Characters should have double their amount of wounds

[The Emperors Champion22]

1 hour ago, Inquisitor_Lensoven said:

No, this is such a stupid idea.

just like demanding X weapon get a big direct buff to its lethality.

So then normal characters begin to approach the durability of the biggest baddies in their faction? That doesn’t make sense either 

 

GW needs to work on lowering the lethality.

fewer rerolls to hit/wound, fewer strats or special rules that give +1 to hit/wound, or -1 to save.

maybe mega armor could get ramshackle, or something, and similar for other units with similar armor in other factions, but just doubling character wounds is such a hamfisted way to try to fix the lethality problem.

 

here’s a great example that doesn’t require a named faction mega character.

guard company commander has 4 wounds, that means he already has a good chance of surviving a lascannon shot, doubling his wounds means a single lascannon a dedicated anti-tank weapon cannot kill him, raising it to 6 means there’s only a 16% chance a lascannon can one shot him.

could some characters here and there use to get an extra wound or two? Sure, but do characters as a whole need more wounds? No, particularly since they shouldn’t be targetable until T3 or so if you’re playing them smartly.

yeah its probably not the best solution but goddamn seeing all these insane datasheets, abilities, stratagems, etc that basically let everyone just pump out damage is insane, and it seems like theyre adding broken ways to ignore damage instead of just removing some of the ways to deal it. 

[Scribe]

2 hours ago, The Emperors Champion22 said:

yeah its probably not the best solution but goddamn seeing all these insane datasheets, abilities, stratagems, etc that basically let everyone just pump out damage is insane, and it seems like theyre adding broken ways to ignore damage instead of just removing some of the ways to deal it. 

The Edition is beyond redemption. It's that simple.

[JaM_TW]

Meanwhile,...

I just keep on painting my Necrons. And maybe later this year some chaos stuff. 

And wait for next edition:-)

[Marshal Reinhard]

As someone who hasn't even played a game of 9th, even I can tell the game is out of whack. Heck you could do it just by the frequency on which that claim is made here on B&C alone, but it's coming from pretty much everywhere. Chief complaints are needless complexity via stratagems etc and lethality concerns.

Which is a shame, because 9th will always have a place in my heart as the edition that broke the almost 2 decade dirge of BT models. Having a gorgeous limited edition lunch box codex for the edition everyone admits is broken, is a bit meh. But since I don't play much anymore, it just means I'm on the same boat as JaM_naf#6121 here. Painting my glorious new models, awaiting a more reasonable 10th.

[Valkyrion]

I've got a 40k game coming up at the end of the month which will be my first in three months and I already feel like I've forgotten how to play, yet I could sit down with the 2nd ed rule book the day before a game and re-remember all the stats and points cost from the Daemon World army list in the Chaos codex appendix. 

I mean, the rules for firing a Cyclone Missile Launcher in 2nd edition were more complicated than anything 9th edition throws up, but 9th just feels less intuitive and therefore harder to remember - not difficult to learn, just hard to remember, like everything has too many words or something.

I think I'll have more joy with 30k. At the moment there's a lot of book flicking to remember what Brutal or Reach do, but they'll bed in eventually, but at least there's not two lots Synaptic Imperatives, Command Points, Auras, Stratagems, Secondaries and so on to remember.
 

[The Emperors Champion22]

4 hours ago, Reinhard said:

As someone who hasn't even played a game of 9th, even I can tell the game is out of whack. Heck you could do it just by the frequency on which that claim is made here on B&C alone, but it's coming from pretty much everywhere. Chief complaints are needless complexity via stratagems etc and lethality concerns.

Which is a shame, because 9th will always have a place in my heart as the edition that broke the almost 2 decade dirge of BT models. Having a gorgeous limited edition lunch box codex for the edition everyone admits is broken, is a bit meh. But since I don't play much anymore, it just means I'm on the same boat as JaM_naf#6121 here. Painting my glorious new models, awaiting a more reasonable 10th.

Yeah the black templar range refresh has been my favourite thing in 40k so far. 

but they just keep adding and buffing things in every codex. I guess it makes people buy it but they could tone it down at least a little bit.

[Captain Idaho]

I get the OP concerns... it does suck when your 4 wound character takes 2 wounding hits, you fail both saves and D2 kills him. A Terminator lasts just as long against such weapons.

