New Warhammer 40,000 Edition announced!

[gaurdian31]

30 minutes ago, Inquisitor_Lensoven said:

As someone looking to expand my small ork warband, I’m curious how they’re going to balance out ork shooting with this  -1 to hit/BS in cover

 

hitting on 5s this will destroy their shooting.

I would guess they give their guns more shots. I am pretty sure that they used to hit on 5s for multiple editions and their guns would have like 4 shots instead of 2 to even it out.

[Xenith]

Maybe a rule like Long, Uncontrolled Bursts that makes them ignore to hit modifiers. More likely will be more shots. 

[Nephaston]

Yeah, just simply giving them more shots is the ticket imo. Just gotta bring a bucket to carry all them dice.

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

1 hour ago, gaurdian31 said:

I would guess they give their guns more shots. I am pretty sure that they used to hit on 5s for multiple editions and their guns would have like 4 shots instead of 2 to even it out.

Thats what I figure, but at that point, it seems to make no sense to debuff shooting if the number of hits you can expect remains the same.

 

id honestly prefer a lot of RF, and a slight brute force increase to their weapons with a S increase by 1 for small arms and 2-3 for special and heavy weapons.

[01RTB01]

Bringing Dakka, Dakka, Dakka back would help. Also as the first/ second codex in the edition, they should be ok.

[Emperor Ming]

5 hours ago, DemonGSides said:

 

That's not a GW rule, that's a tournament organizer rule that's just propagated. It's easy enough to undo by just saying "that's not how this works anymore."

Yes i know that!

 

Every game I've played be it casual events or competitive have used this as a house rule or similar. 

[jaxom]

5 hours ago, Inquisitor_Lensoven said:

it seems to make no sense to debuff shooting if the number of hits you can expect remains the same.

I agree. Overall, I think the change helps bring shooting lethality down. For most cases, I think the -1 to hit maths out the same as +1 to save (head math, take with grain of salt).  There are some edge cases though. The most straightforward being that 2+ and 3+ Saves now benefit from Cover against AP0 weapons.  That too though brings down lethality.

[Antarius]

The big caveat to this post is that it's too early to truly know anything about how the totality of changes will affect the game, but I honestly think it would be pretty silly to make cover better and then buff all armies/units to make sure they score exactly as many hits/wounds on models in cover (not to mention how this would affect their shooting at units that aren't in cover). To put it bluntly, the whole point of making changes to the game is to change the game and the way it's played.
Some of those changes might be bad or might make specific army variants less immediately useful, but that's just the nature of the beast.

Personally, I think cover should be impactful and potentially change the way you need to deal with units in cover (if you're an ork boy, maybe go in there and krump them - the distinction between choppa/shoota boyz is gone now anyway so might as well put that choppa to use!), so I like (the idea of) these changes.

[Mogger351]

7 hours ago, 01RTB01 said:

Bringing Dakka, Dakka, Dakka back would help. Also as the first/ second codex in the edition, they should be ok.

 

9 hours ago, Nephaston said:

Yeah, just simply giving them more shots is the ticket imo. Just gotta bring a bucket to carry all them dice.

 

Having played into it quite a lot over the years, both these options result in really long, slow phases that typically don't result in much. It's also sort of painful for the ork player to have 40+ shots that convert into 1-2 wounds on a marine.

[ChapterMasterGodfrey]

I just hope with the recent attention they've actually given to 1000 point games, they release terrain layouts for games at that size.

[Emperor Ming]

3 hours ago, ChapterMasterGodfrey said:

I just hope with the recent attention they've actually given to 1000 point games, they release terrain layouts for games at that size.

Hopefully, but the current wording seems like they are throwing everything away for tournament play only

 

or 'merged' 

[Rogue]

8 hours ago, jaxom said:

I agree. Overall, I think the change helps bring shooting lethality down. For most cases, I think the -1 to hit maths out the same as +1 to save (head math, take with grain of salt).  There are some edge cases though. The most straightforward being that 2+ and 3+ Saves now benefit from Cover against AP0 weapons.  That too though brings down lethality.

