How are you liking HH 2.0 so far?

[Mandragola]

I guess it looks kind of like you'd expect from a GW game. Great models, fun background, sketchy rules and very little balance - though in that case it helps that most of us are using the same core army list.

I do mostly like the change to blasts but it's caused some weird interactions due to the utterly baffling choice to have two different systems for penetrating the armour of infantry and vehicles. An extreme example is the Thunderhawk cannon that's AP4 destroyer, so it will penetrate any vehicle almost automatically but leave a marine in power armour standing and have no effect on a dreadnought. But then my dark furies can rip dreadnoughts into pieces but can't even scratch some vehicles.

I think it's pretty strange that they decided to not take anything from 8/9th edition 40k. They had a chance to swap the AP system for save modifiers, to make cover relevant (it matters less than ever without so much AP3) and perhaps to introduce a damage stat to weapons instead of instant death and brutal. I'm not saying they should have just switched over completely, and I'm really not a fan of the current 40k, but this feels like a step back in some ways.

[SkimaskMohawk]

A lot of people despise the save modifier and damage system for absolutely trivializing durability of units. You can see the see saw of them trying to make things durable in the face of modifying armour and damage, and then them trying to make high impact units that can still feel powerful. After 5 years, the games a mess of ignore modifiers and damage vs. super high ap, ignores invul, and flat giant damage numbers.

The point of vehicle armour was for them to be invulnerable until faced with something that could easily paste them. These weapons used to be capable at killing everything else as a result of their strength and ap; this got butchered because of reasons and now we have a bunch of high strength blast weapons that can only knock a single hull point off vehicles and struggle to kill infantry. Like even that thunderhawk cannon; it pens super easily, but it averages 2 hull points. Great against a parking lot, terrible against single vehicles. 

Idk, you look at the vehicle damage table, you look at dreads, you look at the heavy subtype, and then you look at blast weapon profiles. It's really clear that the majority of blast weapons have no purpose and they didn't actually understand/really didn't care about the knock effects the changes brought.

Totally agree on the cover. It got made very 8th editiony in that it's block LOS or bust. I guess they didn't like going to ground for 3+ cover, night fight 3+ (with bonus night lord 2+), or conqueror of cities for for mass 3+. But uh, taking away going to ground and the warlord trait and stealth from night fight kind of...does that. 

[Orange Knight]

Perhaps the future of both the Heresy and Warhammer 40k lies with a system that is an amalgam of both...

[Xenith]

4 hours ago, Mandragola said:

They had a chance to swap the AP system for save modifiers

I don't like the modifiers in 40k, but I think in heresy where pretty much everything is in power armour, we could have achieved a lot of nuance with weapons. 

[Gorgoff]

30 minutes ago, Xenith said:

I don't like the modifiers in 40k, but I think in heresy where pretty much everything is in power armour, we could have achieved a lot of nuance with weapons. 

That is the exact reason why we shouldn't have modifiers. It is just impossible to balance, doesn't feel immersive at all and makes Marines feel weak and soft. I like it that they reduced the amount of weapons which ignore armorand it should stay that way. I like my Marines tough.

[Xenith]

37 minutes ago, Gorgoff said:

I like my Marines tough.

I agree there - the amount of firepower marines can stand up to in HH (and by default, pre-8th ed games) is refreshing and great. I just mean that you can more finely tune how likely a marine is to survive a it from a specific weapon with modifiers, as opposed to all/nothing, and you dont end up with weird stuff like AP4 breaching on plasma, where sometimes it punches through terminator armour, sometimes it doesn't crack power armour. My opinion is that you shouldn't need a special rule to tell you what a gun can do/how tough a model is, when you can bake it directly into the profile. 

An appropriately designed modifier system and stats also means you can do away with things like invulnerable saves, as how often model x should survive being wounded by weapon y is baked into the profile - same way as armour of contempt largely rendered invulns pointless/zero benefit in 40k.

Anyway, this is OT - happy to discuss design philosophy elsewhere! 

