Balance Dataslate - June 2025

[Scribe]

25 minutes ago, HeadlessCross said:

Conversely, why should my whole army be invalidated because someone decided to play Ynarri?

 

Whether the hits were too much is a different discussion, but you're not entitled to broken rules or models because you bought them. 

 

Oh totally. Which is why the designers should have been held accountable oh....any time in the last several editions.

 

Expect better. You lot are getting fleeced.

[Evil Eye]

I hate to say "I told you so" re: the problems of trying to make a "living system" with seasonal patches, but, well, I told you so.

[Dr_Ruminahui]

6 hours ago, Evil Eye said:

I mean, they don't have to be, I think that's just the recommended size if you want to put your Defiler on a base.

 

 I want to put mine on a base, but its a kitbash for which I thought I had bought the largest GW base for , but that wasn't big enough- need to go measure the base again.  If 160mm (the recommended base) is indeed larger that base, I'll definitely be picking one up... it be just so much easier to deal with if it is based.

[HeadlessCross]

2 hours ago, Scribe said:

 

Oh totally. Which is why the designers should have been held accountable oh....any time in the last several editions.

Do...do you actually believe that rules were somehow better balanced in earlier editions?

 

I can promise you they weren't, or was it just SKILL ISSUE for Grey Knights players in 4th?

[Magos Takatus]

4 hours ago, Scribe said:

 

Nah. This isn't it.

 

I never played meta, but if I drop a $2000 on something, it better do what I bought it to do, not have the rug pulled out because the designer cannot write a good rule set.

My Mechanicus got benched for 10th while GW sort themselves out, and I played Orks with Taktikal Brigade, so I've been slowly watching Moar Dakka get my Ork army repeatedly punished, with Big Meks and Flash Gits both getting booted, plus Lootas now, Only the points cuts to Deff Koptas have prevented me from losing even more units out of my army. Recently I have been finding my feet again with Aeldari at my friend's request, and I was just starting to enjoy Aspect host, but now Ynnari seems to have attracted the nerf bat of GW. It feels like tournament meta lists get my armies hammered over and over again, even if I'm not playing the hot new thing. I can recover from the Ork and Aeldari nerfs, sure... but my Adeptus Mechanicus still feel like Guard with a dozen extra steps instead of orders rather than the precision cyborg shooty-men that they used to be.

 

I'm just hoping that 11th edition fixes a good few things. Changes there will be more far reaching than flash-in-the-pan knee-jerk balancing. What GW to Adeptus Mechanicus all but killed the Admech forum on the B&C, and I hope that one day it will recover, but I'm not holding my breath. Nowadays about the only posts I see in there are the odd titan project progressing gradually.

[HeadlessCross]

2 hours ago, Evil Eye said:

I hate to say "I told you so" re: the problems of trying to make a "living system" with seasonal patches, but, well, I told you so.

Yeah, the age of rules never getting updates despite clearly needing them were so much better. 

[Scribe]

23 minutes ago, HeadlessCross said:

Do...do you actually believe that rules were somehow better balanced in earlier editions?

 

I can promise you they weren't, or was it just SKILL ISSUE for Grey Knights players in 4th?

 

No, but I would suspect after several decades, GW could have done a better job.

 

Enjoy the treadmill.

[Evil Eye]

28 minutes ago, HeadlessCross said:

Yeah, the age of rules never getting updates despite clearly needing them were so much better. 

Yes, they unironically were.

[HeadlessCross]

5 hours ago, Scribe said:

 

No, but I would suspect after several decades, GW could have done a better job.

 

Enjoy the treadmill.

They should do it better the first time, but that doesn't mean the fixes aren't being done. 

[Scribe]

16 minutes ago, HeadlessCross said:

They should do it better the first time, but that doesn't mean the fixes aren't being done. 

 

Sure, great. When is the next reset? Next summer? lol

[HeadlessCross]

11 minutes ago, Scribe said:

 

Sure, great. When is the next reset? Next summer? lol

All you're really proving is the point that an electronic living ruleset is the best way to move forward. 

[Scribe]

6 minutes ago, HeadlessCross said:

All you're really proving is the point that an electronic living ruleset is the best way to move forward. 

 

I mean people learn the wrong lesson's all the time I guess.

 

A 'living ruleset' is not even close to the best way forward when its invalidating hundreds if not thousands of dollars of game pieces. It USED to be you were good for quite some time during an edition well unless you were CSM and got screwed over and over, but now? Now you just roll the dice that the unit you dropped a bunch of money and time on is still worth using in 6 months.