 

The key factor here isn't the +1 or -1 itself, it's the relative effect they have. Modifiers matter more when they affect difficult rolls.

 

For illustrative purposes, imagine BS5+ shooting at a 4+ save. Ignoring the wound roll (because we can treat it as a constant), the base chance of landing a damaging hit is ⅓ × ½, or ⅙. 

- a cover save makes that ⅓ × ⅓, or 1/9. 

- a -1 to hit makes it ⅙ × ½, or 1/12.

So a BS5+ shooter prefers to deal with cover save.

 

Now imagine BS3+ shooting at a 4+ save - the base chance to land a damaging hit is ⅔ × ½, or ⅓.

- a cover save makes that ⅔ × ⅓, or 2/9.

- a -1 to hit makes it ½ × ½, or ¼.

So a BS3+ shooter prefers to deal with -1 to hit.

 

Again, modifiers matter more when they affect difficult rolls.

For the BS5+ shooter, hitting is more difficult than beating the save, so the hit modifier hurts them more. 

For the BS3+ shooter, beating the save is more difficult, so the cover save hurts them more.

 

So in isolation, this change broadly benefits better shooters (like marines), and low AP weaponry into good armour.

And it hurts worse shooters (like orks), and high AP weapons (where the cover save often doesn't matter anyway).

 

[Antarius]

Thanks for mapping it out, Rogue!

However, I will add that I think it's a little more nuanced in practice whether it disadvantages "horde" armies or not, as I think many "cheap and cheerful"-type units will also benefit more from cover under the new system, so there's probably a bit of "swings and roundabouts" to it.

[Rogue]

No worries.

 

And yes, the bigger picture is likely to be more nuanced - my conclusion there is specific only to that single interaction between the two modifiers.

[phandaal]

22 hours ago, Antarius said:

I can’t speak for phandaal, but my reading of their post wasn’t that models should react differently in game terms, but that the same result can be interpreted as representing different things. Sort of like how a model being removed due to having 0 wounds left might represent other things than being slain outright.

 

Bingo! This is exactly what I meant.

[jaxom]

20 minutes ago, Rogue said:

 

The key factor here isn't the +1 or -1 itself, it's the relative effect they have. Modifiers matter more when they affect difficult rolls.

 

For illustrative purposes, imagine BS5+ shooting at a 4+ save. Ignoring the wound roll (because we can treat it as a constant), the base chance of landing a damaging hit is ⅓ × ½, or ⅙. 

- a cover save makes that ⅓ × ⅓, or 1/9. 

- a -1 to hit makes it ⅙ × ½, or 1/12.

So a BS5+ shooter prefers to deal with cover save.

 

Now imagine BS3+ shooting at a 4+ save - the base chance to land a damaging hit is ⅔ × ½, or ⅓.

- a cover save makes that ⅔ × ⅓, or 2/9.

- a -1 to hit makes it ½ × ½, or ¼.

So a BS3+ shooter prefers to deal with -1 to hit.

 

Again, modifiers matter more when they affect difficult rolls.

For the BS5+ shooter, hitting is more difficult than beating the save, so the hit modifier hurts them more. 

For the BS3+ shooter, beating the save is more difficult, so the cover save hurts them more.

 

So in isolation, this change broadly benefits better shooters (like marines), and low AP weaponry into good armour.

And it hurts worse shooters (like orks), and high AP weapons (where the cover save often doesn't matter anyway).

 

That's an interesting way to look at it, and nicely demonstrates the impact on magnitude. I was thinking of percent changes, and only thinking about discrete changes. Both scenarios have the same percent difference for each step of change and I didn't consider the accumulation of change along the way, which is more clearly visible in your math. So while each scenario has 40% between unmodified and +1AP, then 28.6% between +1AP and -1Hit, the end result of 3/36 (w/+1AP)) vs 4/36  (w/-1Hit) for scenario 1 and scenario B 8/36 (w/+1AP)) vs 9/36  (w/-1Hit); when then compared to the original 6/36 (scenario A) and 12/36 (scenario B) creates a larger percent difference - or greater impact - on the lower BS shooter.  