 

Edited September 6, 2022 by Xenith

[Mandragola]

I definitely wouldn't want to have gone down the 40k route to the point where everything was insanely lethal. I understand the reasoning behind the two armour systems up to a point, but in reality I don't think it's ever worked. Why don't you use the AP stat to see if you penetrate vehicles, for example? It just leads to this bizarre inconsistency.

In general I liked the transition from 7th to 8th, but I certainly wouldn't argue that it was perfect. If seems to me that the 2.0 reboot was an opportunity to pick the best bits out of both game types but they chose not to.

[SkimaskMohawk]

10 minutes ago, Mandragola said:

I definitely wouldn't want to have gone down the 40k route to the point where everything was insanely lethal. I understand the reasoning behind the two armour systems up to a point, but in reality I don't think it's ever worked. Why don't you use the AP stat to see if you penetrate vehicles, for example? It just leads to this bizarre inconsistency.

You do use the ap stat against vehicles; ap 2 gives +1 to the damage chart, while ap 1 gives +2. A lascannon or meltagun can explode a tank; a thunderhawk cannon or cerberus shot...doesn't. Stripping plasma and all the big blasts of ap 2 left the game in a lurch of only las and melta can explode vehicles now.

20 minutes ago, Mandragola said:

If seems to me that the 2.0 reboot was an opportunity to pick the best bits out of both game types but they chose not to.

Andy Chambers said it was meant to pull the best bits from the previous editions, but they didn't even get that right lol. Vehicle damage charts, ruins rules, wound allocation, etc... ALl better examples in previous editions. 

[MARK0SIAN]

Save modifiers have been such a disaster for marines in 40K that they actually had to introduce a rule to make them ignore part of them because power armour felt like tissue paper. 

As for fine tuning weapons, you can’t really fine tune the range of weapons in heresy when you’ve only 5 numbers to work with. As for multiple damage weapons they just mean you’re picking up even more models by the handful. 
 

It was such a relief that they didn’t migrate heresy into the 8th edition ruleset and I don’t think it has anything to offer. Yeah, this system does lead to some things like blasts being a bit underwhelming and being only able to take 1HP off a vehicle sometimes feels weird but I’d rather things were hard to kill as opposed to easy to kill. 

[Mandragola]

I guess for me that just because you had save modifiers wouldn't mean you needed to make everything AP-4 and 2-3 damage, like they seem to have done in 40k. The default should probably be AP0.

To be honest I don't completely hate the outcome of the current system, which is that you have weapons that do particular things well and others that don't. You can't expect something like a Typhon to just leave a smoking hole where whatever you fired it at used to be - it's supposedly good against some things and not others. It's just a shame it doesn't really make any sense which things it's good and bad against.

[Bung]

We still lack rules for some armies, so we cant be sure if Blast weapons are really that bad in the future.

Space Marine Power and Terminator Armour being impressed by blasts and some other stuff fits the lore.

And about the Vehicle Damage table, i had luck talking with some military officers doing planing and simulations.

Its one of the things that comes really close to reality with the posibilities locked to a 6 sided dice with modifiers.

 

[Brofist]

'Heavy' is a good example of swinging too hard into a single design direction.

Its clear the design ethos was 'no low AP large blast weapons'. So now we have buckets of low AP high strength templates with few meaningful distinctions. They then further compound this design by adding heavy to a bunch of units. You're almost always getting saves against blast weapons in 2.0, so it just ends up punching down against blast and template weapons that had already been toned down.

Large blast plasma in 2.0 especially feels so very... weak? Anti climactic? I'm not sure what word to use to describe the loss of feeling something that was once decisive. On one hand I like that we have a new meta and new direction for the game, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss playing in an environment where big lethal templates felt good to use.

[Xenith]

15 hours ago, MARK0SIAN said:

As for multiple damage weapons they just mean you’re picking up even more models by the handful. 

And we don't have weapons that inflict instant death or kill handfulls of models at once in heresy?

My feelings on modifiers was that instead of giving termies a 2+ and 5++ to save >50% of ap4 breaching 4+ plasma hits, you give termies Sv1+, and make plasma AP-2. Termies take a 3+ save against plasma and normal marines take a 5+ save against plasma wounds. 

