State of HH 3.0

[No Foes Remain]

On 9/12/2025 at 11:47 PM, Marshal Loss said:

It's hard to tell how well the game is doing. Anecdotally, some in my area are sticking with 2.0 and others have moved to 3.0, though plenty of people seem to be be working on Saturnine kits. Previously I'd have expected everybody to migrate to the new shiny and I'm a little concerned about the game's long-term future locally. Any responses you get to 'how well is 3.0 doing' online will vary based on where you ask the question, but 3.0 is clearly a polarising edition one way or the other. GW badly bungled the launch. 

 

I don't think counting battle reports is a good measure of how well the game is doing. There have never been many HH 'content creators' and HH battle reports have never hauled in masses of views. 40k is an anomaly in that regard among GW's games. 

 

Personally I really like 3.0. The core rules generally feel like an improvement over 2.0 and I have thoroughly enjoyed the few games I've played so far. That being said I absolutely hate the army building/detachment system, it's awful, and most factions feel like they've lost a fair amount of flavour.

Your take, Marshal, is the one I see the most. Core rules seem solid, albeit very wordy, but the rest is a mixed bag in terms of units and army building. 

 

I do wonder if it would be at all possible to use the 3.0 core rules but 2.0 army building and unit customisation....

[Galron]

I really enjoyed the one game I played after being very anti-3.0 going into it. I love the freedom of list building, they were right, and the rules work fairly well once you figure them out and it uses the vastly superior GW WS chart which is the only game currently I know of that does(Necromunda might). By that I mean the one where if you are good in close combat, some mook has a harder time hitting you instead of you just getting a slight advantage of hitting them a little better. I wish I had more time to play, my health issues and wifes health issues have kept me from getting any more games in :(

[arnesh88]

I’ve played several lower points games (White Scars and Salamanders), hoping to get proper 3000 point games in the future.

- Both Tacticas feel good, White Scars feel very speedy vs last edition, especially with transports and jump packs

- Gameplay feels good for the most part. Outside of charges and challenges, it feels like HH, but a little smoother with less “exception of rules”.

- Biggest thing to get used to for me is Strength both being more and less important. Against vehicles, more important. Against everything else, a little less important.

- Lower points games don’t feel as bad to play as previously. Damage characteristic and Reaction points seem to help keep things more even.

- Vanguard and “catch up” mechanic don’t seem to matter all that much in my games. I think they need to tweak them a bit. Also, I prefer a mix of consecutive scoring and end game scoring missions, then determine them randomly in pick up games.

- Army building is both more flexible and less flexible. More flexible in that transports and retinues are easier to “assign”, and allies are easier to fit in. Less flexible because of how detachments are structured. Not a bad thing, just different.

[N1SB]

Every weekend or so I visit the Warhammer Store, there's at least 1 game, sometimes 2, of ppl trying HH 3.0.  There ARE factors:

 

• Our guys didn't play HH 1.0 or 2.0.  Only I had played HH 1.0 before
• They all started post 8th ed 40k, and have been feeling burned out.  They'll go back to it, it's just 40k burnout

 

They're okay with the clunkiness of the rules, because all GW games are clunky.  Tbh, if I weren't used to 40k from 3rd ed to 7th, HH 1.0 would've been a total nightmare.  They don't have that editionmentia (not making fun of dementia because it's no joke, but this is what I suffer from, I get confused with old editions).

 

There's 1 thing more.  All the guys getting into HH 3.0 are Chinese.  They utterly respect the lore, but conceptualise things quite differently.  They frame 30k in the same way they'd think of Romance of the Three Kingdoms rather than something by Homer or Tolkien or something.  It's fascinating.

Edited September 20 by N1SB

[Pacific81]

'Editionmentia' needs to be a new word! I find it hard enough with Epic which has had 5 editions, I have long since tapped out of 40k but don't know how you can stay on top of 10 unless you literally just live and breathe the game.

