3.0,failed or not

[Orodhen]

On 12/25/2025 at 8:11 AM, Pacific81 said:

One thing the varied answers in this thread have shown is that even though a new release brings in new players, it also sunders existing communities.

I really hope, even if 3.0 isn't massively successful (or the game itself universally liked) GW stick with the current format for the next edition. Follow the success of Blood Bowl and just do a 0.1 update to the rules (a change of special rule word or two), let players quickly adapt to the new system within one game, let events pull in new players even while they allow 3rd edition players to use their existing armies, don't turn the game mechanics on their head.

I think they could do this, release a lovely new big boxset (with new MKIV or whatever) and it wouldn't cost them a single sale, but think it would do a lot to stop the break-up of gaming groups.

This is what I originally wanted from a 3.0. Just a fixed up 2nd edition. And yet here we are.

 

My group used to message each other daily with progress pictures, rules questions or HH memes. Now the group chat hasn't had a new message in several weeks.

[No Foes Remain]

4 hours ago, Orodhen said:

This is what I originally wanted from a 3.0. Just a fixed up 2nd edition. And yet here we are.

 

My group used to message each other daily with progress pictures, rules questions or HH memes. Now the group chat hasn't had a new message in several weeks.

 

I mean even looking at the B&C, the 30k forums were pretty busy even during 2.0 days but now it's dried up to a few threads (ironically this is one of them).

[Captain Idaho]

In the new year I'm going to post up a discussion talking about interest and see if we can get some ideas and consensus for engagement. I have some ideas.

 

I say this because I've noticed it too and perhaps if those in the community feel like discussing stuff in a focused manner in regular consistent timings, we can drum up support that reaches out further as a trend.

[DOGGED]

While I can't compare to previous editions, I guess I can leave here my 2 cents.

I was tempted by 2nd edition but didn't get into then. This time I did and have got hold of 2 Saturnine boxes already. I'm certain that I won't get another because I have enough of its contents, but I have acquired MkII Assault, MkIII Command and Tactical squads as well as heavy and special weapons and Dreadnoughts. 2 Siege Assault boxes are on their way and next year will be rounding up the armoured components to have a Great Crusade/Early Heresy force. So quite an investment for one year, and I don't regret it a bit.

I'm still getting to grips with the rules and it will be a while before I get to play it, but it's gonna replace 40K as my gaming option almost in its entirety.

[Hfran Morkai]

I've had a little play with army plamning and I can't say I enjoy it as much as I did the Rites of War (important to note I never actually got round to playing 1.0 or 2.0).

 

I know they've said 'less limitations' but it doesn't feel that way so far and I also liked the thematic restrictions for RoW.

 

If the box had been MkIV and Tartaros though I would have been on it like a gull on chips.

[Orodhen]

3 hours ago, Hfran Morkai said:

I've had a little play with army plamning and I can't say I enjoy it as much as I did the Rites of War (important to note I never actually got round to playing 1.0 or 2.0).

 

I know they've said 'less limitations' but it doesn't feel that way so far and I also liked the thematic restrictions for RoW.

 

If the box had been MkIV and Tartaros though I would have been on it like a gull on chips.

I used to list-build all the time for fun before.

 

I tried to make some for 3.0, out of curiosity, and it's like pulling teeth.

 

It doesn't help that my drop pod and subterranean assault lists are un-useable now.

[Brofist]

On 1/4/2026 at 1:23 PM, Orodhen said:

It doesn't help that my drop pod and subterranean assault lists are un-useable now.

 

The worst part was how they got the designers to make statements about how little everything was changing and that you could play all your old armies. Some shady stuff

[Hfran Morkai]

On 1/4/2026 at 9:23 PM, Orodhen said:

I used to list-build all the time for fun before.

 

I tried to make some for 3.0, out of curiosity, and it's like pulling teeth.

 

It doesn't help that my drop pod and subterranean assault lists are un-useable now.

 

Agreed.

 

The first list I was planning on painting and assembling was an Orbital Assault list. In fact I already had the pods.

 

I liked the ability to move units into troops/grant Line if appropriate based on the Rites of War.

