Steven Pardo on whether GW "killed" heresy - much more thoughtful than the title suggests!

[Petitioner's City]

Interesting video from Steve Pardo of SN Battle Reports did an interesting piece of how the first year of heresy has been handled, sometimes well, and often bad. he does express well what is good, for him, but much that is wrong.

 

 

 

For some fun stuff they've done recently, their Cthonia campaign is pretty fan-dabby with another coming soon!

 

 

 

 

Edited August 7, 2023 by Petitioner's City

[MegaVolt87]

Outer circle posted this comment which got the YT heart/ like thing from SN battle reports-

 

It's not a matter of if they are killing it, and more a matter of they have at a minimum:
-40k
-Sigmar
-Heresy
-Middle Earth
-Blood Bowl
-Necromunda
-Titanicus
-Aeronautica (replace with Epish)
-Warcry
-Underworlds
-The Old World

Their production capacity is up about 30% on what it was prior to specialist games coming back, but they have how much extra work load? So really, since they cannot look after all systems at once, they seem to have an approach of "how little support can we give to a system at a time". All the problems in heresy are to some extent problems in all systems, with Heresy being a problem child as it was so FW intensive and they are planning IMHO to port it all into plastic and roll FW into GW this year or next.

 

Its a fair assessment and matches with how GW have been rolling for a while. Expanding the product range to keep players in the GW walled garden, release just enough content to keep people interested after a big opening. If you are unhappy in one space of the hobby there is another that you would like- migrating from 40k to HH is a common move for many people, myself included. HH is competing with the money makers of 40k, new AoS stuff like Cities of Sigmar etc for release slots. Only thing to be done is wait it out and scoop up the HH releases you like along the way to keep the line(s) moving on the various reports, sales charts etc to get HH stuff bumped up the production schedule list. 

[Orion]

11 minutes ago, MegaVolt87 said:

FW intensive and they are planning IMHO to port it all into plastic and roll FW into GW this year or next.

I get a little depressed anytime I hear this.
I liked them being more separate. Now everything is in competition (see the list above)

[Petitioner's City]

43 minutes ago, JayJapanB said:

I get a little depressed anytime I hear this.
I liked them being more separate. Now everything is in competition (see the list above)

 

Tbh outer circle posts this kind of idea so often (and I've called it out on comments on his videos, which are unanswered), but it's clearly not the case and is not in way substantiated by GW itself or it's staff. 

 

SG/FW will remain its own team, a somewhat expanded team, but one whose plastic releases have to fit into the wider calendar. Thus I get what you mean about everything in competition - there are only so many plastic spots (hence for example, Munda's quarterly slot if we are lucky!)

 

 

 

 

But to be honest I think the only dominating thing in the schedule is 40k. AoS feels rather less supported than 40k, even though we have had Seraphon and Chaos in the past two years, and started this edition with Kruleboyz, and now have Cities. It just feels weirdly anaemic compared to 40k, with predominantly signature character releases as the standard release for AoS, alongside Warcry and Underworlds as small releases.

 
 

 

 

To get to TOC's point - SG itself has a number of key games, that exist alongside the main studio's games (the list above).

 

The overall studio is "Warhammer Studio" into which everything fits.

 

The "main" studio - which people usually mean by "GW" - seems to be organised in the following way in terms of rules writing 

 

40k

 - under studio manager Stuart Black 

- I assume there is a lead designer (or designers) under Stu for 40k

- Kill Team, potentially under Elliot Hamer

 

AoS, 

- studio manager was/is Jes Bickham (linkedin has him in this Role, but twitter says IP manager)

- lead AoS writer is Matt Rose

- lead Warcry writer  - not sure 

- Underworlds is under Dave Sanders

 

Forge world/Specialist Games is distinct from the above, and its studio manager is of course Andy Hoare 

 

The sci-fi side (under Hoare, lead designer(s) not sure):

 

- Necromunda (still going strong, since 2017 to date)

- AT (put to sleep, maybe still rules for suitable new LI releases)

- AI (discontinued, maybe still rules for suitable new LI releases)

- Heresy 

- LI 

 

The fantasy side (lead designer is Rob Alderman, under Hoare's studio leadership):

 

- Blood Bowl

- Middle Earth

- The Old World 

 

It may be that the SG staff under Hoare and Rob work in both areas - certainly the mini designers and graphic artists seem to - and thus share the writing duties too among the team members under specific project leads. 

