Now unbound has been billed as very much antichrist-al in it's effect. I choose 24 separate Obliterators, yeah I choose 7 Riptides, Well I choose 2 Transcendant C'Tan...
Steve brought his Emperor Titan again...
For a tournament by all means curb it, but you were gonna make the tourney your own and change things anyway to make it your own, it's one more line in the pack "Battleforged Only". We choose to limit you to this type of legal army only, no harm no foul, these are our rules for these games.
Unbound comes alive when used by people not to make an abusive list, but when it's used to make a fun list. Previously if a player wanted to run an armoured company (Outside of AM Forgeworld) they had to break the rules. AM are the only faction in the galaxy that masses their tanks? What if I want a Chaos armoured force, or Eldar, or Tau without Troops? Now I can. What if I want to do a dirty dozen style character army? Now I can. What if I want an Aspect Conclave of Banshee, Scorpion and Dragon? Now I can.
Now previously I had to break the rules, there was nothing stopping me before with friends but now it is legal, no need to break a rule. What did it cost me to have that official stamp? Tourney have to say "Battleforged Only" seems like a good trade to me. 17 keystrokes to allow a chunk of your player base official freedom to go nuts with their armies while another can ignore it.
Not only that but I feel it helps show the direction the designers want to go. They don't want a competitive game, it's clear that's not how the majority of them play. They want a loose ruleset that gives you are the player freedom to make your fun with it however the two of you (or three or more we don't judge lifestyles here) want to.
Yes they want you to talk to your opponent before you play and you may consider that a weakness, in which case perhaps 40k is not the game for you, I love talking with my opponents beforehand about lists, scenarios and how their army fits together.
And that's the thing that I always feel like needs to be said more, if you don't like a game don't play it. Life is too short to play games you don't enjoy, 40k will be what it will be and you cannot afford to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy, it's what keeps MMO's in business. If something in your leisure time isn't fun, don't do it, there are other games out there.
But I digress, so what did 7th edition actually change for better and worse? I'm just gonna look at some of the big changes and the minutia may come up in course.
- It redressed the MC/Walker imbalance and buffed vehicles in general.
The Smash nerfs and removal of auto-hits mean vehicles can survive close encounters with MC's much more readily and that MC's are much less likely to double out people with a casual smash attack whereas the walker is likely still a S10 all day every day type of fighter.
The general vehicle changes didn't protect vehicles from HP spam but from single shots. Yes I hear you "But Dunkel that means they did nothing because Wave Serpents" and I might have agreed with you had high power AT shots become more popular again. Yes, I said weapons like Melta are becoming more needed. The S7 spam of yesterday has to make way for the units of today.
LoW and Forge World being in the core game means you could easily be looking across the board at Knights, Baneblades, Stompas, Land Raider grade chassis, Leman Russ. Some of those things S7 can't even hurt and others it needs 6's to glance. A Knight with it's Ion Shield requires 12 S7 hits to strip a single HP. Once you are facing units like this you need something with more bite.
- Objectives placed before choosing sides.
It boggles my mind how big of a change this is and how little coverage it is getting. Previously we were choosing sides then placing objectives in your deployment zone/no-mans land, now this happens beforehand. As someone who finds gunlines incredibly boring to play as or against this is a great change. You can put your objectives in your deployment but what if you lose choosing side? Now if your opponent deployed his objectives aggressively you are in serious trouble as he's at on 3 with 3 he can fight and your have 0 with 3 you can fight easily.
It's created a whole new game of how to place them to best effect and rewards armies that can get out and grab objectives as required, a welcome change in my book.
- The Maelstrom Missions
I'm gonna catch some flak for this one but I think they are great. It needs a little caveat adding that allows discarding of those impossible objectives for new ones but otherwise I think they are great. A common complaint it that your objectives changing turn to turn is immersion breaking for them and I can see that, I don't agree but I get it. Since they are only generated after they are completed however I see it as a series of commands coming down the chain for armies that are on a roll
You took the hill, shot down the Harpy and challenged the Broodlord? Is there a Tyrant you can kill?
Best yet in keeping with the usual 7th edition system you have been presented with a tool, maybe you want to tweak the rules for your enjoyment. Want to try shared Maelstrom objectives? That works, want to pair down the pack and use a custom card set, then do that. It's that "Here's Everything" approach we talked about last time again.
- The Psy Phase
Yup, I'm going there. Now if you read the internet you'll probably have noticed there are two groups of people shouting about this, one who say "Warp charge spam is out of control" and another who say "You get fewer powers off in 7th than in 6th" the problem is despite them wanting to change the game differently they can both be somewhat right.
Odd right?
A single Mastery 3 psyker went from generating 3 warp charges per turn and passing on LD10 for casts to generating an average of 3.25 charges, seems like a buff, moving on right? Wait, that's not quite how it works.
That average assumes every 2 dice will turn up one 4+ and thus a charge. What about if you cast three powers and one of them turns up two of those expected successes? Your powers have gotten less reliable right off the bat. Realistically you need to be throwing more dice than you *need* to get anywhere near the old success rates, this in turn means fewer powers getting cast.
So what about 4 level three casters? 12 Warp charges in 6th an average of 7.75 in 7th. Way weaker in fact, so what is making caster spam so strong? Summoning and the new invisibility.
Some Daemon armies can rattle off 30+ dice a phase and they can pour them into summoning more Daemons which while they can't summon can generate more charges. Now these are WC3 powers so you really need 6-7 dice from reliability but you are still talking about adding 4 new squads each turn, bolstering your army by 400pts.
You will never win a timed tourney with this list as you are going to be slow getting all this down but it can be strong throwing down those extra troops. However you are just throwing more and more cannon fodder down and if your opponent can handle hordes he is going to be racking up the kills and potential VP's
Invisibility is... well just a bit too good. It buffed an already good power and gave deathstars something extra. The immunity to blast and template weapons can create units that are a real issue for many armies.
Add in that with the new system these powers only got slightly easier to dispel due to their blessing nature and the problem despite being sometimes overstated, exists.
Witchfire on the up side got a significant boost and I've been enjoying the idea of it more and more. Being able to shoot separate targets with it, not counting towards weapons fired and being able to fire multiple witchfires means you can generate some fairly impressive psy-dakka. Add in onto a platform that can already shoot (Lash Keepers, Devourer Tyrants etc) and you can really drop some serious number of wounds.
I think I've rambled enough for another time. Next time I'll finish up with a few final 7th edition thoughts, talk about how various armies have been affected in my eyes and sum up.
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