 

I'm not sure I love the Detachment malarkey, it certainly seems to hurt more at lower points.

[Stitch5000]

18 minutes ago, Hfran Morkai said:

I liked the ability to move units into troops/grant Line if appropriate based on the Rites of War.

Given that the Primary Detachment has 4 Troops Slots and you unlock another detachment simply by taking a command choice that used to be compulsory anyway, and that more units can score without needing to have Line (X), why is this a problem?

 

19 minutes ago, Hfran Morkai said:

I'm not sure I love the Detachment malarkey, it certainly seems to hurt more at lower points.

Again, at lower points levels you have a Primary Detachment, and you unlock 1 or more Detachments simply by taking the command choice (that was once a compulsory), how is this true?

[Hfran Morkai]

30 minutes ago, Stitch5000 said:

Given that the Primary Detachment has 4 Troops Slots and you unlock another detachment simply by taking a command choice that used to be compulsory anyway, and that more units can score without needing to have Line (X), why is this a problem?

 

Again, at lower points levels you have a Primary Detachment, and you unlock 1 or more Detachments simply by taking the command choice (that was once a compulsory), how is this true?

 

Okay.

 

1k Space Wolves, I will admit this is nowhere even near a good list as I'm waiting for upscaled MkIV before I do Grey Slayers and ideally Tartaros.

 

I have a Breacher Squad, Tactical Squad, Rhino and a Caster of Runes.

 

I want to put my Breachers into a Land Raider (expensive I know). I can just Logistical Benefit it.

 

I'd like some harder hitting infantry, ooh a Veteran Assault Squad with my Caster of Runes. Oh wait, there's not a Command Level Detachment for Elites, guess they'll be my Logistical Benefit and I'll have to take an Armoured Fist as my Detachment.

 

I've now got no real expansion room without purchasing another character.

 

Or, I could have just had the Force Organisation that's existed for Horus Heresy 1.0, 2.0 and in fact much of 40K.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 6 by Hfran Morkai

[Stitch5000]

18 minutes ago, Hfran Morkai said:

 

Okay.

 

1k Space Wolves, I will admit this is nowhere even near a good list as I'm waiting for upscaled MkIV before I do Grey Slayers and ideally Tartaros.

 

I have a Breacher Squad, Tactical Squad, Rhino and a Caster of Runes.

 

I want to put my Breachers into a Land Raider (expensive I know). I can just Logistical Benefit it.

 

I'd like some harder hitting infantry, ooh a Veteran Assault Squad with my Caster of Runes. Oh wait, there's not a Command Level Detachment for Elites, guess they'll be my Logistical Benefit and I'll have to take an Armoured Fist as my Detachment.

 

I've now got no real expansion room without purchasing another character.

 

Or, I could have just had the Force Organisation that's existed for Horus Heresy 1.0, 2.0 and in fact much of 40K.

 

 

 

 

In 1st Edition, (Black Book 7) it stated that a Space Wolves Detachment  HAD to have a Praetor or a Centurion as a compulsory HQ choice, so you would have always needed to take an additional HQ model alongside the Caster of Runes (then a "Priest of Fenris") and you also had to take an HQ choice for each 1,000pts... Plus you were required to take Grey Slayers as Compulsory Troops.

If my memory serves correctly, lots of the Consul types weren't able to fulfil the compulsory HQ slot, so nothing has actually been lost in terms of flexibility. 

[Hfran Morkai]

However if I wanted a Land Raider, a Squad of Terminators and some Jetbikes I didn't have to worry about detachments, I just had to make sure I had space in the Force Organisation.

 

Yes, whilst it's true the SW rules were a little more restrictive HQ wise at least I didn't need to worry about opening up Detachments.

[Shard of Magnus]

11 hours ago, Hfran Morkai said:

However if I wanted a Land Raider, a Squad of Terminators and some Jetbikes I didn't have to worry about detachments, I just had to make sure I had space in the Force Organisation.