 

If GW wants to cut prices *pausing for laughter* then yes, a living ruleset COULD be fine, assuming they eventually start finding their way to a good ruleset.

 

What a joke.

[01RTB01]

5 hours ago, Evil Eye said:

Yes, they unironically were.

I know many have disagreed with this but I certainly had a lot more fun in earlier editions.

 

The design philosophy is totally different to what it once was. As with every game, every system ever, there are flaws but games were more fun, generally a lot less swingy than they are now. Tournament style play that pervades now, although not a 'must' is too often the norm. 

 

The days of building a tac list and playing well has been replaced by seemingly having to take specific choices depending on the army. Despite the sheer amount of stuff available now, choices people take are very narrow. Armies I've played against often don't feel representative of what their faction is on the tabletop as army building is now so horribly skewed. 

 

Considering the plethora of units available to orks, you never see planes on the table for example. Yet always it's the spam that's punished and the weaker options not really altered. It's taken most of the edition for them to finally do something about speed freaks and arguably it's a little late in the day. 

 

I don't know whether it's age, perception or otherwise, but I definitely had more fun in older editions. If things are properly play tested then the level of change wouldn't be required. The 3 year edition churn is culpable in this but alas it's not changing any time soon. There's reasons that my old gaming group are playing primarily 2nd and 3rd Ed 40k now...

[Scribe]

"How can we keep them buying?"

 

"Easy, convince them we are 'balancing' the game for them,  nerf what they have, buff what we need to sell."

 

 

[Antarius]

6 hours ago, Evil Eye said:

Yes, they unironically were.

Well, they were and they weren't. I get that you're responding to an equally categorical statement, but I think it's better not to play along with false dichotomies like that. Things are more nuanced and it doesn't have to be either/or when it comes to updates.

 

Personally, I don't think there's any doubt that the current approach of doing targeted updates between editions is a better idea than the old "well, we wrote it in a codex 4 years ago and that can't be changed, so sucks to be *insert army*, I guess". However, I do agree with you that the current method doesn't necessarily produce better results than the earlier model, but I think that's more to do with how they go about it and what metrics they use.

I'm not going to do my usual rant about the perils of balancing based on tournament play/restricting the scope of updates to units that overperform in certain configurations, but it seems obvious to me that if the current approach to updates were actually working as intended, we would see much fewer and less sweeping updates at this point in the edition and we would probably see more varied armies on the tables.

Of course, this is also to some degree an issue with us and our mindset as players and customers, but I can't help feel that basing updates on tournament results should have proved itself a dead end by now.

[Blindhamster]

For me, I've played since 2nd edition (not old enough to have caught rogue trader). 

 

Honestly, my favourite things to happen to the game were bringing back AP modifiers (I HATE the 3rd-7th/HH approach of AP either worked or it did nothing), more granularity with wounds (I like that a space marine actually feels at least a bit more resilient than a guardsman). I like that stats have been stretched out a bit this edition, but I think the game really needs to be something other than a d6 system - not that it'll ever happen. 

 

I like units having unique abilities and I don't hate stratagems, though thats an area HH maybe does things better with its reactions and stuff. 

 

I love crusade rules and honestly think the potential for narrative gameplay has been better in the past few editions than it had been for years before it. 

 

To me the low point of 40k was 6/7th editions. 8th was a breath of fresh air, 9th was too lethal, it got annoying quick just how fragile space marines felt despite the extra wound. 10th is broadly a better game than 9th to. As for 3rd, it was fine, I liked the army building rules of 3rd most I think. 4th sucked (I'm a blood angel player remember), another low point for me and my enjoyment of the hobby (I was even working at GW for the tail end of that edition), 5th was fine but not great.

[Karhedron]

7th edition was a low point for me too. I actually quit the game for a couple of years. It was only the return of Guilliman and the start of 8th that actually got me back into it. 7th and 9th both had the same problem. They were both refinements of a previous edition that got worse it by adding crazy game-breaking bloat. In the case of 7th edition, it was the Formation system which gave wildly unbalanced bonuses for fielding fixed sets of units. For 9th it was the insidious power creep of Stratagems that overdid it.

 

We are apparently about 1 year out from 11th edition. Hopefully they don't repeat the same mistake.

Edited yesterday at 09:26 AM by Karhedron

[ZeroWolf]

On reflection, I could probably easily go without stratagems completely. Not sure what I'd replace them with, if anything.

