10th ed faction focuses

Desolation Squads have indirect fire and, as long as they remain stationary (which they are likely to do in any game), they ignore all to-hit penalties for indirect fire AND ignore cover.

Also, Chaplains on bikes can confer devastating wounds to any unit they are leading, and they can lead bike squads that have a bunch of weapon options, including grav-guns.

Marines are shaping up to be pretty ridiculous.

krayd wrote:

Desolation Squads have indirect fire and, as long as they remain stationary (which they are likely to do in any game), they ignore all to-hit penalties for indirect fire AND ignore cover.

Also, Chaplains on bikes can confer devastating wounds to any unit they are leading, and they can lead bike squads that have a bunch of weapon options, including grav-guns.

Marines are shaping up to be pretty ridiculous.

Anyone else think the new character rules are already creating more problems than they solved?

Especially since GW seems to have upped the power of their buffs substantially.

Herohammer amped up to 11 ... can't wait to see how useless ours are gonna be ... gotta wait till Thursday to be disappointed

Archon_91 wrote:

Herohammer amped up to 11 ... can't wait to see how useless ours are gonna be ... gotta wait till Thursday to be disappointed

Well, they dropped the toughness of all Eldar phoenix lords (that have been seen so far) down to 3 for some reason, and the singing spear is now pretty crap in melee (S3 AP0), so if CW is getting the shaft on that front, then that probably doesn't bode well for us.

Again, I'm worried that we're going to be stuck with anti-infantry being our primary focus, in a meta where you really don't even need to take infantry in order to build an army.

krayd wrote:

Well, they dropped the toughness of all Eldar phoenix lords (that have been seen so far) down to 3 for some reason, and the singing spear is now pretty crap in melee (S3 AP0), so if CW is getting the shaft on that front, then that probably doesn't bode well for us.

It seems they really want to put distance between SM characters and the characters of all other factions.

krayd wrote:

Again, I'm worried that we're going to be stuck with anti-infantry being our primary focus, in a meta where you really don't even need to take infantry in order to build an army.

The frustrating thing is how much we are expected to sacrifice for the power of mediocrity.

The Splinter Cannon is 36" A3 S3 AP-1 D2 Sustained Hits 1; Anti-Infantry 3+
The Shuriken Cannon is 24" A3 S6 AP-1 D2 Sustained Hits 1

The Splinter Cannon has the power to wound infantry on 3s.
The Shuriken Cannon also has the power to wound infantry on 3s by virtue of being S6. It can also wound T3 infantry on 2s.

The Shuriken Cannon can also wound most bikers on 3s and most monsters and light vehicles on 4s.

Meanwhile, the Splinter Cannon is wounding bikers on 5s at best, and everything else on 6s.

In return for being worse against everything, the Splinter Cannon has a slightly better range. One that doesn't gel with any of our units, save on the Razorwing.

We're really off to a flying start in this edition.

Aside from the venom did anyone put splinter cannons on anything? I used to run them on my Kab squads back in 5th/6th/7th when moving meant a dark lance hit in 6s but since that Hasnt been the case for a while the splinter cannon has become a dark lance

Archon_91 wrote:

Aside from the venom did anyone put splinter cannons on anything? I used to run them on my Kab squads back in 5th/6th/7th when moving meant a dark lance hit in 6s but since that Hasnt been the case for a while the splinter cannon has become a dark lance

I think I've put one on my Razorwing.

Otherwise, no. I've generally either run Kabalites as 2 5-man squads or else taken a Dark Lance.

Even in 8th, before it was hammered into the ground, I just never found my army lacking for splinter weapons.

I love how the SM captain gets a variant with a jump pack despite no official model existing. I wonder if this courtesy will be extended to literally anyone else...

I like running double splinter cannons on my Venoms, but that's really only because it feels right to me. With Blasters losing their AT potential, I'm going to say with confidence that there will never be a situation where you want the Cannon over the Dark Lance. The Splinter Cannon's been a solution looking for a problem for several editions now imo - I'm not really sure what targets it's supposed to shoot at that are not already handled by a more capable weapon. Anti-GEQ? Expensive and overkill with its current statline. Anti-MEQ? Disintegrator Cannons are generally a better fit. Anti-elite/mounted/monster? Cannons are completely useless against the majority of these targets now.

