angels went from a Codex chapter with a few quirks to the Rhino Rush assault guys my army was pretty obsolete. I never really looked back until new Mephiston grabbed my attention.

[Doghouse]

I'm finding it at the moment but that is due more to uncertainty than anything. There are lots of armies I'd love to take a bash at then get put off but there are now others that have become more appealing due to changes.

 

I think the patrol method is the best way moving forwards but it's hard to invest in a larger army if it no longer appeals to you. I think it's easy to forget that an army can be a huge investment  in time and money and normally is the first of a couple of such projects.

[clanfield]

I'm finding it at the moment but that is due more to uncertainty than anything. There are lots of armies I'd love to take a bash at then get put off but there are now others that have become more appealing due to changes.

 

I think the patrol method is the best way moving forwards but it's hard to invest in a larger army if it no longer appeals to you. I think it's easy to forget that an army can be a huge investment  in time and money and normally is the first of a couple of such projects.

i agree but i think crusade is the way to go fall head long into the story of your faction.

 

i totaly get this my wolves have changed a lot in 33 years get a small patrol going of something fun it will broaden your tactics at least

[Karhedron]

I would echo the above sentiments. Burnout can happen for a variety of reasons. My advice is put them away safely and do something else for a while. There are enough jobs we must do in our lives, hobbies are meant to be fun. If you are not feeling it for any reason, no point in forcing yourself to carry on.

 

Try doing something completely different for a while. Maybe try building a small non-MEQ force. They say a change is as good as a rest. Just don't get rid of the army. Pack it away safely. Who knows, the next release cycle could bring a bunch of sweet new units for the army that get your juices flowing again.

 

It can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes changes of editions mean your army no longer plays the way you want it to. Or maybe it still plays the same way and you have gotten bored of it. Maybe you are tired of the same combination of colours and need a fresh challenge.

Edited September 15, 2020 by Karhedron

[chapter master 454]

Due to experimental phases I had, yes. I have a small ork army and a small necron army (still have my metal c'tans) and I enjoyed them to a point but Orks fell out for me because GW decided to axe one of the fun aspect of orks which was looted vehicles, so I now have 3 tanks that are worthless (a chimera based transport wagon, a boom cannon based wagon and a then a big one based on a land raider chassis but I am pretty sure there are predator parts in there). On top of the fact orks kind of lost an element of fun to them for me...really they get pigeon holed really quickly into the same thing which is "wanna do it good? Take mass" which applies to their melee, shooting, shooting and melee, melee and shooting, shooting melee, melee shooting and so on. You can even look at the whole "Da Jump" issue where the rule designers aren't trying to help orks at all but instead let them have a crutch power because they can't be bothered putting power elsewhere (imo, Da Jump should be fairly dangerous like all powerful ork tools for both sides).

 

Necrons I kind of just fell out with before they got to their 5th edition codex skipping 4th. They were fun but I just didn't really dig the new stuff as much, I do like some of it but largely not into the change they underwent though I would say from an outside stance it was a positive move, certainly makes them more appealing to play but I personally liked the old styled narrative of "Skynet but now space faring, oh and enslaved some star gods casually". Would consider going back to them but my friend is doing necrons and I already stepped on some toes going into Tau (a long time desire since I saw them eons ago).

 

Currently my two armies are Tau and Marines with Imperial Knights on the side because I like Heavy duty equipment and giant robots (says on the side...has something like 2 dominus knights, 5 questor and 2 armigers...).

 

Marines have always been an army for me. First army so first love I suppose but I have always liked them and I personally love the new infantry coming in (heavy intercessors...-insert Jontron "I'll take stock"-) but not so in favour of the new tanks (I like the Storm Speeder for reference, makes sense to me. Gladiator and Repulsor should of been tracked. And I've trigger war angel again!) but on the whole I do like Primaris and the change to firstborn having 2 wounds now has eased my trepidation about Primaris though I understand some are upset Primaris aren't replacing firstborn...welp, shoe on the other foot for now until they are merged into one I suppose!