[Brofist]

I get what you're saying, but man that's probably the first time I've seen heresy compared to actual literature

[Gorgoff]

On 9/20/2025 at 6:12 AM, N1SB said:

Every weekend or so I visit the Warhammer Store, there's at least 1 game, sometimes 2, of ppl trying HH 3.0.  There ARE factors:

 

• Our guys didn't play HH 1.0 or 2.0.  Only I had played HH 1.0 before
• They all started post 8th ed 40k, and have been feeling burned out.  They'll go back to it, it's just 40k burnou

That is the target audience I thought GW tries to get with 3ed. 

People, who never played old 40k (7th and below) and who are used to certain rule mechanisms and who are burned out by current 40k. 

It basically is a rebound system to catch peolle before they figure iut that there are so many other fantastic tabletop games. ;)

[Razorblade]

2 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

That is the target audience I thought GW tries to get with 3ed. 

People, who never played old 40k (7th and below) and who are used to certain rule mechanisms and who are burned out by current 40k. 

It basically is a rebound system to catch peolle before they figure iut that there are so many other fantastic tabletop games. ;)

It seems utterly counter intuitive to intruduce rapid fire edition churn, especially with a bunch of unnecessary (and actively bad) changes then.

[BadgersinHills]

On 9/20/2025 at 12:12 PM, N1SB said:

There's 1 thing more.  All the guys getting into HH 3.0 are Chinese.  They utterly respect the lore, but conceptualise things quite differently.  They frame 30k in the same way they'd think of Romance of the Three Kingdoms rather than something by Homer or Tolkien or something.  It's fascinating.

 

That's pretty interesting, from someone watching the 1994 show and now looking for bits to kitbash the Three Brothers but in space.

[Gorgoff]

2 hours ago, BadgersinHills said:

 

That's pretty interesting, from someone watching the 1994 show and now looking for bits to kitbash the Three Brothers but in space.

I never heard of any of this. Is it a chinese tale?

[Gorgoff]

8 hours ago, Razorblade said:

It seems utterly counter intuitive to intruduce rapid fire edition churn, especially with a bunch of unnecessary (and actively bad) changes then.

I guess two things happened during 2ed. 

 

1. They saw that a lot of burned out players started to play HH instead and that the game seemed to really took off and

 

2. They acknowledged the problems it had with resctions, soft tanks and all that. They solved those problems. But they also wanted to make it more accessible to 40k players so we get bigger and bigger weapons on the models, and these got more cartoonish, we got a more open army building style, we got sgrubly worse vehicle rules for line of sight and we got somewhat the no model no rules thing, because they trained the 40k players to not only accept that but to expect nothing else and even demanding to be able to build every option a model has right out of its box. 

 

Obviously the included some things which doesn't work as usual and some thing the new players won't like but the rapid release was necessary for them to get the new Edition going because 40k players who started with 8th are now in the perfect age category to start playing HH. 

And they obviously terribly miscalculated how the HH crowd works and what WE want. That's why the new edition doesn't sell that good. They :cuss:ed up the release by killing off way to many options and try to hastely apply a band aid in form of the extremely big legacy pdf. 

 

We will see where they go from now on. 

Will there be a new edition in two years? 

Edited Monday at 06:02 AM by Gorgoff

[Razorblade]

1 hour ago, Gorgoff said:

2. They acknowledged the problems it had with resctions, soft tanks and all that. They solved those problems. But they also wanted to make it more accessible to 40k players so we get bigger and bigger weapons on the models, and these got more cartoonish, we got a more open army building style, we got sgrubly worse vehicle rules for line of sight and we got somewhat the no model no rules thing, because they trained the 40k players to not only accept that but to expect nothing else and even demanding to be able to build every option a model has right out of its box. 

They didn't tough. Reaction Shooting remained completely untouched. The LasHSS looks pretty unappealing and Hallucinations are gone so they the worst offenders of 2E aren't terrorizing tables, but there are enough units that can pack a nasty return fire and now you can just use all your reactions to do so. I'd argue that this is actually worse from a core rule standpoint. 

As for the tanks, yes they're tougher, but I'd argue the execution is pretty bad. My main problem with 2E was the random explosions. In 4E those kind of continue to exist, because they made tanks tougher by making pens very unreliable to get, but kept plenty of guns that one-shot a tank if and when they ever get lucky.