I did get what I said I wanted earlier in this thread, which was a ranged weapon capable of wounding T3 on 3's, but I'm not sure at what cost lol. Guess we'll know for certain next week.

TheBaconPope wrote:

I love how the SM captain gets a variant with a jump pack despite no official model existing.

I think the trouble there is that models DID exist once. Like this one. They're less likely to extend the courtesy to other units or characters if a model has never existed for the option. There has never been an official Archon on Jetbike, for example.

Squidmaster wrote:

I think the trouble there is that models DID exist once. Like this one. They're less likely to extend the courtesy to other units or characters if a model has never existed for the option. There has never been an official Archon on Jetbike, for example.

Plus we can't have a space marine squad that cant have 1 of 1000 variants of captain and lieutenant attach to it

Archon_91 wrote:

Plus we can't have a space marine squad that cant have 1 of 1000 variants of captain and lieutenant attach to it

True. I think the issue there though is that Space Marines have all of the character options from decades of releases. We don't.

But it's not like we couldn't or didn't (if i remeber correctly jetbike and skyboards were options for Archons and succubus in 3rd) ... and the original idea or the design philosophy behind the D.E. revamp if 5th edition (or at least from what I understand it to be) was Kitbashing ... GW wouldn't have to waist the production resources on designing every specific character and just let the players smash together the left over bits from their kits to make them, but that also left a lot of room for third party sculpts of said characters to be made so the then CEO of Games Workshop decided greed was best and frak that philosophy right out the door ... but I also know that we lost options going from 3rd to 5th edition and each edition after that we lose something else so ...

I did myself a disservice and looked at the 7th ed Marine codex.

There were like 30 Datasheets.

It was magnificent I almost cried, clapped and crap my pants.

Uploads of today are up. Looks like it's just the snowflake marine chapters.

I find this rules trickle real annoying

Agreed they should just give everyone their Indexs all at once, sure hold off on the points and missions until the release date but I don't see the reason for the index trickle outside of they need to make the imperium/space marine players feel like special ponies cause they get all their rules first ... and screw xenos yall can wait and feel envy over all the rules we gave to space Marines to destroy your faction specifically

If I'm feeling charitable, this could be to prevent the community website from being hugged to death by everyone rushing to get their rules all at once. But the way they're releasing it (just Tyranids and Marines first, then ???) says there's at least some level of marketing BS at play here, to me.

But who knows with GW. Their digital infrastructure seems to take the golden throne as its inspiration (ancient, unknowable, and held together mostly by duck tape repairs and prayer)

Archon_91 wrote:

But it's not like we couldn't or didn't (if i remeber correctly jetbike and skyboards were options for Archons and succubus in 3rd) ... and the original idea or the design philosophy behind the D.E. revamp if 5th edition (or at least from what I understand it to be) was Kitbashing ... GW wouldn't have to waist the production resources on designing every specific character and just let the players smash together the left over bits from their kits to make them, but that also left a lot of room for third party sculpts of said characters to be made so the then CEO of Games Workshop decided greed was best and frak that philosophy right out the door ... but I also know that we lost options going from 3rd to 5th edition and each edition after that we lose something else so ...

Unfortunately this has not been the ethos behind Codexes for a long time. The ethos since 7th has been "no official model, no rules".
The could let us kit-bash, but they won't.

I have a good feeling about this edition. We're going to get a lot of options & flavorful rules. Hell, we might even get wargear options for our character units.

Wrack_Enthusiast wrote:

I have a good feeling about this edition. We're going to get a lot of options & flavorful rules. Hell, we might even get wargear options for our character units.

You know something the rest of us don't? We lost options on the kabalite data sheet including (and this cones from the venom rule) the ability to take them (and wyches) in units of 5 ...

But the more I think about it the more I like the new Power from Pain as it actually does something for shooting (and we will be able to use it on our ravagers, so rerolls for them without having to buy an archon to stand back there screaming vects poetry at the gunners)

I am patiently waiting (and plotting) for the index cards to see where the coven sit in terms of additional ways to get pain tokens and thankfully because they are present in a recent picture of the army, it seems we still have mandrakes even though we can't buy them

Archon_91 wrote:

You know something the rest of us don't?  