 

Tau however are a faction of love but their rules right now suck more than a vacuum. It is such a chore to get anything to work in a fun sense and anything "competitive" can be translated as "triptide flavour 358". Models look awesome, awesome concepts in there but the rule designers and writers clearly chug glue, hate the lore writers with a passion and demand they be burned at the stake, and just want to make more marine rules because Tau really get little to any fun. No attempts to experiment with giving Tau any form of close combat ability and to suggest it is considered heresy (which I find comical because few people blinked with Necrons being buddy buddy with blood angels back when they were an army of T-100s) but yet can't suggest anything better than ether giving them overwatch or if they are a melee player saying they should be deleted. I often find it hard right now to enjoy Tau just because of the lacking in fun options. The only fun I have is trying to find lists in the codex that are fun and functional but thats it.

 

Oh and I did have eldar for a short while but got bored because I couldn't make a list with them without being "opps, its amazing" "oh darn, this is pretty nasty" "opps, all grease". Seriously...I fell out with eldar because they were just all grease, no bacon.

[Azekai]

I felt this way with Knights. I have 4 traitor nights of House Malinax that I love and they have seen the table... basically once. They are so skew-y that I don't really like taking them in a normal game of 40k, too easy to literally stomp an unprepared opponent. That might change in 9th, but I still doubt they would be much fun to play against.

And I also started to work on a marine army, ordered the minis months ago. Now as I paint them my local gaming group is growing increasingly leery about the rapid changes to Astartes. I might just see if people are interested in going back to early 8th ed rules, before the overwhelming primacy of the Space Marine. I am not burnt out, but I do feel like the game itself is doing a poor job of allowing balanced games. The points system is not a good measure of whether forces are equal at all.

[Ahzek451]

Been feeling that way with admech. Just another army I'll likely never get to, and while I think the new models look good, it oddly doesn't sit right with me. But I also don't want to be rid of them because of how they are tied to my admech knights and titan legion. Its an odd spot. I dig 30k mechanicus so much better and I'll never be rid of those guys. 

[Leonaides]

I am a mix of hobby butterfly and institutionalised blood angel. While I dabble with (or at least get some of the models for) a few other armies like death watch, imperial knights or catachans (tho a full 3k points of them) I have chipped away at my angels since second ed. I like the lore, and if I get bored with one playstyle I mix it up and get something different or pull out old units i haven't used in a while. Which is why I can do a full mounted company, or a full drop pod company, or an air cav demi company, or a first company force or a scout company. With all that, I can adapt to pretty much any ruleset, and I play for the fun and tactical challenge rather than for the win...

[jaxom]

Thank you all for sharing your experiences and perspectives.

 

So let me ask tho, are tou fallen out of love with your army because how they play or no longer interested in their lore and who the army is?

 

It's the lore; Dark Angels, specifically. More about this later on.

 

Can you describe what youre feeling and to which faction? Is it a rules, models or fluff based change?

 

I've had factions that grabbed me and wanted to start an army, but dropped them fast. But the main factions where I love the lore and background I've stuck with. These are Blood Angels, Thousand Sons and Iron Warriors.

 

I loved the idea of warrior-monks; the robes and tabards, etc. I love the idea of knights and how incorporating some of the realities of knights one can create a suitably grimdark feel. Over the years, as GW fleshed out the lore more, the Dark Angels had very little of that spotlight on them. They got the paranoia and secrets while the Black Templars got the knightly bits.

 

I moved on. There's too many unfinished projects to dwell on it for long.

 

I'm finishing up some Guard stuff and then moving onto Nurgle. However, I have a bunch of Space Marine plastics and I'd like to return to Space Marines some day. I figured if I could work out my feelings on the matter now it would help me plan for the future.

 

This is happening to me in real time with Space Marines.  Too many releases.  Not thrilled about 2W Firstborn.  Overall power rating is just unfortunately high atm.  I too hope this is the start of a new baseline where others will catch up.  My 4 games of 9th with SMs have been 2 blow outs against Craftworlds and Tau, and 2 struggles against fellow Codex marines.  I really hate the idea that this game is so Space Marine centric that it must dominate all considerations of how to play.

 

I hear that. I've been planning the Nurgle stuff since about May, but it's a happy coincidence that I won't be working on Marines while the game is in its current state. I'm optimistic for what things will look like six months from now.

 

This happened when they retconned Templars. It’s devastating.