 

Sorry to ramble, I just think it's important to track this a bit better :)

 

Edit: it would be cool to track this, since GW don't do this for us anymore - who does what? Wade as IP lead for 40k, Mark Bedford as lead miniature designer for much of SG still, etc. 

Edited August 7, 2023 by Petitioner's City

[Noserenda]

Both videos currently private or unavailable?

 

As to studio layout, well, specialist games often feels like the necromunda studio that has some other games they do on the side. AoD I think has benefited from a backlog of kits to release but is slowing and normalising now

[Orion]

Imperial Armour where?

Imperial Armour where?!?!?

Stop making mohawk heads and heresy shoulder pads, and drag Warwick, Cottrell etc back into the studio. 

[Petitioner's City]

32 minutes ago, Noserenda said:

Both videos currently private or unavailable?

 

As to studio layout, well, specialist games often feels like the necromunda studio that has some other games they do on the side. AoD I think has benefited from a backlog of kits to release but is slowing and normalising now

 

How annoying they hid it! Its not in my cache either, otherwise I could try to include the transcript. How weird. 

[SkimaskMohawk]

This is what i posted as a comment in Facebook on one of the groups Steven posted that video in:

 

Quote

I think it's obvious that the specialist game team is not staffed appropriately for their apparent breadth of responsibility. You can't do what amounts to an extreme version of 9ths transition to 10th, while developing the new epic, while pumping out necromunda rules, all at the same time. 

 

People (maybe just myself) assumed that the launch of heresy 2nd would smooth out the balance problems and reinvigorate the game as a result of the expanded choice in units. This didn't happen; if anything, it created a more restrictive set of unit choices, as the gap between the "good" and "bad" units was wider than ever. And frustratingly, it never got addressed. From the final playtest to launch, to each very minor FAQ; nothing. And on top of that, there's people still waiting for their armies; blackshields and daemons still can't be run, as well as shattered legions and armies of dark compliance. Over a year into the new edition and there's fewer viable units, fewer viable builds for armies, and fewer armies. It sucks, and the game stagnating in this lurch feels extremely frustrating to play at this point.

 

Now it's debatable if the transition from 1st to 2nd was more than 9th to 10th, but to me it feels like it was with a larger overhaul. The specialist team simply isn't big enough to meet the demand of creating two new games and expanding a third. 

 

And on top of that, the idea of heresy in plastic never really took off. You got tanks, jetbikes, dreads, terminators, tactical, and heavy support squads. With the exception of jetbikes, the variety is super low and supports very samey builds; anything different is still in resin. And unfortunately, any plausible "late heresy" 40k stand-in is on a timer, as all the classics like land speeders, bikers, scouts and the rest are getting discontinued (guess we know why attack bikes and box dreads never made it into the libers).

 

So a rules team that's way overworked and can't fix their mistakes. A product line that doesn't fulfill its promise of brining in new players turned off by the cost and more time intensive resin. Add in the balance philosophy that saw so many units become complete duds to that mix, and you have a game thats basically only attractive to people with game knowledge and a large collection. But its also frustrating to those of us that played it as our main GW game, because you have fewer options and the unit disparate so real. 

 

Like it's kinda crazy to me that in 2017, I bought four Deimos rhinos direct from forgeworld for $244. And in plastic, 4 Deimos rhinos are the same price. Corax cost me $115 and is now $173. 10 dark fury cost me $125 and are now $210. The game was actually way cheaper back then, and you had a much smaller chance of your units being complete duds in game. 