Solutions might require a new edition though. A decrease in power level would be great.

[Special Officer Doofy]

11 minutes ago, Captain Idaho said:

I get the OP concerns... it does suck when your 4 wound character takes 2 wounding hits, you fail both saves and D2 kills him. A Terminator lasts just as long against such weapons.

Solutions might require a new edition though. A decrease in power level would be great.

This. The creep got real for me when termagant's got a S5 -1AP gun. I feel the core rules are fine, it's the individual power creep of each codex that ruined it and made things like armor of contempt necessary but silly.

[MARK0SIAN]

1 hour ago, Valkyrion said:

I've got a 40k game coming up at the end of the month which will be my first in three months and I already feel like I've forgotten how to play, yet I could sit down with the 2nd ed rule book the day before a game and re-remember all the stats and points cost from the Daemon World army list in the Chaos codex appendix. 

I mean, the rules for firing a Cyclone Missile Launcher in 2nd edition were more complicated than anything 9th edition throws up, but 9th just feels less intuitive and therefore harder to remember - not difficult to learn, just hard to remember, like everything has too many words or something.

I think I'll have more joy with 30k. At the moment there's a lot of book flicking to remember what Brutal or Reach do, but they'll bed in eventually, but at least there's not two lots Synaptic Imperatives, Command Points, Auras, Stratagems, Secondaries and so on to remember.
 

It’s hard to read/remember because the whole thing is written like the small print on a bank loan.

It also just isn’t intuitive. For example, people have had to produce actual flow charts to determine who gets to fight first in certain situations because there are so many conflicting abilities and it’s that complicated to work it out.

https://www.goonhammer.com/ruleshammer-unusual-fight-phases-what-units-come-first-last-in-the-middle/
 

Compare that to a simple initiative system like 7th used and heresy still uses and it’s just emphasises how unintuitive it is in 9th. 
 

In fact, the order of fighting is the perfect microcosm of one of the major problems with 9th edition. They took their own simple, easy to understand system (chargers always fight first) and couldn’t resist handing out loads of additional abilities (this unit always fights first, make a unit fight last etc) that destroyed the simplicity of their own rules and made it a confusing, overly complex mess. 
 

They remind me of that meme of the guy putting a stick through the spokes of his own bike. 

[phandaal]

11 minutes ago, Putrid Choir said:

This. The creep got real for me when termagant's got a S5 -1AP gun. I feel the core rules are fine, it's the individual power creep of each codex that ruined it and made things like armor of contempt necessary but silly.

Felt like Strength 5 beetles were a turning point for a lot of people.

It is not the worst instance of lethality creep by any means, but there is just something extra stupid about a gun that squirts out little beetles being stronger than the gun used by the game's flagship super soldiers.

[Special Officer Doofy]

6 minutes ago, phandaal said:

Felt like Strength 5 beetles were a turning point for a lot of people.

It is not the worst instance of lethality creep by any means, but there is just something extra stupid about a gun that squirts out little beetles being stronger than the gun used by the game's flagship super soldiers.

Right, it's just one of many examples and the one that jumps out the most to me.

I personally was not a fan of 7th, 8th had me come back to the hobby. Mark0sians example is perfect. The Core rules are fine, whoever charges fights first. Then they add so many exceptions and counters in the codexes. Armor saves countered by free AP on everything, then giving stuff invuln, then giving weapons that bypass invuln, and now we will have a new Daemon save that ignores the ignore.

It will take a new edition to fix alot of issues, if they fix the lethality of the game, characters will last longer.

[Valkyrion]

They could fix it by releasing a balance dataslate saying 'ignore all the rules for stratagems, sorry about the £15 you wasted on the cards' and make a Command Reroll a 'Hero Reroll' or something, that you can use once per turn on one of your characters to help them stand out a bit, and one unit per turn can use Overwatch. 

It will suck for some things, but it would apply to everyone and it might make things that are decent but have no real stratagem support see some play. 

Nothing should get to act twice in a given phase, I don't think. Your characters become more survivable if their enemy can only hit them once with no stratagem support. 

