Dark Angels 2.0 preview for the HH

[exsulis81]

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/05/10/legions-of-the-horus-heresy-do-everything-amazingly-with-the-dark-angels/?fbclid=IwAR2fzIII6IOJWdIF1ooWZlgtJVfsfMEvm2U01ntJMASjdHLpFh3St0RHw5w

[The Scorpion]

Oh boi. These rules are atrocious. Not in the sense that they are weak, but they are such a mess.

Choosing the Hexagammaton for individual units is a travesty fluff-wise, but at least it's kinda good crunch-wise.

The problem with this design philosophy is that RoW get gutted. Not only has half their gimmick been stolen by the legion trait, but by restricting wing selection, the debuffs become too significant.

It infuriates me that there is SIX rites for the Dark Angels and that nobody in the game design team thought this might be a problem.

Though in all fairness, the true culprit is whoever designed the Dark Angel rules for Book 9. The current team is only adapting 1.0 rules to 2.0

I guess I was hoping that 2.0 would get rid of the awful "Crusade" rules and start anew, and I was brutally dissapointed.

[WrathOfTheLion]

How are the RoW gutted like that? Beforehand the Hexagrammaton bonuses were purchaseable, not granted via the Rite of War.

[The Scorpion]

Take the Deathwing RoW for example:

If your playing a game with 4 objectives, you want 3-4 scoring units, oh wait, you really need 4-5 now, because there is a fifth objective now you HAVE to hold. Let me just spend those troop slots on non scoring big point investment terminators. Yeah... a 5+ fnp will totally matter in the long run.

 

How are the RoW gutted like that? Beforehand the Hexagrammaton bonuses were purchaseable, not granted via the Rite of War.

It's all due to whoever wrote the book 9 rules not understanding what the Hexagrammation is.

 

The Hexagrammaton are specialist formations, in other words... Rites of War. Nothing more. The wings have zero buisness in the legion trait, and yet there they are.

 

As a counter example, Hekatonystika are not formations... they are specialist orders which can be deployed as specialist formations, but their main use is to act as specialized command against unique foes.

 

Line units are, by their very definition, NOT specialists.

There is no way anyone can convince me that the Stormwing should be themed after tacmarines instead of Breachers.

 

So many problems.

[Slave to Darkness]

Is there any reason lorewise why the DA dropped the other wings and just kept the Deathwing and Ravenwing? 

[WrathOfTheLion]

Is there any reason lorewise why the DA dropped the other wings and just kept the Deathwing and Ravenwing? 

They never had all of them as a direct organization, which means you could almost view Deathwing/Ravenwing as 'promoted', and you can still see vestigial pieces of it in the current chapter. A good example is the Firewing containing Interrogator-Chaplains, who still exist.

 

Functionally, I think the damage during there Heresy, the loss of Caliban and the Loss of Jonson made it difficult to keep maintaining those formations going forward.

[Marshal Mittens]

 

 

Is there any reason lorewise why the DA dropped the other wings and just kept the Deathwing and Ravenwing?

They never had all of them as a direct organization, which means you could almost view Deathwing/Ravenwing as 'promoted', and you can still see vestigial pieces of it in the current chapter. A good example is the Firewing containing Interrogator-Chaplains, who still exist.

 

Functionally, I think the damage during there Heresy, the loss of Caliban and the Loss of Jonson made it difficult to keep maintaining those formations going forward.

I mean there are two successors that are Firewing and Dreadwing right? And Greenwing is basically Stormwing?

[N1SB]

Is there any reason lorewise why the DA dropped the other wings and just kept the Deathwing and Ravenwing? 

 

 

I mean there are two successors that are Firewing and Dreadwing right? And Greenwing is basically Stormwing?

 

 

I don't know of any specific meeting where a Dark Angels committee voted to disband a Wing or whatever, but for example, Dreadwing was always going to be closed.

 

Dreadwing used all sorts of dangerous weaponry, like Rad weapons (they're not Rad like TOTALLY AWESOME DUDE, but like radiation) and Vortex weapons and stuff.  Their weapons were almost as dangerous to the user as to the target, so over time, that whole discipline would have been phased out, thus so did Dreadwing.

 

Another Wing I was looking at was Ironwing.  They were like an alternate (almost) All-Predator Rite of War.  Their way of organising depended them on having tanks.

 

So when Roboute Guilliman pushed his Codex Astartes organisation on the other Legions, you remember that chart how every Company was supposed to have an amount of armour like Dreads and Preds?  They probably had to divvy up Ironwing to give everyone their allotment of Predators, maybe.  I'm just guessing.

 

What about the surviving Wings of Deathwing and Ravenwing that set them apart?  I dunno.

 

I guess Deathwing survived because they were generally Veterans and the Codex Astartes made the 1st Company all Veterans, so the reorgansiation didn't break them up.  It's possible Guilliman didn't mention Bikes specifically, so the Dark Angels and their Successors snuck in Ravenwing below the wire (White Scars too, probably).

 

I'm just working things out in my head, I think that's the sort of idea.  Either Wings got phased out organically because they weren't that popular or using the recommended organisation of the Codex Astartes broke them up.

[WrathOfTheLion]

It could also be a lot of the weapons and all are cached on their secondary homeworld of Gramarye mentioned in Book 9: Crusade. That they had a second base/world outside of Caliban from the original Terran legion begs the question, what happened to it?