Not really, but I do believe in the power of positive thinking. Who knows, maybe the index cards won't be representative of the datasheets in our codex?
I also really like Power from Pain in this edition, it reminds me of how it worked in 5th. We'll see how it all shakes out in the end, but I'm looking forward to the index cards too.

From what I've seen so far, it look like the designers built a decent foundation for DE and kinda forgot to build the rest of the house.

I quite like the idea of pain tokens, at least compared to the old PfP system. But they took this decently fluffy idea and used it to...give us two types of reroll. Both of which would be fine as part of a list of 4-6 benefits, but just feel like they stopped halfway through writing as is.

Add to that a detachment bonus that can charitably be described as phoned in and I'm even less certain about how things are going to shake out. I'm guessing we'll have the full index rules on Thursday, so we'll see, but I'm personally going to find it difficult to be excited about DE if it's clear the designers weren't.

Wrack_Enthusiast wrote:

I have a good feeling about this edition.

That makes one of us.

Wrack_Enthusiast wrote:

We're going to get a lot of options & flavorful rules.

Optimism is one thing but this is demonstrably wrong.

What we're going to get is:

- The Pain Token rule (which might have been interesting had the writers not gone to Starbucks and forgotten to come back and finish writing it)

- A non-existent detachment ability.

- 2 pages of stratagems (zzzzzZZZZZZ).

- 4 enhancements that are somehow going to have to make up for the fact that we have 3 HQs with no wargear, all trying to serve the exact same role, and all having to spend the entire game glued to one of maybe two units.

Wrack_Enthusiast wrote:

Hell, we might even get wargear options for our character units.

Right. In the same way that CSM just got their Jump Packs back.

Oh wait, no they didn't. Because that privilege is reserved for Space Marines and Space Marines only.

The indexes in general aren't big on flavorful wargear choices. I think that a best indicator of how things are going to look in 10th in terms of that is going to be the first batch of codices that get released.... especially the non-marine ones. Though, if they look great, you can still lament the fact that we are not going to be seeing ours for a while. I suspect that they might want to work on all of the Eldar stuff at once, since we've got crossover units (corsairs, harlies, Ynarri).

krayd wrote:

The indexes in general aren't big on flavorful wargear choices. I think that a best indicator of how things are going to look in 10th in terms of that is going to be the first batch of codices that get released.... especially the non-marine ones. Though, if they look great, you can still lament the fact that we are not going to be seeing ours for a while.

The thing is though ... is GW has said that the indexes aren't going to be "replaced" by the codexes ... the codexes are going to be a different set of army/ faction rules you CAN play if you want, but the index data sheets are what you get for unit rules and options for the edition ... basically think of these as the supplement codexs from 6th/7th where they didn't replace your main codex unit sheets, they just became a different set of rules and army building you could play with if you wanted

If the 10th ed codexs were truely going to add that much more flavor and power and wargear options we'd run into the issue we just had with 9th where you got DEMOLISHED if you didn't have your 9th ed codex and forcing players to play with their index rules (again GW has said these are the data sheets for the edition) while they wait for their Codex is going to piss off more than a little bit of the player base as it looks like they are really slowing the roll out of codexes this edition

Archon_91 wrote:

The thing is though ... is GW has said that the indexes aren't going to be "replaced" by the codexes ... the codexes are going to be a different set of army/ faction rules you CAN play if you want, but the index data sheets are what you get for unit rules and options for the edition ... basically think of these as the supplement codexs from 6th/7th where they didn't replace your main codex unit sheets, they just became a different set of rules and army building you could play with if you wanted

I think that what GW means is that the detachment rule that is in the Index (realspace raid) will be in the codex, plus some other detachments that you can just slot in and out. It is very possible that they may update the datasheets for the codex, and that is where all of the wargear options will be, if any. We'll have to see what the codices actually look like to confirm. However, they have suggested that the datasheets as they are right now, are not set in stone, and may get modified over time during balance passes.