We also got mental stats nobody asked for, a convoluted charge phase with a whole lot of ripple effects (the new heavy subtype crippling half the legion specific units), terrain rules that no one wants (or even understands how) to play as written, terrible missions (a proud tradition given 2Es core rulebook missions)

A lot of people picked 40k-style option reduction and unit removal as their thing to be mad about and then sort of forgot all the other when the legacies PDF dropped (which also didn't even restore all the options they've axed). But in reality this edition is rotten from the core and that is not something a hastily thrown together Pdf can fix 

Edited Monday at 07:08 AM by Lord_Ikka

[BadgersinHills]

2 hours ago, Gorgoff said:

I never heard of any of this. Is it a chinese tale?

 

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a 14th century Chinese novel based on the Three Kingdoms period from around 190 to 223 AD (Give or take a few years) about the fall of the Han dynasty and the characters of the subsequent Three Kingdoms period. It's quite popular in China and the surrounding regions from what I know. 

[Pacific81]

I'll be honest HH is mostly a modelling/painting thing for me. I love the fluff, miniatures & setting. I might attend an event or two but again its mostly to see the other armies people have put together (HH is always great in that regard).

Playing the game is a much lesser consideration; and I think it probably it is for GW themselves, otherwise they would have given it some resources for editing and playtesting.

[N1SB]

3 hours ago, BadgersinHills said:

That's pretty interesting, from someone watching the 1994 show and now looking for bits to kitbash the Three Brothers but in space.

 

1 hour ago, Gorgoff said:

I never heard of any of this. Is it a chinese tale?

 

He is, and once more, Brother Badger explained something better than I ever could.  It's perfect.

 

Ya, he's referring to the beginning of the Chinese epic of the Three Kingdoms.  The Three Brothers are, in fact, NOT brothers at all, but the main 3 protags.  They make an oath in a peach grove to quell a rebellion, swearing that, while their family names are different, they are brothers, and though they are of different ages, they vow to die on the same day (i.e. together on the battlefield).  As soon as Brother Badger said "3 brothers" my mind immediately invoked that image.  And this 3K story is strangely related to 30k...

 

...it's exactly if I were to say to you, Brother Gorgoff, "Loken with the Mournival at the ruined garden."  Brother Badger, , 好！

 

Even in the end of The End and the Death, Loken refers to the oath he had taken in the very 1st novel.  It's like that.

 

If you ever watched Star Trek the Next Generation, it's that episode where Picard establishes diplomatic relations with xenos who only speak in idioms and proverbs.  Darmok!  His arms wide open!  Under the sunlight!  Welcome to this place, I'll show you everything!  I know I totally screwed that quote up, but that's what it FEELS like.  My brothers here, their Chinese dialect is Cantonese, but the language is Warhammer.

 

An example.  A few weeks back, an Ultramarine player and a Black Templar player were ribbing each other...in good fun, you know how we do...about whose Chapter was the truer Space Marine, the Codex Astartes vs the Eternal Crusade, who really ended the Horus Heresy.  The Ultramarine player was winning the argument by pointing at the 40k Marine shelves, look at how his Primarch brought everyone Primaris with fancy new standardised power armours while the Black Templars look like a mishmash of Marks.

 

It was the time the Scouring Preview had just come out:

 

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/8tc8lyjz/the-big-summer-preview-an-epic-new-series-from-black-library/

 

The Black Templar player jiujitsu'd the Ultramarine's point by pointing to that picture of Dorn and Guilliman's, "Yes, my Primarch's armour, full of holes.  Your Primarch's armour, SO CLEAN."  You see his point, like who really was fighting to save the Imperium in the Siege of Terra and have the scars to prove it, like do you really want to compare our armours, Brother Smartypants!?  It was hilarious, oh man, you had to be there.

 

The flaws you all see in HH 3.0 are the same ones we do...but I got all these 1-liners to distract me.  "Guilliman's armour, SO CLEAN," oh man it's even funnier in Cantonese.

[Gorgoff]

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

They didn't tough.

 

They absolutely did. You can only react three times in the whole turn not per ohase, whichbis a whole different animal. 

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

Reaction Shooting remained completely untouched. The LasHSS looks pretty unappealing and Hallucinations are gone so they the worst offenders of 2E aren't terrorizing tables,

 

This as well

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

but there are enough units that can pack a nasty return fire and now you can just use all your reactions to do so.