By using modifiers and playing with armour values you can eliminate excess special rules added to kill more or save more things, due to other broken rules. As a 1 always fails on the save, you can actually use very low armour saves to function, effectively, in the same way as an invulnerable. If you want something to ignore all saves, then you just give it something crazy like ap-10 rather than coming up with another special rule to memorise. 

[MARK0SIAN]

12 minutes ago, Xenith said:

And we don't have weapons that inflict instant death or kill handfulls of models at once in heresy?

My feelings on modifiers was that instead of giving termies a 2+ and 5++ to save >50% of ap4 breaching 4+ plasma hits, you give termies Sv1+, and make plasma AP-2. Termies take a 3+ save against plasma and normal marines take a 5+ save against plasma wounds. 

By using modifiers and playing with armour values you can eliminate excess special rules added to kill more or save more things, due to other broken rules. As a 1 always fails on the save, you can actually use very low armour saves to function, effectively, in the same way as an invulnerable. If you want something to ignore all saves, then you just give it something crazy like ap-10 rather than coming up with another special rule to memorise. 

We do have instant death weapons now but they’re rarer. For example a terminator isn’t getting instant death from a heavy bolter which would happen from a damage 2 heavy bolter like in 40K. In this edition there’s also a lot less stuff that means you’re picking up models by the handful anymore, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but it’s not like it used to be where a blast template would remove a dozen guys. 

I don’t like modifiers because (IMO) marines should be getting their 3+ save against most stuff which wouldn’t happen with modifiers. They also tend to lead to counter after counter being added like in 40K. 

That said, if you were talking about moving away from a D6 system then I might be more open to the idea but I just don’t think a D6 system gives enough granularity for modifiers to be effective without feeling like your guns do nothing or your armour is paper.

[Marshal Mittens]

@Brofist I still find the plasma cannon from the Dread to be ok against power armor. A 5" blast can cover a lot of marines, and it has a 50% chance of picking a lot of them up. For its points, it seems like the best blast weapon.

I will say, normal plasma cannons do feel weaker than plasma guns, and it seems like a TSS with plasma guns, point for point, will probably kill more power armor than a plasma cannon from a dread. 

Plasma does seem very swingy against marines now though, either it kills a bunch, or very few, depending on if they get to save or not, which makes it hard to predict. 

[Gorgoff]

17 hours ago, Mandragola said:

 It just leads to this bizarre inconsistency.

 

Vehicles are not people. Hence it is weird when they have wounds and toughness like infantry has. They have thick armour plates where small arms fire pings off but if a weapon punches through the vehicle is in grave danger. I think the system makes a good job showing this. It is not perfect but way better than the :cuss:ty 40k game.

17 hours ago, Mandragola said:

In general I liked the transition from 7th to 8th, but I certainly wouldn't argue that it was perfect. If seems to me that the 2.0 reboot was an opportunity to pick the best bits out of both game types but they chose not to.

I am more than happy that they didn't take the stuff fans of 40k like. That game looks and feels like a boardgame and not a tabletop.

Better rules for terrain would be nice though. 

 

What I don't like so far are the psychic powers. They are so... boring? And only some are good. I would have wanted more shenanigans and not this stuff we got. The system is good but most of the powers seem so uninteresting although some are very powerful. 

[Xenith]

1 hour ago, MARK0SIAN said:

We do have instant death weapons now but they’re rarer. For example a terminator isn’t getting instant death from a heavy bolter which would happen from a damage 2 heavy bolter like in 40K.

Takes 2 unsaved wounds from a heavy bolter to kil la termie in both 30k and 40k. Instant death is also conferred by anything double the targets toughness  - generally S8+ - Which is plentiful. 

1 hour ago, MARK0SIAN said:

I don’t like modifiers because (IMO) marines should be getting their 3+ save against most stuff which wouldn’t happen with modifiers.

I don't understand why you think you'd slap modifiers on everything? Just because you can give a bolter ap-2 doesn't mean you should. I've been advocating that the addition of save modifiers, in a specific, limited way, can clean up a bunch of unneccessary special rules and still preserve the toughness of marines. That's just a fact. My game design philosophy is that the unit/weapons characteristics and abilities are better baked into a statline than conferred by myriad special rules that require page flicking. 