 

---
 

As for the rules, I like the changes. The old rules where you paid points for the Hexagrammaton wings were ridiculous and had no chance of ever functioning.

Edited May 11, 2022 by WrathOfTheLion

[Chronotonic]

I mean HH is not 8th/9th edition 40k

 

so these rules do not look broken at first glance off the page there from the link.  

 

Dark Angels were the first legion we all know this but from the fluff they were the template for the other 19 legions and how they do things.  Which I think is just neat...

[N1SB]

 

It's all due to whoever wrote the book 9 rules not understanding what the Hexagrammation is.

 

The Hexagrammaton are specialist formations, in other words... Rites of War. Nothing more. The wings have zero buisness in the legion trait, and yet there they are.

 

 

I thought about what you said.  I hadn't thought about it before, but I think I agree with you.  I don't feel as strongly about it, but I see the problem.

 

And I'm thinking like, game dev, why are you making things difficulty for yourself (and us for that matter)?  You want to reflect the Hexagrammaton?  Just use the existing game mechanic that is Rites of War, there, done.  Why make up 6 Hexagrammaton Tactics instead of 1 Legion Tactic?

 

It's like, "Well, some people want to mix & match different Hexagrammaton and make their own thing."  But as soon as you mix them, they stop operating as that Hexagrammaton, the Hexgrammaton Tactics isn't some individual skill or unit-based skill, it's like this coordinated effect of the entire formation.

 

I can't square this circle either, I dunno.  I don't plan on playing 1st Legion, I was only planning an Ironwing detachment in the Ironwing Rite of War (it's called Armoured Fist or something).  But otherwise, I do think it can be kinda confusing when I'm mixing different Wings, it's the same Legion, but with mixed Legion Tactics.

 

Bottom line - I don't think it's terrible, that it ruins the 1st Legion as I don't feel that strongly about it, but it is quite over-engineered, isn't it?  Eh, GW continues to GW.

[jaxom]

 

 

It's all due to whoever wrote the book 9 rules not understanding what the Hexagrammation is.

 

The Hexagrammaton are specialist formations, in other words... Rites of War. Nothing more. The wings have zero buisness in the legion trait, and yet there they are.

 

 

I thought about what you said.  I hadn't thought about it before, but I think I agree with you.  I don't feel as strongly about it, but I see the problem.

 

And I'm thinking like, game dev, why are you making things difficulty for yourself (and us for that matter)?  You want to reflect the Hexagrammaton?  Just use the existing game mechanic that is Rites of War, there, done.  Why make up 6 Hexagrammaton Tactics instead of 1 Legion Tactic?

 

The Dark Angel lore in the HH series (the initial duology, the short stories, then Angels of Caliban which was written with access to some FW notes, then Crusade) are a slew of contradictions. Generally speaking, Crusade is the most cohesive source assuming one ignores everything else. The hard thing is that the Hexagrammaton, as first described in Angels of Caliban, would require something like changing squad compositions mid-game or changing Rite of War mid-game. Redloss goes from his squad to his pantheon, a separate unit, once the Dreadwing are given operational command. I think the initial idea was that the Dark Angels didn't have the same organization as many legions; that they basically operated as Veteran Tactical Squads (bolters, special weapon, heavy weapon) and each contained a member of each Wing. Very flexible, expertise distributed across the entire force; then a Wing change would dynamically shift the force into what we might recognize as a Rite of War. That idea was abandoned for Crusade and the later books.

[exsulis81]

Reading AoC made it sound like Deathwatch kill team composition for every unit.

[bigtrouble]

I don’t play HH, but it seems the rules are a decent attempt at finding the flavor. Should they apply uniformly to the whole force rather than unit? One fun thing about the Hexagrammaton in the lore is how it’s kind of a blend with the “Orders” of old Caliban; they are as much a recognition of a skill or personality trait of an individual as they are a battle formation. Maybe the rules are attempting to inject the personality into each unit as if it were an individual marine.

[twopounder]

I was looking to start up HH as there is nothing about 8.x that interests me. Of course they would dump 1.0 right after the DA book comes out...

But from what I've seen, they've made a huge mess of 2.0. While some changes (like terranic greatswords and calabanite warblades) are for the better, it feels more like they gutted the legion.

1) The legion trait to "activate" wing abilities makes it pointless to take multiple wings. Do the units just forget what they are and what they can do every turn?

2) All the Old Night weapons were purged except stasis, which was heavily nerfed. 

3) loss of unique units like the Automata and Enigmatii take out the "forbidden" feel of the army and made it into "dudes with plasma"

4) Deathwing companions can't take terminator armor. Yeah, because reasons.

5) This one is more personal for me, but jet bikes were hugely nerfed and turned into cavalry while attack bikes were eliminated entirely. Why? DA could barely take Ravenwing to begin with. Now the selection is even smaller. Vehicles don't get the Ravenwing rule so fliers are not part of the hexagrammaton. 

I'm really not a fan of the changes I've seen so far and a lot of the changes boil down to "we don't have a box that specifically says Deathwing Companions in Terminator Armor to sell you, so we're not letting you play with them".

Turning the dreadnoughts in the MCs irks me, but in the setting only has a couple MCs anyway, so they aren't competing with other races at least. But it does completely change the dynamic in how they play and weapons that are used against them. They're now vulnerable to poison and fleshbane.