I think this is a point that doesn’t get emphasized enough when people talk about the changes in list building. Expanding an army from a list perspective isn’t as straightforward in v3 as it was in v2. There are a lot of options with detachments, without constraints of the rites of war. But…the detachment approach makes expansion challenging unless you have an unused detachment slot. At a fixed point most lists can be made to look 1:1.  Personally, I don’t feel the list building aspects make v3 a failure in themselves. The pre launch hype that didn’t foreshadow the significance of the changes was a major negative.

 

I don’t think any of the people I know have not been able to recreate their v2 lists. That doesn’t mean all of those lists are playable - either because of other rules interactions (such as descent or angels/drop pod assault not working with the restriction on feel strike) or due to other rules changes making a unit less fun/useful/etc . Added with the reduction in special flavor rules for rites of war compounds the ‘feels bad’ aspect. On the flip side, there are other army builds that can now be done because there aren’t the RoW limitations. That’s a plus for me although I am in the minority on the view with the local group.

 

All of that contributes to the community perception and has certainly not been a success from player engagement from what I have seen. I think this year will be telling from trends.  Spend on HH in the local group seems to have trended up considering new edition. That is unlikely to continue without an influx of new players to the group. We are an insignificant number overall, but the implication of trending is worrisome as a fan of 30K. I’m expecting there will be a shift back to 2.0 or people will stop playing. (Again, speaking only for my local group.)

Edited January 7 by Shard of Magnus
Added ‘not’ to start of second paragraph.

[Stitch5000]

16 hours ago, Shard of Magnus said:

I’m expecting there will be a shift back to 2.0 or people will stop playing. (Again, speaking only for my local group.)

On the contrary, a dozen people in my immediate player group who more or less skipped HH2 after playing HH1.0 for a decade have taken up HH3 with vigour and some of them have attended 3 or 4 events already. 

[Orodhen]

21 hours ago, Shard of Magnus said:

I’m expecting there will be a shift back to 2.0 or people will stop playing. (Again, speaking only for my local group.)

That's pretty similar to my local group. Some people are going back to 1.0. Some are sticking with 2.0. More than a few have outright just quit because they were fed up with GW.

 

So my local scene is fractured to the point of being almost non-existent outside of little pockets of players.

[Brofist]

We have a number of people just skipping the entire edition. In a way the 3 year cycle is also a curse because, let's face it, that's about the time it takes to complete a big army.

[Pacific81]

I have made my gaming group swear a blood oath that we are not switching to a new 4th edition in 2.5 years, even if it arrives from the hands of Rick Priestley coming down in a ray of sunlight sent by the Gods!

[JeffJedi]

I hope they are not "saving" mk4 and mk5 for later editions. Although I could seen mk7 coming out in a scouring themed edition.

Edited Friday at 04:50 PM by JeffJedi

[Xenith]

My feelings echo a lot of people's here - I posted this in my AL plog which I'll paste here:

 

Quote

I've been gradually getting to grips with 3rd ed, but only managed 3 games since release, generally due to slow uptake from my club. I can honestly say, that, regardless of the quality of the rules, GW really shot themselves in the foot with the major revamp and good will of the community, and severaly underestimated the influence of the...whiny influencers who decried the game. 

 

Several of the biggest HH players at my club havent had a single game of the new edition, 2 havent even bought the rulebook yet (one of whom amassed over 10k pts of fully painted DA from AoD release in 2022). 

 

I'm going to have to create a slow grow campaign to get things going again, but the new rules are even more book-inetsive than the last, a big step backwards, regardless of the quality and narrative nature of them. They have gone too 'granular' for what should be a mass-battle wargame. 

[Hfran Morkai]

1 hour ago, JeffJedi said:

I hope they are not "saving" mk4 and mk5 for later editions. Although I could seen mk7 coming out in a scouring themed edition.

 

I'm hoping that as we got VI and III in 2.0 that we see IV this edition, and sooner rather than later.

[Stitch5000]

On 1/9/2026 at 4:36 PM, Xenith said:

They have gone too 'granular' for what should be a mass-battle wargame.

What do you mean by this?

 

[Pacific81]

I don't want to put words in @Xenith's mouth, but the rules have a level of detail (i.e. granular) that are more suitable for a skirmish or squad level game (5-25 minis) rather than platoon level (60-70 minis plus as the game is designed to be played).