 

You always could but now you have to due to the limited number of Reaction points.

Ao no movement shenanigans, free intercept plus return fire anymore. 

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

I'd argue that this is actually worse from a core rule standpoint. 

 

I'd argue that this isn't true at all and assume that itbis based on your general dislike of reactions in general which I not only understand but also share. Reactions are ok now IMHO but they didn't add anything to the game I would miss if they removed them. 

I like to sit while the enemy does his turn and watch what he¹ is doing. 

 

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

As for the tanks, yes they're tougher, but I'd argue the execution is pretty bad.

 

I really like the execution. 

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

My main problem with 2E was the random explosions.

 

I loved those and they weren't the problem.

No more 4+ cover for them, reaction fire, to cheap HSS with lascannons, to much firepower in general, not bekng able to react, charging deep striking units etc. were the problems they had. 

In 2ed 40k vehicles were and felt the best. 

They moved kind of real vehicles (more or less), they were fast, tough, could shoot freely at different targets with each weapon, had different damage tables depending on where you have hit them and they had better BS (well, most of them at least) than infantry due to targeters. 

3ed brought some of that back, which I like.

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

In 4E those kind of continue to exist, because they made tanks tougher by making pens very unreliable to get, but kept plenty of guns that one-shot a tank if and when they ever get lucky.

You probably mean 3ed, no? 

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

We also got mental stats nobody asked for

 

Which I really like

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

, a convoluted charge phase

 

Yeah, I didn't understand why they felt the need to knclude a mini Shooting phase to the charge phase. That feels unnecessary. 

I guess they saw people not using the guns on their cc units anymore and tried to tackle that. 

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

 terrain rules that no one wants (or even understands how) to play as written,

 

Agree.

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

terrible missions (a proud tradition given 2Es core rulebook missions)

 

I like the Mission style but not the execution. Objective shouldn't ever be kn deployment zones and they should have at least six core missions in the core rules. 

They do those games for 30 years and literally have dozens and dozens of missions at their disposal. 

But I guess they save that for their DLCs which I despise. 

1 hour ago, Razorblade said:

A lot of people picked 40k-style option reduction and unit removal as their thing to be mad about and then sort of forgot all the other when the legacies PDF dropped (which also didn't even restore all the options they've axed). But in reality this edition is rotten from the core and that is not something a hastily thrown together Pdf can fix 

I can't agree to that.

3ed is certainly the better game than 2ed but it has it's flaws. 

Main offenders for me are the terrain rules, the missions and how armies sre build now (for :cuss:s sake just give us a proper army builder GW!). 

And ladt but not least the mind shift of GW towards us. I do not enjoy getting handled like cows to be milked and shot when my bladder runs dry so to speak. 

 

 

¹I know that technically there must be female players but I never saw a woman play HH so far unfortunately.²

² oh wait, I know one! Still not a good ratio 

[Xenith]

On 9/13/2025 at 11:18 PM, JeffJedi said:

Lack of FW resin kind of hurts.  How long has it been since a resin character was made for Horus Heresy? It must have been Siege of Cthonia.

 

 

Aster crohne and kaedes nex were released in may this year, preceded by the iron hands praetor and the iron warriors warsmith, not to mention the almost monthly centurion we received for a while!

[Xenith]

Overall I'm ok with the rules. They make an ok game. It seems they have sacrificed 'fun' for a competitive gaming experience though. I'm deeply mourning the loss of larger blasts, like plasma blast guns, titan grade weapons, being 3" is madness. They have increased ap on some stuff to make it more killy, but the fun with blasts was clipping a shed load of models at once. I need to play more.  Four turns seems short, like my tactical squad can only do 4 things this game. It makes rhinos/transports really valuable and I'm thinking whoever can drop 40 tacs on midfield objectives T1 will likely win. 

[Mandragola]

On 9/14/2025 at 8:10 AM, Pacific81 said:

@Razorblade and @Mandragola with the objectives & scoring system, do we think this has suffered in the same way as Legions Imperialis in that it just hasn't been playtested enough? Like if it had, there are some very obvious mistakes in there that would have immediately become apparent and been corrected? Some of it seems just so basic.