I'm not a tournament level player by any stretch, but when the new Tyranids came out, my regular opponent utterly steamrollered me without using any stratagems beyond the additional relic and warlord trait and command rerolls. He didn't need any of the ones in the book. If the book is that powerful without stratagems to a pair of semi experienced non competitive players then what could a proper tournament player do with strats? 

I'm putting my soapbox away before I get started on auras and rerolls....

[phandaal]

9th Edition's core rules are good, yeah. They could use some tweaks, but overall they feel solid.

The lethality and ridiculousness comes from the codexes. That would take a new edition to fix in the sense that it would have to be some kind of Index release to tone everything down.

Using the example of Tyranids, I actually did have the privilege of playing my Deathwing against them in their pre-nerf state last month.

Tyranids guy had an unoptimized list and made many mistakes (he was cool though, not a WAAC monster). Nearly tabled me. Going by the amount of 2s and 3s he removed from his wound rolls thanks to Inner Circle, he would have tabled a non-Deathwing army by Turn 3.

Shockingly, I did win the game, but that had more to do with playing Tempest of War and the other guy making a lot of mistakes.

[Valkyrion]

Yeah, I'm not sure what could be done to the core rules to make the game flow better and be less lethal when it's the codexes that are the problem, but there's still 4 codexes yet to come in this edition and we've only got 11 or 12 months left. That means one faction is going to get around 6 months with their codex at best before the new edition drops, so GW aren't going to go for a hard reset, and neither are they going to change their M.O. 

They've shown with the balance dataslates, points adjustments and the mission pack things that they recognise issues and try and correct things, but then you get different problems. Necrons, for example, seem to have become a solid faction after 2 years, but you wouldn't know it by looking at their codex. You've got to also find all their relevant bits of info in dataslates, MFM, mission packs and the rest which have drastically changed the faction as a whole. It's not just an armour of contempt level rule, or making a Hive Tyrant a mandatory warlord, it's a huge change that alters the entire army. That shouldn't be necessary and it's only necessary because everything that has come after has been turned up to 11. 

You can't just show up to a GW store or gaming club with your army and your codex and know for certain that everyone is playing by the same rules anymore. 

 

Anyway, we're veering off topic and I don't want to get the topic locked, so....I think characters have the right profiles in general, it's just that everything is too deadly and you feel it more when you are taking away a 150 point model that has probably had a couple of CP spent on it to boot.

Edited July 16, 2022 by Valkyrion

[Claws and Effect]

I switched over to Horus Heresy a year and a half or so ago. I saw the direction 9th edition was heading way back then and decided I wanted no part of it. 

[bigtrouble]

Something I’d like to know from those who don’t like this edition’s “lethality”: What percentage of an army should survive a game, in your mind? This would inform the number of wounds a unit should have.

 

9th is a bit more like chess, in that positioning and playing with good tempo are far more important than not getting killed. I like that. Everything can die. I think it increases the challenge to play the mission in a good way.

[MARK0SIAN]

10 minutes ago, bigtrouble said:

Something I’d like to know from those who don’t like this edition’s “lethality”: What percentage of an army should survive a game, in your mind? This would inform the number of wounds a unit should have.

 

9th is a bit more like chess, in that positioning and playing with good tempo are far more important than not getting killed. I like that. Everything can die. I think it increases the challenge to play the mission in a good way.

Positioning and tempo take a huge backseat compared to who’s got the latest, most broken codex or who can put together the cheesiest combo of strats, relics etc. 

There seems to be a prevailing notion amongst the designers and a lot of the player base that units mustn’t just be good at their job, they mustn’t be able to fail at it. So an anti-armour unit must be able to one-shot any vehicle it comes across, a melee unit must be able to instantly kill anything it runs into in melee. This is one of the problems we have, it’s not enough that a unit can damage its intended target, it must be able to inflict horrendous damage or kill it in one go. That makes it almost impossible to make things survivable because then people will moan that their 150 point melee unit can’t kerb-stomp a knight on the charge. 

It’s not so much about people’s armies surviving the game, it’s about them surviving the first or second turn or surviving a single contact with an enemy unit. 
 

You’re right in terms of the chess analogy in that, in chess, if a unit has the right position it take any opposing piece, a pawn taking a queen for example. The same shouldn’t be true for a game like 40K because the sides are not symmetrical.

