State of HH 3.0

[Gorgoff]

4 hours ago, Razorblade said:

Except me and my group actually never reacted three times in any given phase

Fixed it for you. ;)

If you and your group never did that, you played a highly different game than me or anyone I know. It doesn't make the statement correct that they solved the issue though. 

Free intercepting for ten points per unit with the augury scanner killed most deep strike or outflank or flyer build.

That is gone. Period.

No more intercepting + return fire¹ + overwatch.

That is gone. Period.

 

¹the fact that we just gifted another shooting phase to the enemy if we shoot before charging stopped players doing that entirely. Like deep striking next to a Heavy Support squad and then shoot them with anything before charging?

Only a fool did that.

But you had to if that unit was standing on the first floor and filling the floor completely due to how charges and positioning worked.

And still works by the way. 

Full floors above ground level can't get charged. (ｰдｰ)

 

No more emovement reaction + any of the just mentioned. 

Gone. Period.

 

Just because you never saw or did that, doesn't mean that it never happened anywhere.

It certainly did and it was major problem and they solved it. 

A unit can only react once in the whole turn. That alone helps massivly. 

 

What you want is the removal of reactions in total from the game or the removal of shooting reactions. 

Which you can but obviously you didn't get the memo that movement reactions are now king for countering Vanguard scoring. Put three units on the mission objectives  ever so slightly, score in your turn big time and if (or to be more precise when) the enemy tries to score vanguard against those squishy Line units you move them away. p(^-^)q

 

Sure, return fire is still good and so is overwatch but in a 4 turn game you do not want the enemy to be able to get Vanguard points. 

 

I am uncertain if that is a good thing or a bad thing because it feels so gamey and only is based on how bad the Vanguard rule is written (it should score the moment a Vanguard unit removes a scoring unit from an objective no matter if this unit gets destroyed, runs away or simple its models in 3 inches around an objective get killed by the Vanguard unit) but that as well make it highly unlikely that the enemy will use all three reactions for shooting reactions. Especially since flyers can now come in turn one and drop some nasty Vanguard unit right in your face and that rhino rush is back big time.

Getting charged turn one is a very real threat in 3ed if you do not use your movement reactions which reduces how many times you can return fire or overwatch. 

 

As I said in my last post I could live without reactions in total though because I find them

A tedious to play with

B they feel gamey and

C I like to have my coffee while watching the opponent do their turn and not nervously having to check the distance his models are to mine all the time and having to oversee what he is doing.

That doesn't feel very chill to me and tbh I feel forced to act like these hyper nervous try hards who always did that in the past,

you know the kind? You move your models and they always check every millimetre you move them and get in the way with their nervous finger. :D

 

 

4 hours ago, Razorblade said:

Hard to talk rules quality with a person who loves having their 3+hour time commitment game decided by a few single D6 rolls. 

I remember exactly one game in the past 20 years or so which was won by that. I could give you even every detail what happened and so on but that w as one game. Most games I won or lost because I or my opponent made mistakes which added up to the outcome of the game. 

 

It is an extremely over exaggerated reason why the explosion table allegedly was terrible. It simply isn't true. 

Besides having meaningful cover saves for vehicles of 4+ really made those very hard to come by if the table was good.

Goodntables help with shooting reactions by the way. 

Most people play on bowling alleys where the few big terrain pieces they have are in the deployment zones and nothing in the middle for some reason, and that is just the biggest offender when it comes down to why shooting armies are so much in favor. 

Lets look at to examples:

Horrible tables game wise. 

It's like Why even bother to place that terrain at all? 

The big ass ruined pyramid in the first picture should be right in the middle of the table and not on the corner.

＼(^o^)／

 

 

4 hours ago, Razorblade said:

Again I'm happy for your subjective enjoyment but that doesn't change the fact that mental stats are unnecessary bloat on the core rules at best and a balancing problem at worst.

 

Which is also a subjective perspective. ;)

It removed the necessity of so many special rules and solved one problem Thousand Sons had pretty elegantly. 

Instead of finding ways how to make them better psyker with addition rules they simply have +1 Willpower. 

That's easy and don't effect the wrong things like it would if the had just more leadership. 

Want to make a unit tougher against incoming pinning shots without making them overall immune to moral? Give them more Cool and be gone with it. 

It is a nice addition ruleswise but if you don't like it because it feels icky to you that is also viable. 

I hate how line of sight and firing arcs work now on vehicles akrhough that works perfectly fine and doesn't add any bad rules to the game.

It just feels wrong and that is reason eniugh to hate it in my book. 8)

 

I like being able to see what a unit can do by looking at their unit entry and those stats help me with that. 

Same with weapons stats by the way. 

The were able to remove several special rules by just putting more information into those stats as well. 