[crimsondave]

2 hours ago, Blindhamster said:

For me, I've played since 2nd edition (not old enough to have caught rogue trader). 

 

Honestly, my favourite things to happen to the game were bringing back AP modifiers (I HATE the 3rd-7th/HH approach of AP either worked or it did nothing), more granularity with wounds (I like that a space marine actually feels at least a bit more resilient than a guardsman). I like that stats have been stretched out a bit this edition, but I think the game really needs to be something other than a d6 system - not that it'll ever happen. 

 

I like units having unique abilities and I don't hate stratagems, though thats an area HH maybe does things better with its reactions and stuff. 

 

I love crusade rules and honestly think the potential for narrative gameplay has been better in the past few editions than it had been for years before it. 

 

To me the low point of 40k was 6/7th editions. 8th was a breath of fresh air, 9th was too lethal, it got annoying quick just how fragile space marines felt despite the extra wound. 10th is broadly a better game than 9th to. As for 3rd, it was fine, I liked the army building rules of 3rd most I think. 4th sucked (I'm a blood angel player remember), another low point for me and my enjoyment of the hobby (I was even working at GW for the tail end of that edition), 5th was fine but not great.

I agree with pretty much everything you said other than 10th.

 

I’d still rate 7th as the worst game.  There was no point in even unpacking my guard to play Eldar, Tau, Necrons (decurium anyway) or late edition Space Marines (Skyhammer or something?). I either got wiped out in 2 turns or the other player had to intentionally bring their worst stuff and try not to kill me.  But I still played it.

 

Thing is, I still played 7th.  I just have no desire to play 10th.  I made it about 3 turns and had enough.  The backbone seems the best it’s ever been.  I wish they’d make 2 different games.  Competitive and Casual.  Use the 10th backbone but bring back WS, I, blast templates, points instead of power level, and do away with the video game like ways of bypassing wound rolls and saves and delete stratagems.  I thought 7th edition was simpler even though it was terrible.

If you want a short game, play 750-1000 point games.

 

Now this would suck for competitive.  That’s why I say make 2 different games.  They could also push the edition turn back to every 4 or 5 years and still come out ahead money wise.

[DemonGSides]

Trust me when I say that it's not just the competitive crowd that is happy about not having to deal with templates and referring to tables to figure out what happened when the dice were rolled.

So much easier to just look at the dice and know what happened.  Immensely more satisfying than cross referencing.  Templates I can at least understand the "fun" behind it, but they were just a vector for arguments.  I wish there was a way to simulate the AOE effect of them still, because current blast is pretty meh, but the arguments over templates was never fun nor ideal.

 

If you want that old game style, just play the old editions.  No need for a two tier game (Three tier if you count Combat Patrol).  That just becomes a rules snarl anyways.

[Orange Knight]

Templates and armour facings were rules that in theory add flavour, in practice were just tedious and un-satisfying, and led to a lot of debates and arguments.

 

What I can say however, is that the general rules in 10th are very dry and lack flavour. We used to have fun rules such as a Necron commander that would always seize the Initiative, but never when facing Orks because they were too unpredictable. Or Magnus being able to turn models he defeated into Chaos Spawn. Some of these were wacky, others were useless, some were extremely over-powered - but they all added flavour. 8th still had a lot of fun rules, they were paired back in 9th and again in 10th until we ended up with the current game.

 

Now all special rules boil down to attack, wound and movement modifiers that can easily be quantified and measured. I know this is done to try and create a tournament game. Most people don't play in tournaments.

[Mogger351]

8 hours ago, Scribe said:

 

I mean people learn the wrong lesson's all the time I guess.

 

A 'living ruleset' is not even close to the best way forward when its invalidating hundreds if not thousands of dollars of game pieces. It USED to be you were good for quite some time during an edition well unless you were CSM and got screwed over and over, but now? Now you just roll the dice that the unit you dropped a bunch of money and time on is still worth using in 6 months.

 

If GW wants to cut prices *pausing for laughter* then yes, a living ruleset COULD be fine, assuming they eventually start finding their way to a good ruleset.

 

What a joke.

"Is still worth using" is the problem here, just because a unit isn't optimal, unless you want to enter events it largely won't matter.

 

GW have releases brand new dud units before, its very well evidenced that a lot of what you're implying is made up.

 

I find the comments I saw online about defiler being good suddenly for some factions as "an excuse to generate sales of an old kit" hilarious. Why would they let it stew on a shelf for nearly 20 years of obscurity and a decade of low sales purely so they could "play the meta"?