[phandaal]

13 minutes ago, bigtrouble said:

Something I’d like to know from those who don’t like this edition’s “lethality”: What percentage of an army should survive a game, in your mind? This would inform the number of wounds a unit should have.

40k is not Chess.

A better way to look at this is how quickly you and your opponent can remove each other's units, and how much of each army is left at the end of the game.

For example, if you have 0% of your army left at the end of Turn 5, and your opponent has 1% of theirs left at the end of Turn 5, it would be considered an even match. If you and your opponent both have 99% of your units left at the end of your Turn 5, then you would both probably consider the game to have been boring.

If your army loses 30% of its units during your opponent's first turn, that would probably be considered too fast. After all, what is the point of bringing models if you do not even get to use almost half of them?

That said, I do not know the right answer for how much is too much and how little is too little. Frankly, that is what Games Workshop should be figuring out in exchange for selling us rulebooks.

[Toldavf]

I remember when most characters had 2 wounds and 6 attack, in the land before eternal warrior. Positioning characters if an important part of the game, it is the best protection they can get. 

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

2 hours ago, bigtrouble said:

Something I’d like to know from those who don’t like this edition’s “lethality”: What percentage of an army should survive a game, in your mind? This would inform the number of wounds a unit should have.

 

9th is a bit more like chess, in that positioning and playing with good tempo are far more important than not getting killed. I like that. Everything can die. I think it increases the challenge to play the mission in a good way.

Positioning doesn’t help much if the earthshaker gets buffed to heavy 3D3+3 S10 AP-3 D3

 

no matter where you position yourself it can reach out and wreck you.

 

the lethality has made turn 1 alpha strikes way too important.

in my last game I forgot about grinding advance, but probably could have had a decent alpha strike on my opponent had I remembered considering he was playing marines and had wasted nearly a whole squad of intercessors and a whole squad of eliminators.

I think how many units survive should be more down to generalship, and not make you feel like every unit heavy tank or light infantry will get shot off the table in one turn from one unit. There doesn’t seem to be much risk/reward in 9th, to me it seems like there is very little reward in taking a risk and the whole game is more about hiding as many units as you can in cover as long as you can, preferably on an objective 

personally I think infantry born AT should be fairly expensive and that the majority of an army’s AT should come from vehicles.

 

for example if demolisher multi meltas cost 15pts I think the eradicator multimelta should cost 20-25points.

Edited July 17, 2022 by Inquisitor_Lensoven

[Captain Idaho]

40K is not that sophisticated that maneuverability matters more than lining up and killing opponents in as short a time as possible.

More importantly, customers purchase models and if they all get removed before doing anything, their perceived value is much reduced. 

[spessmarine]

On 7/16/2022 at 6:35 AM, MARK0SIAN said:

It’s hard to read/remember because the whole thing is written like the small print on a bank loan.

It also just isn’t intuitive. For example, people have had to produce actual flow charts to determine who gets to fight first in certain situations because there are so many conflicting abilities and it’s that complicated to work it out.

https://www.goonhammer.com/ruleshammer-unusual-fight-phases-what-units-come-first-last-in-the-middle/
 

Compare that to a simple initiative system like 7th used and heresy still uses and it’s just emphasises how unintuitive it is in 9th. 
 

In fact, the order of fighting is the perfect microcosm of one of the major problems with 9th edition. They took their own simple, easy to understand system (chargers always fight first) and couldn’t resist handing out loads of additional abilities (this unit always fights first, make a unit fight last etc) that destroyed the simplicity of their own rules and made it a confusing, overly complex mess. 
 

They remind me of that meme of the guy putting a stick through the spokes of his own bike. 

yeah, dropping initiative as a stat just seems dumb now
you replaced a straightforward system with something that functions similar but is more opaque with weirdness like strikes-first, strikes-firster and strikes-firstest floating about

[bigtrouble]

2 hours ago, MARK0SIAN said:

There seems to be a prevailing notion amongst the designers and a lot of the player base that units mustn’t just be good at their job, they mustn’t be able to fail at it.

I definitely see this problem. If we invest enough in a unit, points, CP, time and money, we expect it to perform at its one function nearly every time. If it isn’t reliable it makes the weight of decisions feel less impactful, like it doesn’t matter how the game is played. I think i’ve noticed that overpowered codices tend to have more units that are consistent, and don’t suffer the bad rolls as much.