[Noserenda]

I definitely think understaffed might be right, id heard internally they added a few more to the team last year but we dont seem to be feeling the benefit just yet, especially in FAQs, they dont need to be monthly or anything but they really need to exist, the ones we have are at best half arsed :(  

[Bung]

3 hours ago, Noserenda said:

I definitely think understaffed might be right, id heard internally they added a few more to the team last year but we dont seem to be feeling the benefit just yet, especially in FAQs, they dont need to be monthly or anything but they really need to exist, the ones we have are at best half arsed :(  

 

The problem for FaQs is, you need someone knowing how the rules interact and does not only listen to the loudest internet voices.

[SkimaskMohawk]

1 hour ago, Bung said:

 

The problem for FaQs is, you need someone knowing how the rules interact and does not only listen to the loudest internet voices.

 

The problem with the game is that they didn't really understand how the rules interacted in the first place.

 

People who understand the actual interactions would have guessed right away that making more "monstrous creatures" and multiwound models, while decreasing ap and strength on blasts and plasma, and giving more units hardened/heavy armour would create a very lopsided environment. Or, how giving units multiple rounds of shooting for 10 points might impact some units more than others. 

 

And that's before going in for a deep look at mechanics, like how they slopped up their removal of the psychic phase and allow for horribly oppressive psychic combos that literally can't be stopped, all because they never rewrote the clause preventing stacking. Or how the changes to wound allocation allows you to break charging if a character is the only model left after being shot. Or how the wound allocation rules need their 4th edition clause to lock in engagement range, otherwise you can siphon off a lot of wounds. Or how their attempted change to Fearless units using reactions broke primarchs using USRs.

 

I know your post was a thinly veiled comment about people calling fists strong instead of actual concern about the abilities of the team. But the thing is, someone who actually knows the rules, mechanics, and interactions of the game would look at fists and see they have pretty much every tool to tackle every problem, with very few gaps to exploit, and a very low skill floor to start being impacted by their strengths.

[Noserenda]

Thing is, you dont even need to go that far (but you absolutely should) when the books are riddled with obvious outright errors, inconsistencies and screw ups. Like, these things happen, i do editing for a group of 4 folks much smarter than me, who check each others work, and spelling mistakes, copy paste errors and general slips constantly get through, and even past me and on to other folks. Noone is perfect and its a bit silly that SG low key pretend to be.

I was working over a list for an event in a few weeks and i have half a dozen pressing issues i guess ill have to ask the TO's to arbitrate, 3 of which are crucial, all of which have in theory really obvious answers someone could answer and document in an afternoon. Call it a weeks work to go over all the books. 

[Ripper.McGuirl]

3 hours ago, Noserenda said:

 Call it a weeks work to go over all the books. 

This is what I don't understand. They could just find one podcaster, friend, trusted TO, or whatever that they like. Tell that person "Hey, can you write a FAQ for us? We'll toss you some free swag. Just keep it on the DL". It would be done tomorrow.

[Marshal Rohr]

13 hours ago, MegaVolt87 said:

Outer circle posted this comment which got the YT heart/ like thing from SN battle reports-

 

It's not a matter of if they are killing it, and more a matter of they have at a minimum:
-40k
-Sigmar
-Heresy
-Middle Earth
-Blood Bowl
-Necromunda
-Titanicus
-Aeronautica (replace with Epish)
-Warcry
-Underworlds
-The Old World

Their production capacity is up about 30% on what it was prior to specialist games coming back, but they have how much extra work load? So really, since they cannot look after all systems at once, they seem to have an approach of "how little support can we give to a system at a time". All the problems in heresy are to some extent problems in all systems, with Heresy being a problem child as it was so FW intensive and they are planning IMHO to port it all into plastic and roll FW into GW this year or next.

 

Its a fair assessment and matches with how GW have been rolling for a while. Expanding the product range to keep players in the GW walled garden, release just enough content to keep people interested after a big opening. If you are unhappy in one space of the hobby there is another that you would like- migrating from 40k to HH is a common move for many people, myself included. HH is competing with the money makers of 40k, new AoS stuff like Cities of Sigmar etc for release slots. Only thing to be done is wait it out and scoop up the HH releases you like along the way to keep the line(s) moving on the various reports, sales charts etc to get HH stuff bumped up the production schedule list. 