 

Are you referring to the rules shake-up when they lost their own codex?

 

I would echo the above sentiments. Burnout can happen for a variety of reasons. My advice is put them away safely and do something else for a while. There are enough jobs we must do in our lives, hobbies are meant to be fun. If you are not feeling it for any reason, no point in forcing yourself to carry on.

Try doing something completely different for a while. Maybe try building a small non-MEQ force. They say a change is as good as a rest. Just don't get rid of the army. Pack it away safely. Who knows, the next release cycle could bring a bunch of sweet new units for the army that get your juices flowing again.

It can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes changes of editions mean your army no longer plays the way you want it to. Or maybe it still plays the same way and you have gotten bored of it. Maybe you are tired of the same combination of colours and need a fresh challenge.

 

Excellent advice. The Nurgle army I have planned is meant to be palate cleanser after all the converting and darker colours of my Scions. I know I'll be returning to Marines afterwards. Part of that is 24 Mk4 marines, 10 mk3 marines, and 5 cataphractii terminators. I was going to add to the Veteran Tactical Squad, Dreadnought, and Praetor I did for Loyalty & Treachery. This is more about coming to grips with what almost feels like grieving. Like I've lost something or lost the potential for something?

 

[WrathOfTheLion]

A lot of more knightly stuff in book 9 of the HH campaign books. Personally looking at the idea of incorporating things like the knight orders into my 40k models. Edited September 15, 2020 by WrathOfTheLion

[N1SB]

Brother Jaxom, I can already tell you're going to make it, because I too was in a very similar pit to the one you find yourself in now, and there's a way out.

I hear that. I've been planning the Nurgle stuff since about May, but it's a happy coincidence that I won't be working on Marines while the game is in its current state. I'm optimistic for what things will look like six months from now.

It was when I read this, specifically the 6 months timeframe, that I knew you're going to be more than fine. You've got a realistic assessment of the evolving situation, the state of the game is changing, and you know better than I do there's the Road to Thramas, etc. So I only add 1 thing as a guy who went through something similar.

This will sound high faluten, but I found it to be true: your subconscious may well be processing a lot of Dark Angel thoughts/ideas/solutions, and it needs time to work.

I got given some books on like, cognitive science and stuff, but the long story short was academics talking about epistemology (i.e. what we know about how we know what we know) in imho a skewed manner. Their point was we went from reading textbooks to this wiki-look-up-stuff age, which was too drastic a change for them. These academics...who write books as part of their living...favour book-learning, which they're probably good at because that's how they got to be academics. They say we've been trained to study since the printing press and wotnot, so the way their college students are doing all their homework via Wikipedia is, to them, a perversion to the natural order. They neatly omit the fact that people were learning stuff way before then, that Gutenberg clearly knew something to invent the printing press in the 1st place.

I personally strongly disagreed with the crux of their argument, EXCEPT for 1 thing I never thought of: even as we actively learn/study/think, there's a lot of passive back-of-mind processing going on, we just don't notice it as much.

When we read a book, we might be on Chapter 6, but our mental RAM is actually processing everything from Chapters 1 to 5 in the background. We're really good at knowing our progress doing active stuff like reading because we can count the pages, but really bad at realising when we actually understand the book as a whole since there's no visible progress bar that tells you you're X% to an epiphany. The closest thing apparently is some very fancy term that basically means burnout or bordome. Burnout or boredom is your brain's way of telling you, "User, I'm full of this type of input, I need to index it across all the previous data you've accumulated, so hold off a bit."

Important caveat - the speed this happens doesn't correlate with intelligence. In fact, smart people might do this slower, precisely because they make connections others won't, as they have a more sophisticated therefore longer indexing process. So it might be 6 months, it might be more, let things happen as they will.

Hypothesis: you might not be falling out of love. You might have TOO MUCH love. You got to let that love sift for a bit through the funnel that goes from the brain to the heart.

I say this because I know you're an avid reader of at least Warhammer stuff. The HH novels, Alan Bligh's Black Books, and now Road to Thramas, and that's not even counting all the stuff coming from Warhammer Community and the Warhammer Twitch Previews for all the new 9th ed Marine materials. So much input.