 

TL;DR, the change process between the two systems is the same for all BS, but the same process produces different magnitudes of difference... which actually makes a lot of sense now that I think about it because it is a multiplicative process and 3x3 and 4x3 is the same process but the former gets 9 and the latter gets 12  Or as the linguistics would say: the changes are all equal, the results are not all equitable.

[gaurdian31]

15 hours ago, Inquisitor_Lensoven said:

Thats what I figure, but at that point, it seems to make no sense to debuff shooting if the number of hits you can expect remains the same.

 

id honestly prefer a lot of RF, and a slight brute force increase to their weapons with a S increase by 1 for small arms and 2-3 for special and heavy weapons.

Yeah, that was a complaint myself and a few friends had when playing shooty orks. Their BS being bad didn't really matter when they get so many shots. 

[Karhedron]

9 hours ago, Antarius said:

Personally, I think cover should be impactful and potentially change the way you need to deal with units in cover (if you're an ork boy, maybe go in there and krump them - the distinction between choppa/shoota boyz is gone now anyway so might as well put that choppa to use!), so I like (the idea of) these changes.

 

Or call in Da Burna Boyz! 

[01RTB01]

7 hours ago, Mogger351 said:

 

 

Having played into it quite a lot over the years, both these options result in really long, slow phases that typically don't result in much. It's also sort of painful for the ork player to have 40+ shots that convert into 1-2 wounds on a marine.

 

Having played orks in every edition I'll respectfully disagree. It really didn't slow things down any more than marine players with their gazillion re rolls from characters or oath of moment. 

 

I can honestly say it made a difference as an ork player and was more impactful than you're suggesting. Never tell dice the odds as that's rarely seen as playing out on the table 

[Kyari]

5 hours ago, ChapterMasterGodfrey said:

I just hope with the recent attention they've actually given to 1000 point games, they release terrain layouts for games at that size.

 

My issue with 1000 point games is that I feel like they really need a table size somewhere between that of combat patrol and full size. Combat patrol boards are generally too busy for them, and while GW encourages the use of a full size table for them they feel so empty at 1000 points.

 

I liked the changes they brought in during the last chapter approved deck (rule of 2/4, battle line can advance and action and action and shoot, some secondaries can be discarded) but I wish they'd do more.

[Lord Marshal]

It's a Terrain Objectives preview today.

 

Quote

Rather than objectives existing as tokens that units need to stand next to, most are now secured by claiming a terrain area*. It might sound like a simple change, but it has a couple of big implications that shake up how you’ll approach the battle for your objectives.

 

For starters, many objectives will now offer a measure of cover to those capturing them, so you don’t need to worry about your dutiful vanguard being left out in the open as a sacrificial lamb. Infantry, Beasts, and Swarms that choose not to shoot can also make use of the new Hidden rule that we saw earlier this week to avoid long-range fire, making them safer as they contribute to your overall victory.

 

Larger units, such as vehicles and monsters, will also be able to contribute to claiming objectives in greater safety. While not able to use Terrain Areas to gain cover, they can still perch behind ruins, trees, and rubble to gain the benefit of cover, which will be most of the time when holding an objective, as objectives ARE ruins, trees or rubble.

 

Vehicles can also traverse the terrain around objectives more easily, being able to move through lighter features like low walls, scrub, and treelines without slowing (effectively, all the yellow bits on these maps).

 

 

Besides that, it also plays into the story of your games, with armies locked in a back-and-forth scrum over an important strategic ruin, critical power generator, or sacred site  – and you can still use your lovingly converted objective tokens to mark which terrain areas are the ones to contest. As we touched upon while discussing new mission types, most primary missions will want you to hold objectives while accomplishing your other tasks, so you’ll always have some hotspots to brawl over.