Outer Circle is trash and should be ridiculed and ignored. Nothing that dude says is true and he’s a click baiting troll on par with Discourse Minis and Goobertowns Twitter. GW has more than enough staff to support Specialist Games, it doesn’t have competent IT staff handling the modernization. If his suggestion is to cut down on Games because they can’t hire IT professionals, he’s a malicious idiot at best or a saboteur at worst. 

Edited August 7, 2023 by Marshal Rohr

[SkimaskMohawk]

2 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

Outer Circle is trash and should be ridiculed and ignored. Nothing that dude says is true and he’s a click baiting troll on par with Discourse Minis and Goobertowns Twitter. GW has more than enough staff to support Specialist Games, it doesn’t have competent IT staff handling the modernization. If his suggestion is to cut down on Games because they can’t hire IT professionals, he’s a malicious idiot at best or a saboteur at worst. 

 

The guy is very often wrong and annoying, but opposing literally everything he says is really silly. Like :cuss:, he posted a speculative price for LI a few weeks ago and people were literally losing their minds over his "scare mongering prices" when the 4 AT cerastus box cost 117aud direct from GW, and 2 AI  fire raptors were 80aud from forgeworld. It's just baffling really.

 

Like, you really think there's enough staff to support specialist games, when heresy has passed a year without a proper quality of life pass, let alone a fix to it's mass imbalances? Or having failed to bring every faction over? 

 

Or that they're limiting their release schedule due to inability to ship product? They don't care; they happily abuse fomo, as well has holding people's money for weeks at a time while the order works it's way through their backend.

 

[Bung]

6 hours ago, SkimaskMohawk said:

 

The problem with the game is that they didn't really understand how the rules interacted in the first place.

 

People who understand the actual interactions would have guessed right away that making more "monstrous creatures" and multiwound models, while decreasing ap and strength on blasts and plasma, and giving more units hardened/heavy armour would create a very lopsided environment. Or, how giving units multiple rounds of shooting for 10 points might impact some units more than others. 

 

And that's before going in for a deep look at mechanics, like how they slopped up their removal of the psychic phase and allow for horribly oppressive psychic combos that literally can't be stopped, all because they never rewrote the clause preventing stacking. Or how the changes to wound allocation allows you to break charging if a character is the only model left after being shot. Or how the wound allocation rules need their 4th edition clause to lock in engagement range, otherwise you can siphon off a lot of wounds. Or how their attempted change to Fearless units using reactions broke primarchs using USRs.

 

I know your post was a thinly veiled comment about people calling fists strong instead of actual concern about the abilities of the team. But the thing is, someone who actually knows the rules, mechanics, and interactions of the game would look at fists and see they have pretty much every tool to tackle every problem, with very few gaps to exploit, and a very low skill floor to start being impacted by their strengths.

 

 

Nope. My comment was meant to get peoples feet back to earth with their expectations.

Even if SG doubled or tripled their staff in the last months the new members wouldnt have enough knowledge / skills yet to write a FaQ. 

Thats a simple reality of work.

 

The Last few years showed US that listening to the loudest cries for balance etc. of the Internet gave us 40k as it is.

 

So i rather have someone getting to know his work doing FaQs etc. as in my experience fanmade rules and other stuff didnt even reach GWs mediocore rules at best.

 

 

[TheTrans]

Here I am just remembering all the good times of 1st, with all the cool grey areas you could build armies and Legion traits that amounted to more that "+1 to hit with x" or "+/-1 to wound when y"...

For me, personally (not the whole scene etc) a non-marine player, bugger me, they certainly did kill heresy with the 2.0 'release'. 

[MegaVolt87]

On the now private video, it was a twitch stream unedited and posted to YT. Mr Pardo was more chatting with his twitch chat, bouncing ideas etc in an open forum type format. I don't understand why it was privated, it was up for almost a week, Outer Circle's vid txt comment was six days old when I initially made my first post in this topic. Nothing crazy stood out in the stream, was really treading old ground if anything. 