Excellent advice. The Nurgle army I have planned is meant to be palate cleanser after all the converting and darker colours of my Scions. I know I'll be returning to Marines afterwards. Part of that is 24 Mk4 marines, 10 mk3 marines, and 5 cataphractii terminators. I was going to add to the Veteran Tactical Squad, Dreadnought, and Praetor I did for Loyalty & Treachery. This is more about coming to grips with what almost feels like grieving. Like I've lost something or lost the potential for something?

Above's the Theoretical, here's the Practical. Sharing some experience simply to perhaps save you some time.

You're 1st Legion (but doing your thing with Scions for the now). I was Shattered Xth. What connects us? We have, both of us, painted way too much black armour.

I don't know if you've put brush to mini yet, but painting Nurgle is actually a way different and imho much more interesting experience. Not just the colour choices, but I completely re-invented my painting technique, and then Contrast paints came out. It sounds like you're very ready for a change, too.

When I was doing the Shattered Xth so I made these Iron Warriors already adopt some weird idiosyncrasies like 1 squad painted deaths heads on their helms while another reinforced their helms with like metal bars that looked more knightly or something. Just anything because black on Mk III loses a lot of the cool grill details.

I saw you did great green stuff robes on yours, but I can see in both our situations, we were trying to make black look more interesting. Then I, too, shifted to Nurgle.

I went crazy with colour. I painted the Nurglings in the red, blue and yellows of Dr. Mario or the boardgame Pandemic. I went from no colour to so much colour.

The important thing was, the Daemonic things here, were all painted with 90% inks. I skipped actual paints except for a Zenithal basecoat, I did at least 3 bases of Nurglings a night and it was fun to paint, not a chore at all. Nurgle miniatures have a lot more creases and wrinkles and sores that work way better with inks. The only things I painted in a traditional method was the infected Guardsman and the Heavy Support he brought (via the FW Renegades & Heretics list). I believe ink painting wasn't just faster, but actually better suited for Nurgle, to achieve a much more gradual gradient effect.

It wasn't so much learning a new technique as much as unlearning an old one. Contrast didn't come out when I did this. Whole new possibilities for you.

You're also better at using green stuff than I am, I think. You're going to have an even better time with Nurgle than I am.

I actually swore off painting black armour ever again after the Shattered Xth project, but to play against a friend in the 8th ed Kill Team when it came out, I broke that promise to speed paint Deathwatch. This was drybrushing a turquoise (happened to be Dark Reaper Turquoise or whatever), but I felt while working on the Nurgle stuff, I actually got better at painting black armour. I mention this because you plan on returning to your Dark Angels in the future.

So I wrote all this I think my story maps very closely to yours, I was a little bit too early. Now we got plastic Heresy-era armour AND Contrast paints, omg did I start 30k and Nurgle at the wrong time. It's not so much methods or techniques or telling you what to do, I just want to share a vision of what you can look forward to.

To be honest, I kinda envy you, you got a lot more options now. This transition period was probably my happiest overall period in the Hobby, now it's your time.

[MegaVolt87]

Black Legion for me. I just distanced myself from them as I got tired of their ramp up to heel status and failbaddon tropes they fell into over time. How Vigilus ended, was also super disappointing, the new Warmaster reduced back to a Saturday cartoon villain once again after the SoH buildup and ADB's re-work of them. He doesn't have to blow up Terra to be cool or be Matt Ward UM's strong, he can still have smaller successes to keep his new prestige and better rep without drastically changing the 40k meta lore. I would argue Lorgar and the WB's failures are far less severe and damaging to them than the current state of the BL in comparison. Also no need to discuss the decline of CSM rules, its a pale horse so dead and beaten even papa Nurgle no longer finds it amusing to keep immortal for the continuous beat downs. 

[BLACK BLΠFLY]

I burned out on World Eaters back during the CSM codex 3.5... army just became too mechanical to play and overly one dimensional. Burned out on Deathguard during 7th edition... was a finesse army back then - sometimes very fun to play and sometimes quite difficult but looking back was prolly one of my favorite armies along with 13th Company.

[b1soul]

Dark Angels and Raven Guard due to the Thorpe effect

 

Switched to Wraight's WS and never looked back