 

Maybe stop being sweaty and demanding to buy "good" units.

Edited 23 hours ago by Mogger351

[Magos Takatus]

For me, I *hated* what 3rd edition did to my favourite game, and it took several editions for me to consider picking up the game, so ironically it was 6th-th edition era I enjoyed, where the Games Workshop store local to me had large games of Apocalypse where I could plonk a Stompa on the table and watch it do nothing but explode that I often got to laugh about. It introduced what became my favourite army and times were good, up until the point they started making stupid Decurion-style armies that overpowered certain armies through the roof.

 

Compare that to GW slowly crushing Admech under it's boot in recent editions, to the point that I abandoned them in favour of some of my older armies, I'm not sure how to take it. GW didn't just nerf Admech, but violated them, and throwing conciliatory points decreases our way every so often has not made the army feel fun. They can rebalance every three months all they want, but if they fundamentally screw the pooch at the start of the edition, it doesn't matter how far you drop the points. It could eventually get to some hypothetical, farcical situation where I am no longer able to transport enough models to my game to play, or with a home game I can't cram any more models in my deployment zone, but the units still won't work properly without a re-write of the rules. Tau got an army rule re-write recently that has helped them, but I believe Admech need most of their dataslates to be re-worked again. Tweaking points at this point to me feels like trying to apply wallpaper to a house that has already collapsed. They have taken too long to fix the fundamental problems with the faction in 10th and while frequent updates sound good on paper, if you're mainly just going to tweak points costs by tiny amounts it's hardly worth the hassle.

 

When Admech were introduced in 7th as I understood them they were a semi-elite shooting army with accurate, precision gunfire. They have pretty much morphed into a toothless horde army. I've had far more fun shooting with my Ork army since I know they aren't supposed to hit most of the time. I stayed well away from the obvious trap that was the Moar Dakka detachment, but my Ork army still managed to catch flak from the nerfs that Moar Dakka caused. I believe the idea of frequent updates is reasonable in theory, but there seem to be a lot of mis-steps. Seeing something is powerful and then absolutely obliterating it with several layered nerfs seems to be the current paradigm. It happened to Admech as an entire faction, it happened to Moar Dakka, and just now it happened to Ynarri. I'm sure it's happened to many others but I've not been keeping my eye on every army to be fair. GW seem to over-correct constantly and I think they need to think of better ways to do things. The Detachments make some units in an army considerably better or worse without any changes to points. Some units are forbidden from access to stratagems and army rules, leaving them dead in the water in all detachments. The lack of point granularly for equipment is also a problem, with whole units getting buffed or nerfed in points, but in a lot of cases, 10 points here or there just means you have to kick an entire squad out of your army or it frees up points but you can't do anything with them.

 

I know this point came across as negative, mainly because of the Admech rant, but I am hoping that once 11th edition returns hopefully GW will be able to fix some of the problems with this edition and it will be easier to balance things going forwards. Admech is a problem here since they were typically efficiently cheap platforms for fairly expensive weapon upgrades, and for that reason wiping out point costs for upgrades has been problematic for them. I'm sure some other armies are in this boat.

[ZeroWolf]

18 minutes ago, Orange Knight said:

Templates and armour facings were rules that in theory add flavour, in practice were just tedious and un-satisfying, and led to a lot of debates and arguments.

 

What I can say however, is that the general rules in 10th are very dry and lack flavour. We used to have fun rules such as a Necron commander that would always seize the Initiative, but never when facing Orks because they were too unpredictable. Or Magnus being able to turn models he defeated into Chaos Spawn. Some of these were wacky, others were useless, some were extremely over-powered - but they all added flavour. 8th still had a lot of fun rules, they were paired back in 9th and again in 10th until we ended up with the current game.

 

Now all special rules boil down to attack, wound and movement modifiers that can easily be quantified and measured. I know this is done to try and create a tournament game. Most people don't play in tournaments.

The parasite of mortex stands out to me as far as flavourful rules go, and one that feels lacklustre in how hard it is to actually pull off, in what should be a characterful and dramatic moment in the battle. We do need more of them on saying that.

 

I think even the tournament players would enjoy the levity of seeing one of their prized units burst apart into a ripper swarm.

[Lord_Valorion]

Tournament players play on soulless boards with symmetric terrain in form of MDF L-ruins or LoS blocking 2D rectancles. 

They don't give a flying damn about flavorful rules. At this point they could play with bases with unit names on it, without a model on it.