I'm not talking about how well all the units and guns and so forth are balanced though.

That is a different animal but the general princible is nice. 

 

 

4 hours ago, Razorblade said:

Of that was the plan then their execution is, again, a monument to their incompetence. No real melee unit wants to volley fire because it risks making the charge harder. They even talked about this issue in the previews, trying to sell it as a feature. It could have also been avoided really easily by simply moving it to the end of the charge process. (Which incidentally would have also made charging much faster and smoother)

 

Yeah totally agree here.

It feels like they try to smuggle a small reaction through the backdoor in the game by that and even weirder I know some people who like it and even call it a tactical rule to be able to blast the enemy before charging or havjng special rules which allow the volley and then not having to charge.

Some people just like to shoot a lot I guess. ┐('～`)┌

 

4 hours ago, Razorblade said:

How so? How is any of this better than 2E, or even 1E for that matter? 

I would never say such nonsense.

Neither 2ed nor 3ed is better than 1ed.

No debate here. (^-^)/

 

But 3ed definitely is better than 2ed. 

The above plus overall better vehicle rules, no deep strike charging which I hated and better Militia rules.

But not by a huge margin and I say I always forget that I instantly and naturally ignore the preposterous terrain rules and try to avoid thinking about the abyssal way to write army lists. 

That is such a :cuss:show and I would live if that goes away in no time. (／。＼)

Edited Wednesday at 11:35 AM by Gorgoff

[Agramar_The_Luna_Wolf]

Returning myself to the main subject of this post, I think the state of this edition is clearly suboptimal,and I believe the main problems of this edition can be resumed in:

 

- Rules awfully written 

-Very unfriendly for veteran players/ collectors 

-Some decisions/errors unthinkable for me ,like jump back in the time line and start not in the beginning,just a little bit further or lot of errors/missing things, later added in PDF documents as corrections that, at least to me, gives the sensation of poor design management and lack of coordination between designers and developers. Or directly,lack of interest.

-And they threw, to the thrash can, so many good things for the previous edition, specially in supplements.

 

This things kills, in me, my joy for this game. And sadly I'm not the only one.

 

PS: BTW, for the people who said "I didn't play the previous edition/s but this is great", that's good,of course. But it reminds me an old saying from my country. More or less is translated like:

"He who does not know God, prays to any saint."

 

Obviously,if you have no experience or very little experience with previous editions,this one is great for you. It's totally normal.

But if you check the previous materials,try a little it and compare the records and how the things were, you can see and feel a mire than notable difference. And not in favour for the current edition.

Edited Thursday at 12:38 PM by Agramar_The_Luna_Wolf

[Lord Morgrim]

All I can say is our group is still as strong as ever and even have new players as well. I guess it’s all dependent on where you but never assume your experience is the common one. We are all guilty of confirmation bias at times.

[Razorblade]

19 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

Fixed it for you. ;)

If you and your group never did that, you played a highly different game than me or anyone I know. It doesn't make the statement correct that they solved the issue though. 

The statement was already correct. There was no way to get more than two shooting or charge reactions and the only way to get to 3+ elsewhere was:

19 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

Free intercepting for ten points per unit with the augury scanner killed most deep strike or outflank or flyer build.

That is gone. Period.

Yeah, so is the thing that set it off. Intercept and DS where a self-contained problem in 2E that they "fixed" by making both borderline unusable. What we have now tough is tarantulas shooting you in your own movement phase, for free, no matter if you DS or not.

19 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

But you had to if that unit was standing on the first floor and filling the floor completely due to how charges and positioning worked.

And still works by the way. 

Full floors above ground level can't get charged. (ｰдｰ)

Sounds like the heart of that problem were the charge rules, which, as you mentioned remained unchanged.

It also sounds like your group had a lot of feels bad moments around DS and intercept.

I'm sure that sucked, but: A lot of people weren't using reserves in the first place, because 4 turn games and random reserve rolls don't really go together (and continue to not do so in 3E) and: before you praise 3E for killing intercept, remember that it also murdered DS builds in their entirety.

19 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

What you want is the removal of reactions in total from the game or the removal of shooting reactions. 

I really don't. I love my movement phase reactions (tough I think it's gotten a bit too easy to run away from melee) and I think shooting phase reactions are fine outside of large problem units. I'd personally limit them to a single gun, or maybe snap shots. I want overwatch gone entirely tough, and also good riddance to hold the line. Charge phase reaction should be charging with an uncharged unit.