Having to look up lots of special rules - the most egregious examples I can think of are the Medic rules, which require looking through three separate rule references, and challenges, which is effectively a mini-game within a game* - are better suited to smaller games with smaller model count. This is why larger, platoon-level games often feature more rule abstraction, and certainly not pages of special rules and references, which all serve to slow the gameplay down. 

 

On this note, one of the best bit of rules writing I have seen is for Epic Armageddon: again a mass-scale battle, but the game doesn't require you to know if its a high-explosive or plasma inconveniencer that is killing infantry, only that it has an 'anti-infantry' value. So you have abstraction that gives a 'feel' of gameplay, without needing the player to go routing through rulebooks.

 

If I had to make a guess, I reckon a small cadre of playtesters built this game and added more & more complexity without realising how difficult it would become for fresh/new players and how impenetrable it became. Video Game developers often make this mistake, where the standard difficulty is based on them playing for hundreds of hours and inadvertently becoming very good at it. Someone new plays, and immediately dies.

 

*I actually think the challenges are fun, but I don't think it has any place in a game played on this scale & miniature count. I feel for event operators trying to create events and fit more than 2 games into a day really.

@Xenithplease correct me if I am wrong here :)

[Xenith]

Nope, spot on my sentiments! Ld, Cl, Wp etc work in necromunda, as do statuses, as you are playing with 5-10 models per side in a game. Heresy is supposed to be about massive armies fighting brutal battles, that's the whole point of larger unit sizes and cheaper models. At that level, you don't need 4 different kinds of incapacitated to reflect being upset, scared, under fire, etc, one/two will do - falling back or less effective. You don't need to double the stat block so you know whether a guy isn't fighting because he's afraid or nervous, Ld will do. What we needed is a load of models on the table, and big explosions. We received neither, with MSU being pushed, and reduced blast sizes.

[Stitch5000]

16 hours ago, Xenith said:

Ld will do

I have read what people are saying, but we already know pretty well that Leadership alone will not do. The developers of this game have been pretty explicit about the fact that an elevated Ld stat unavoidably makes things that are supposed to be resistant to running away really good at casting psychic powers, for example.

I think the falsely-maligned Legion Chaplain is a good example of how this works. Lots of people made a stink about the Chaplain "not having any special rules" without really considering that he has an Cool of 10... That isn't really available on any models and makes the squad he as joined as close to "fearless" as exists in this iteration of the game. (An important point to take into consideration here is that the binary states of "affected by leadership modifier" or "immune to leadership tests" doesn't exists in this edition. All units use the same fundamental rules, some just have stats that make them very unlikely to fail checks - see Horus Ascended Ld 14.)

Net result - fewer specific special rules but also more interesting game outcomes.

 

20 hours ago, Pacific81 said:

the rules have a level of detail (i.e. granular) that are more suitable for a skirmish or squad level game (5-25 minis) rather than platoon level (60-70 minis plus as the game is designed to be played).

This really isn't true in practice because HH uses agglomerated Units of models. You are effectively using 8-10 squads of models in the same way that you use individual miniature sin Necromunda, for example. All of the HH3 rules have simplified things to make interactions between squads less model-specific, see shooting and wound allocation as prime examples. 

[Captain Idaho]

The thing is, for a larger scale game beyond 5-10 models aside, the benefits of those attributes is negligible compared to the detraction pressure of the fiddly myriad of rules.

 

To counter the examples used, leadership tests for panic that might use Cool, if the Chaplain has leadership of 10 then that does the same trick nicely. He doesn't have psychic powers, so it is irrelevant. 

 

Likewise, being good at casting psychic powers using leadership might result in the psyker having an unusual amount of bravery and less likely to run sure... but how many psychic models are there really so what does it matter.

 

It's a compromise situation really. A cleaner game, with less mental load and rules referencing, is preference at the sacrifice of a Librarian being good at not running away.

 

If that really was such an issue, a simple rule that "models without the command rule cannot pass their leadership to a unit they are accompanying, therefore such units would take a leadership test using the next highest available leadership score."

 

Arguably it wouldn't matter anyway.