[Xenith]

Anyway, I'm not going to say more on that. Apologies for OT, it just feels like what I was writing was not being read. 

Had another game on Monday, war of lies against dark angels - with only 2 line units each, that had to survive until T6 to score, the game was just kill off one anothers troops. I do feel that line should maybe have been the equivalent of ObSec, and allow other units to score. 

[Cadmus Tyro]

I’ve had a couple of games of 2.0 so far, still learning the nuances of the new edition. Generally I’ve enjoyed it, the reactions make it feel much more engaging than before and there are now more things to consider in your list other than anti tank and anti air. I find myself trying to balance the cost of upgrades vs the need to get enough scoring, whilst trying to have some sort of counter to dreadnoughts etc. 

As others have rightly pointed out there’s a few issues. Given the degree to which they seem to have play tested this edition it baffles me as to how some of these issues were not picked up. 
 

The two big things for me currently are reactions and blast weapons. Reactions seem overpowered purely because a unit can react in each phase, I personally feel it should be limited to one reaction per turn. That forces you to make some choices at least. Although I’m reserving judgement until I’ve got a few higher points games under my belt, as I suspect the impact of reactions will be diluted to some degree by the points levels played.

Blast weapons are just a joke at the moment, particularly demo cannons but also Earth shakers. Reducing the template size, the AP and increasing infantry durability (increased wounds, shrouded, night fight BS modifier, heavy Unit type) makes them essentially unplayable. There really should be some consequence for poor deployment/positioning. I understand the philosophy behind the rules change and don’t think we should go back to 1.0 levels and I’m enjoying more of a focus on infantry, but it’s swung too far the other way.

Cadmus 

[Xenith]

9 minutes ago, Cadmus Tyro said:

Reactions seem overpowered purely because a unit can react in each phase, I personally feel it should be limited to one reaction per turn. That forces you to make some choices at least.

Yea, this is an issue particularly with stuff like dreads - I shot my opponent's terms in my turn, he then fired them at the dread, I reactioned with a gravis melta, killing 2, he charged an I overwatched killing another. 1 reaction per unit per turn would be a good balance, or have a -1BS modifier to reaction shots? 

[MARK0SIAN]

32 minutes ago, Xenith said:

Takes 2 unsaved wounds from a heavy bolter to kil la termie in both 30k and 40k. Instant death is also conferred by anything double the targets toughness  - generally S8+ - Which is plentiful. 

I don't understand why you think you'd slap modifiers on everything? Just because you can give a bolter ap-2 doesn't mean you should. I've been advocating that the addition of save modifiers, in a specific, limited way, can clean up a bunch of unneccessary special rules and still preserve the toughness of marines. That's just a fact. My game design philosophy is that the unit/weapons characteristics and abilities are better baked into a statline than conferred by myriad special rules that require page flicking. 

It only takes two unsaved wound in 40K to kill a terminator because they have more wounds. In 30k it would take one unsaved wound from a 2 damage HB to kill a terminator. The double threshold for instant death is also much rarer than weapons that would get 2 damage etc.

I’d also flip your last point. Because they could add modifiers I don’t know why you think they wouldn’t add them to everything. GW’s track record with 40K shows they can’t resist handing out modifiers like candy, to the point where they have to introduce rules that minimise or even outright ignore some modifiers to correct the problem.

[Xenith]

18 minutes ago, MARK0SIAN said:

The double threshold for instant death is also much rarer than weapons that would get 2 damage etc.

Again, I'm talking very specifically about only swapping the current yes/no AP system for a modifier system, bringing damage stats into it is something you've done, and then objected to for some reason. 

Either way, you're still not understanding what I'm saying. In a ground-up rebuild of the game, you get to decide what weapons are 2D and what arent. In the same way that the current rules changed plasma from 1.0 to 2.0 to allow power armour to get a save against it sometimes, as a game designer you can change the rules. 

The use of a modifier system can allow the removal of additional, unneccessary special rules e.g. breaching (also known as bloat) and maintain the same resilience in marines that they currently have.