20 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

Which you can but obviously you didn't get the memo that movement reactions are now king for countering Vanguard scoring. Put three units on the mission objectives  ever so slightly, score in your turn big time and if (or to be more precise when) the enemy tries to score vanguard against those squishy Line units you move them away. p(^-^)q

I did and I can barely communicate my disgust for it. It is precisely the kind of gamey gotcha that people whine about in 40k and it also makes units with vanguard and a real gun (like myrmidons) ridiculously powerful by comparison. Vanguard should score if you kill a unit that was on an objective *at the start of the turn* 

20 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

It is an extremely over exaggerated reason why the explosion table allegedly was terrible. It simply isn't true. 

Besides having meaningful cover saves for vehicles of 4+ really made those very hard to come by if the table was good.

 

It really isn't. If something like a 60 point Rapier can randomly blow up a 400+ point spartan and strand the likely also 400+ point unit it was carrying that is absolutely game deciding, at least if the guy with the Rapier can play. It is also game warping, even if it happens very rarely, as it forces hyper careful deployment of units that should *usually* be expected to tank quite a lot of punishment. 

I agree that good tables help, and overall a lot of heresy is played with too few LoS blockers (it's almost as if the 40k people knew what they were doing when they introduced fixed terrain) but even on a decently crowded table it's hard (and often disadvantagous) to hide big tanks from *all* the guns that may roll a lucky 6.

20 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

Which is also a subjective perspective. ;)

It removed the necessity of so many special rules and solved one problem Thousand Sons had pretty elegantly. 

Instead of finding ways how to make them better psyker with addition rules they simply have +1 Willpower. 

That's easy and don't effect the wrong things like it would if the had just more leadership. 

Let me elaborate: If WP and INT are only used for casting Psychic powers, using battlesmith, master-of-signaling, etc. I don't have an issue with them, but the dice roll could simply be attached to the special rule in question. Seems more elegant than attaching it to every profile when it doesn't matter for the vast majority of units but I guess that might just be me. Where they become a problem is if these tests can be forced on units that normally don't interact with them, because they aren't really priced in there. When your unit arbitrarily cannot interact with an enemy because of a bad stat that you didn't get a discount for and that didn't come up in the last 10 games that's a problem. Similarly when your unit can weather a powerful ability because of an arbitrarily high stat, that you didn't pay for and never used, that's an issue. An even bigger Issue arises if units start to receive arbitrary point cuts or hikes for stats they won't use in 9 out of 10 games. 

 

20 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

Want to make a unit tougher against incoming pinning shots without making them overall immune to moral? Give them more Cool and be gone with it. 

It is a nice addition ruleswise but if you don't like it because it feels icky to you that is also viable. 

I hate how line of sight and firing arcs work now on vehicles akrhough that works perfectly fine and doesn't add any bad rules to the game.

It just feels wrong and that is reason eniugh to hate it in my book. 8)

 

I like being able to see what a unit can do by looking at their unit entry and those stats help me with that. 

Same with weapons stats by the way. 

The were able to remove several special rules by just putting more information into those stats as well. 

I'm not talking about how well all the units and guns and so forth are balanced though.

That is a different animal but the general princible is nice. 

I'm less opposed to cool as it matters for most units and can thus be adequately priced and planned for. Although in execution it seems like an arbitrary LD rebuff to force as many units as possible to interact with the new status rules, which leads to the very silly current situation where some goons with a Vox end up being more morale-resistant than the Elite of the elite.

Which is a running theme of this edition when it comes to weapon profiles, where I too, think the new statline is great, they just then botched a lot of profiles, added confusingly named special rules that often don't make sense on the weapon they're attached to, skipped a fair few opportunities to just turn rules into stat modifiers, and worst of them all, added the terrible new heavy rules (which I think kill a lot of the appeal vehicles gained from their increased toughness. A tank is not a stationary turret)

20 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

I would never say such nonsense.

Neither 2ed nor 3ed is better than 1ed.

No debate here. (^-^)/

 

But 3ed definitely is better than 2ed. 

The above plus overall better vehicle rules, no deep strike charging which I hated and better Militia rules.

But not by a huge margin and I say I always forget that I instantly and naturally ignore the preposterous terrain rules and try to avoid thinking about the abyssal way to write army lists. 

That is such a :cuss:show and I would live if that goes away in no time. (／。＼)

I vastly prefer 2E two one. Progressive Scoring, scaled rending/breaching and no more Psychic phase. I also enjoy my reactions in small doses. 

As for 3E I can't overlook how literally every good idea is buried under a pile of incompetent writing

 

[Pacific81]

On the separate LD/CL/WP/IN any of those amongst who are grognard-enough will remember when these stats were once consolidated between 1st and 2nd edition 40k into just LD.

Remember reading from Rick Priestley at the time it was to try and streamline and how a lot of the time those other psychological factors were just not used. Considering that 40k 2nd edition was much more of a squad/skirmish game with probably potentially 25% the model count of HH3, its quite interesting that the designers of this game came to a different conclusion!