 

The number of objectives varies by mission too, between 5 and 6. That's worth factoring in when you build your army list – will you aim to contest the whole battlefield, or concentrate your forces to secure a handful of critical points?

 

That’s not to say that every objective must now be a building, or treeline, or an important mess of craters, and you’re still welcome to mark them with 40mm bases should the mission require. You might need to defuse a bomb,** for example, or pick up and move relics while running around a crumbling cityscape. 

 

 

We hope the new focus on area-based objectives gives you some ideas for really cool terrain features to fight around, and spices up the narrative of your games whether they’re light-hearted tussles on the kitchen table or tactical tournament matches where every move matters. We’ll be back next week with another miniature reveal from the Armageddon boxed set, and more rules changes you can look forward to.

 

 

Edited yesterday at 01:58 PM by Lord Marshal

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

9 hours ago, Antarius said:

The big caveat to this post is that it's too early to truly know anything about how the totality of changes will affect the game, but I honestly think it would be pretty silly to make cover better and then buff all armies/units to make sure they score exactly as many hits/wounds on models in cover (not to mention how this would affect their shooting at units that aren't in cover). To put it bluntly, the whole point of making changes to the game is to change the game and the way it's played.
Some of those changes might be bad or might make specific army variants less immediately useful, but that's just the nature of the beast.

Personally, I think cover should be impactful and potentially change the way you need to deal with units in cover (if you're an ork boy, maybe go in there and krump them - the distinction between choppa/shoota boyz is gone now anyway so might as well put that choppa to use!), so I like (the idea of) these changes.

That’s all well and good to say, but again a not insignificant portion if the player base wants to be able to tell a story with their games, and some times that story is their army is doctrinally more shooting based.

 

how do you balance guard or tau? Idk much about tau units, but the guard has basically 1 1/2-2 decent melee options. If you cannot effectively soften up an intercessor squad even a Kasrkin or scion squad is probably going to get stomped in melee without serious and unfluffy buffs over what they have now.

[Kaiju Soze]

Objectives preview is up. Typically looking at 5-6 objectives that each use a terrain area rather than the 40mm marker +3". Some missions may still use the marker objectives, representing more interactive things like recoverable relics and diffusible bombs. 

 

Edit: And I clearly didn't pay enough attention, so beaten to it.

Edited yesterday at 02:11 PM by Kaiju Soze

[Karhedron]

37 minutes ago, Inquisitor_Lensoven said:

That’s all well and good to say, but again a not insignificant portion if the player base wants to be able to tell a story with their games, and some times that story is their army is doctrinally more shooting based.

 

It is possible that shooty units/armies will see points drops when 11th edition comes out. It is also possible that GW intentionally wants to reign in shooty armies and boost melee ones but seems unlikely as the current meta does not seem to be overly dominated by shooty lists.

[Tawnis]

11 hours ago, jaxom said:

I agree. Overall, I think the change helps bring shooting lethality down. For most cases, I think the -1 to hit maths out the same as +1 to save (head math, take with grain of salt).  There are some edge cases though. The most straightforward being that 2+ and 3+ Saves now benefit from Cover against AP0 weapons.  That too though brings down lethality.

Aside from the math already presented by others, there is another factor to consider. It's not a -1 to the hit roll, it's a -1 to the Ballistic Skill, which means (At least going by current rules) that it stacks with things like Stealth. Meaning an army like my Kroot that has Stealth on all non-Cavalry units, will be functionally -2 to be hit at range. 

They could be going back to the old style of +/- of modifiers used to offset each other, but they moved away from that for a reason, it was a lot of math all the time. 

 

As it stands, on top of the new hidden rules, some armies are going to be FAR more durable at range, which will likely lead to a more fast and heavily melee focused meta at launch. It's hard to predict so early, but it seems like the way the wind is blowing. 

Edited yesterday at 02:45 PM by Tawnis