 

 

Edited September 7, 2022 by Xenith

[MARK0SIAN]

8 minutes ago, Xenith said:

You're still not understanding what I'm saying. In a ground-up rebuild of the game, you get to decide what weapons are 2D and what arent. In the same way that the current rules changed plasma from 1.0 to 2.0 to allow power armour to get a save against it sometimes, as a game designer you can change the rules. 

 

 

If you mean me or yourself or the community could decide then we might have a hope but if you mean GW could decide then I think you have too much faith in them that they would restrict multi-damage or not get carried away with the modifiers.

I think, for me, it boils down to the fact that GW have handled the modifier system so badly in terms of a lack of restraint that I just would not trust them with one in any shape or form, regardless of the merits of a restrained modifier system.

[Mandragola]

1 hour ago, Gorgoff said:

 

Vehicles are not people. Hence it is weird when they have wounds and toughness like infantry has. They have thick armour plates where small arms fire pings off but if a weapon punches through the vehicle is in grave danger. I think the system makes a good job showing this. It is not perfect but way better than the :cuss:ty 40k game.

I am more than happy that they didn't take the stuff fans of 40k like. That game looks and feels like a boardgame and not a tabletop.

Better rules for terrain would be nice though. 

 

What I don't like so far are the psychic powers. They are so... boring? And only some are good. I would have wanted more shenanigans and not this stuff we got. The system is good but most of the powers seem so uninteresting although some are very powerful. 

While it's true that vehicles aren't people, the line between the two is far less distinct in 30k than you suggest. Basically everything is encased in armour made from Ceramite (whatever that is) - whether that's a marine or a tank. That's why I find it so odd when you have weapons that go through the ceramite on one target but not on another.

And if you think we should have two systems, where is the line between things that should have wounds and toughness vs things that should have armour values? Dreadnoughts, Land Speeders and Armigers have moved to having wounds and toughness this time. When they've remembered (not with land speeders and Armigers), GW have added a ton of special rules to allow things like krak grenades and battlesmith to be used on them, representing that they are mostly mechanical.

I am not a 40k fanboy. I've basically stopped playing it because the game is such a mess right now. But that's not to say there are no aspects of it that work better than 30k. 

Ultimately, it would be fine to have two systems if the writers made it feel like they made sense. They do not. You can't tell me it makes sense for a terminator to be virtually immune (with a 2+ rerollable save) against a destroyer weapon that will penetrate a super-heavy tank all but automatically. And should a power sword that cuts straight through power armour provide absolutely no benefit against vehicles?

[SkimaskMohawk]

2 hours ago, Xenith said:

the game was just kill off one anothers troops.

Unless you were bringing 6 scoring units in 1st, that was the game then too. And I remember that people usually hovered around 3 or 4, so ya, it was the game then too.

The problem isn't line being too punitive; once you get recons and command squads to fill in your elite lists, then you're off to the races. The problem is that the missions don't actually care about scoring the objectives and supplement it with a ton of kill points. War of lies can literally just be kill points at the end of the game and make all the objectives count for 0. Having 6 turns be the majority game length is also a bit...long. 5 with a chance to roll over tends to speed things up and focus the plan a bit better.

@Mandragola imo what the designers thought of how things should work is an argument better left un-voiced. The blast and bike fiasco makes it pretty obvious they think in very emotional, heavy handed ways. 

Putting that aside, the whole bit about power swords giving no benefit against some armours but cutting through others with ease is idk, missing the forest a bit. That's the nature of armour; impenetrable until penetrated. It's also discounting the fact that toughness based models are also invulnerable to stuff with insufficient strength; that power sword needs its rending to wound a leviathan; a solar auxilia hq with a paragon blade will bounce off, regardless of its AP. Compare the other power weapons and you still have an easier time hullpointing off the vehicles in your strength range than hurting the leviathan. 

Not every weapon can hurt vehicles, and not every weapon can hurt toughness values. Look at Kabanda and think about what weapons get locked out while he's at toughness 9.

Edited September 7, 2022 by SkimaskMohawk