[Marshal Rohr]

3 hours ago, SkimaskMohawk said:

 

The guy is very often wrong and annoying, but opposing literally everything he says is really silly. Like :cuss:, he posted a speculative price for LI a few weeks ago and people were literally losing their minds over his "scare mongering prices" when the 4 AT cerastus box cost 117aud direct from GW, and 2 AI  fire raptors were 80aud from forgeworld. It's just baffling really.

 

Like, you really think there's enough staff to support specialist games, when heresy has passed a year without a proper quality of life pass, let alone a fix to it's mass imbalances? Or having failed to bring every faction over? 

 

Or that they're limiting their release schedule due to inability to ship product? They don't care; they happily abuse fomo, as well has holding people's money for weeks at a time while the order works it's way through their backend.

 

Neil, Andy, Rob, Ben, and two other people I can’t remember the names for work on Heresy. You aren’t going to get a balance pass.  Maybe for years. Necromunda doesn’t. Lord of the Rings doesn’t. Titanicus doesnt. Old World Won’t. It’s just the way they’ve decided to do it. An FAQ and update maybe once every 18 months and just to clarify stuff. 
 

edit: the issue is you have a problem with the way the rules interact or stack or that some factions can’t do as many super combos. They don’t care. They really don’t. They made a game you’re supposed to use to play a campaign with an army you specifically built because you love the Heresy. They did not make a game even considering that some people would spam lascannons with super combos because they did not make a game where they care what your heavy Support guys take. 
 

They released Mark 6 Nostalgia pattern Armor first. That should tell you everything you need to know about their objective here. If you want to see how you are supposed to play the game go look at Andy’s Instagram. Check out Horus Heretic’s armies. Look at who else they play with. 

Edited August 8, 2023 by Marshal Rohr

[No Foes Remain]

4 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

Neil, Andy, Rob, Ben, and two other people I can’t remember the names for work on Heresy. You aren’t going to get a balance pass.  Maybe for years. Necromunda doesn’t. Lord of the Rings doesn’t. Titanicus doesnt. Old World Won’t. It’s just the way they’ve decided to do it. An FAQ and update maybe once every 18 months and just to clarify stuff. 
 

edit: the issue is you have a problem with the way the rules interact or stack or that some factions can’t do as many super combos. They don’t care. They really don’t. They made a game you’re supposed to use to play a campaign with an army you specifically built because you love the Heresy. They did not make a game even considering that some people would spam lascannons with super combos because they did not make a game where they care what your heavy Support guys take. 
 

They released Mark 6 Nostalgia pattern Armor first. That should tell you everything you need to know about their objective here. If you want to see how you are supposed to play the game go look at Andy’s Instagram. Check out Horus Heretic’s armies. Look at who else they play with. 

 

I have a lot of respect for you Rohr since you were among the first heresy people on this board (along with 1000heathans and others whose names have long since changed and I can't keep up) and got me heavily invested into 30, but I cannot agree with you here.

 

What, it seems to me, you're saying is that 30k and the other 'specialist games' won't get an FAQ and we should just accept it? I don't believe that's the right mindset to have in any hobby, if something is broke or unbalanced (like lascannons having sunder, what fool thought that was a good idea) it needs to be fixed for the good of the hobby health overall.

 

In regards to your second point, I do so happen to agree. They just took 30k 1.0 and made it more accessible, which is only ever a good thing. However they messed up some rules, like Contemptors which are pretty damn strong so that's why people take lascannons because they are the only reliable counter to the dreadnought issue and vehicles just happen to suffer because of it.

 

To your last point, GW favouring Mk6 has been hotly debated so I won't touch upon that here (for fear of the volkite and melta armed mods) but that is another issue with 30k. GW is telling us how to play it and that is vastly different to how it was in 1.0, why should we agree to change our outlook and mindset for our hobby just because GW is heavily suggesting how to play it?

[Marshal Rohr]

I’m saying that a dedicated Balance Pass won’t be coming, FAQ and stuff will be more frequent. Titanicus and Necromunda get them occasionally but I don’t think they’ve done wide scale rebalancing outside of a new edition for any of the SG. 