 

Just reading the new Epic Warpath game rules and they've printed the names of 25-30 people involved in playtesting the game. Do GW just not do this anymore (either for $$$ or maintaining secrecy reasons?)

Look at it another way. If you’d been involved in playtesting a GW product, particularly with the strength of feeling in the heresy community, would you want your name made public?

 

There is external playtesting. I can’t say how it works. Some of the rumours that were floating around last year supposedly originated with playtesters.

[Pacific81]

I've never been that convinced by GW hiding the names for the sake of 'safety'. I don't think for one moment the GW fan community is any more toxic than Marvel, Star Wars etc. And if it were true, why hide the names of artists? Was someone being stalked over an incorrect depiction of MKIV shoulder pads? (Actually, that would not surprise me..)

 

I think its just to stop the creatives making a name for themselves and leaving to earn more money, which has happened so many times in the past. Basically the only name on there is 'GW', and I think its pretty sad that those people who no doubt laboured long and hard on it will never see their names in print on their work. Its like the stars on the wall of remembrance in the CIA, as though they are secret devs who nobly gave their art to GW 

 

[Brofist]

It's absolutely about paying creatives less money and not letting designers get more famous than a brand. Same thing happened in AAA games, with which I'm intimately familiar. The part about safety is basically whitewashing in the corporate sense.

[Xenith]

Nah, Mat Ward received a lot of online hate around 2010-2013, and Robin Cruddace I believe did also for producing two of the worst 40k codexes of 5th edition. 

[Gorgoff]

8 hours ago, Xenith said:

Nah, Mat Ward received a lot of online hate around 2010-2013, and Robin Cruddace I believe did also for producing two of the worst 40k codexes of 5th edition. 

Which ones?

[Razorblade]

On 9/22/2025 at 10:10 AM, Gorgoff said:

 

They absolutely did. You can only react three times in the whole turn not per ohase, whichbis a whole different animal. 

Except nobody actually reacted three times in any given phase in a regular game (maybe with Deep Strike and Free intercepts, which were both an issue and were both handled pretty poorly in both 3E and 2E). Generally speaking you had 4 reactions a turn (1 per phase +1 from your warlord), so if the total number reactions, regardless of specific reactions would have been the issue, they would have reigned that in a little. And it's really a little because you have to remember that usually there wasn't a charge reaction on every turn, often no move reaction turn 1 and possible warlord death to cut total reactions down to 3 on the later turns. So overall a very slight reduction in total number of reactions. 

However, that misses the point in its entirety because the issue was never about reactions per se, but about big scary units shooting their big scary guns at their full (big, scary) BS in the opposing turn. The prime offender for this was return fire of which you could get a maximum of two, and depending on what you wanted to do with your warlord and the traits available, there was a real trade-off to even getting that second return fire. Nowadays everybody can simply return fire thrice with no set-up required at all. They can similarly run away three times if anyone tries to have a fun game with their melee army. They can even do both in the same game. So, overall, they reduced the number of total reactions available in the slightest, whilst increasing the amount of reactions that *matter* and doing nothing about the reactions that were being a problem. That is not a fix.

On 9/22/2025 at 10:10 AM, Gorgoff said:

I loved those and they weren't the problem.

 

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

On 9/22/2025 at 10:10 AM, Gorgoff said:

 

Which I really like

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.

On 9/22/2025 at 10:10 AM, Gorgoff said:

Yeah, I didn't understand why they felt the need to knclude a mini Shooting phase to the charge phase. That feels unnecessary. 

I guess they saw people not using the guns on their cc units anymore and tried to tackle that. 

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)

On 9/22/2025 at 10:10 AM, Gorgoff said:

I can't agree to that.

3ed is certainly the better game than 2ed but it has it's flaws. 

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

[Agramar_The_Luna_Wolf]

14 hours ago, Xenith said:

Nah, Mat Ward received a lot of online hate around 2010-2013, and Robin Cruddace I believe did also for producing two of the worst 40k codexes of 5th edition. 

Robin Cruddace recibed hate because he said loud that many people didn't want to believe, but was in plain sight: "we are using FAQs to make you buy more and more miniatures, not for competitive equilibrium or more playable army lists"