[SkimaskMohawk]

5 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

Neil, Andy, Rob, Ben, and two other people I can’t remember the names for work on Heresy. You aren’t going to get a balance pass.  Maybe for years. Necromunda doesn’t. Lord of the Rings doesn’t. Titanicus doesnt. Old World Won’t. It’s just the way they’ve decided to do it. An FAQ and update maybe once every 18 months and just to clarify stuff. 
 

 

 

And you don't think the inability to fix their rules is an indicator of understaffing? Usually, most people feel a certain sense of pride and ownership over their work and want it to be the best version it can be; when something comparable happens in video games it's because the developers coding the game didnt have enough time to make it properly in the first place, and aren't given time to fix it afterwards as they're working on seasonal content. For context, Bligh and French wrote Betrayal and had a FAQ out in 4 months to clear things up because they were only focussing on heresy.

 

5 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

edit: the issue is you have a problem with the way the rules interact or stack or that some factions can’t do as many super combos. They don’t care. They really don’t. They made a game you’re supposed to use to play a campaign with an army you specifically built because you love the Heresy. They did not make a game even considering that some people would spam lascannons with super combos because they did not make a game where they care what your heavy Support guys take. 

 

Okay so maybe these people don't have pride in their work after all, and contorted someone else's system to badly balanced campaign hammer. Guess we were right all along, and the incredibly spiteful rules changes were made out of spite and incompetence at playing.

 

5 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

If you want to see how you are supposed to play the game go look at Andy’s Instagram. Check out Horus Heretic’s armies. Look at who else they play with. 

 

I know how you were supposed to play Blighs game, and it was really simple. In either campaign or pickup game play you could take what you wanted, and unless you made a really jank list, you could win if you were good enough. That's how 40k was at the time, that's how Betrayal worked when it came out, and that's how it continued to play until daemons completely screwed everything up.

 

But ya, I'll go look and see that you're supposed to play at Warhammer world, on a table with no terrain, and just gunline your opponent into the ground in a big megabattle. Funny how I don't remember that at all during the big 7th edition boom; these forums were full of 2000-3000 point armies and ideas to play them on proper tables. 

[Marshal Rohr]

You are based in Canada with zero connections to the GW studio. Prove it was done out of spite. Prove they didn’t play the game. You don’t know what the [redacted] you are talking about and you keep saying “balance pass! Balance pass! Balance pass!” Like it hasn’t occurred to them to put out and FAQ or something. They have. They just didn’t do the thing you wanted. That means they don’t want to. They’re not understaffed with a team of six or more people. That’s almost as many as the main 40K studio rules team. Owen, Rob, and the little blonde guy from the Heresy twitch streams did play 1.0. There’s videos of them playing. You can keep saying the game is broken and needs FAQs here and on Facebook but it doesn’t matter, they don’t care, and they aren’t going to do a six month balance pass like 40K is suffering from. Which is good because you’d be right here complaining about your rule book being worthless with a day 1 FAQ. 

Edited August 8, 2023 by Marshal Rohr

[Noserenda]

I mean, at this point they are either spiteful or incompetent, and really id prefer the former. 

Its not about their weird contempt for people wanting a better balanced or fluffier game really, its about all the little mistakes and screw ups that litter their work and they wont put a super minimal effort into fixing.

[Marshal Rohr]

6 hours ago, Noserenda said:

I mean, at this point they are either spiteful or incompetent, and really id prefer the former. 

Its not about their weird contempt for people wanting a better balanced or fluffier game really, its about all the little mistakes and screw ups that litter their work and they wont put a super minimal effort into fixing.

Fixing how? Reprinting the rulebook? A weekly points adjustment like 40K? Monthly FAQs reviewed by the 3D Printer go brrrrrr guys in the Facebook Comment sections? It’s super minimal effort so surely it won’t require literally any resources or time, right? Because it’s so minimal. 

Edited August 8, 2023 by Brother Tyler
Unnecessarily confrontational statements removed.