Yes, I have a few.
Well first of all, I've noticed that game night attendance has been up and more games have been played which is really good for our group (which was on life support just a few weeks ago). Is 8th the best edition ever? Opinions vary, but in mine: no, not at all. So do I like everything about it? Obviously not. Can I still have fun playing it? Yup! Quite a bit actually (just waiting on Bob to eventually come around and reach that same conclusion as I have).
Let's face it, there has never been an edition of 40k where I thought every rule made sense or was okay with me, tis' the nature of the beast. But its still a pretty good game I guess. There are two things in particular though that are starting to really annoy me.
First up: Mortal Wounds.
In a nutshell, Mortal Wounds are a stupid fucking mechanic created for AoS, and they should of stayed there. Seriously, what the actual fuck is the point of an invulnerable save, if the model with one is...ya know, vulnerable to mortal wounds?
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| Shadow Sun's escorting squad of six stealth suits was wiped out before ever getting to do anything on turn 1. That said, they died only due to the apparent requirement of ENTIRE Dark Angel army shooting at them exclusively. |
Example: Commander Shadow Sun, badly bloodied and falling back but still protected by -1 to hit, 3+ save and a 5++ invulnerable save, plus command points to help keep her in the fight. Sounds like a tough cookie right? Wrong! Psychic power, mortal wound, dead...get her off the table. The point to all of her fancy rules are what? Naught apparently due to an all to easy to cast psychic power.
Very quickly our local beer and pretzels crowd group is devolving into how many mortal wounds can be SPAMMED per turn. For how many editions now have 'remove model from play/completely unsavable attacks' existed? 2-3 editions? Whilst few, they've all been the most maligned of rules, so clearly we needed to not only keep that BS around with Mortal Wounds, but make 'em omnipresent.
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| A hellacious Custodes v. Nids slugfest on a table nearby... |
The only two weapons in our particular Tau arsenal that can inflict mortal wounds are the Hammerheads' railguns, and even then only on a to-wound roll of a 6. That said, we found out that with good rolling a Hammerhead's railgun can still insta-pop a space marine dreadnought with one shot! Just like days of old...also like the olden days: Saturday a Dark Angels' captain has joined Tyberos the Red Wake in changing his last name to the Red Mist due to those same railguns!
My second gripe: Command Points.
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| My oh-so-beautifully painted adversaries. |
Okay, you can spend a CP to make a reroll here and there, attack out of turn (by the way, can your opponent also use a command point negate that? It came up and we couldn't figure it out), or use a funky little strategem here and again. Cool. However GW gave the DA a warlord trait in which, on a 5+ roll a used CP is given back. So with good rolling (it happens to some people Neverness) its like having an infinite supply of CPs. So just about any failed armor save on someone/thing of better than average value is rerollable, and almost every failed psychic test or perils is negated...yeah that shit gets real tiresome really fucking quick!
Also the 'wait, maybe I have a stratagem I can use to help/negate that' (followed by shuffling thru 2 dozen cards and the reading of too much fine print) slows the game down considerably. I can think of 2 rolls I should have used CPs to reroll in hindsight, but I think the never ending supply of them from across the board (till the railgun/red mist incident cut off that almost infinite supply) was annoying me so much that I just ignored mine altogether. I get what GW was going for, and they do have their uses, but they're easily open to abuse I think, especially in this particular situation thanks to that DA warlord trait. Dark Angel opponents should expect to encounter this frequently.
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| This is what a 22 model, $350 (WTF?) army looks like....from what I overheard however, I'm in no rush to fight 'em. |
So...yeah, its still not the best game, and I'm having fun for the most part, buuuut those two complaints (the 2nd only came to the fore this past weekend) are starting to gnaw away the fun.
9 comments:
Well, it's good to see you back in the game, Cheef!
So, the custodes army averages $15.90 a model? Ouch.
Is something wrong with your camera? Your pics look really dark...or were you purposely trying to make them...uh..."grimdark"?
Quite a few armies that an ability where they can to try to retain a CP. It's typically a character ability or something like that. My new favorite one is the Dark Eldar one that costs like 3 CPs to use but can essentially negate your opponent's Strategum. Fun stuff. Personally, I think they should have left it simple like the three in the basic book. I am glad you're having fun over-all though, wish I had more opportunities to play it myself (cue lonely piano music...)
@Counterfett: Thanks! And yeah, the Custodes are ridiculously expensive (even in a game where that is the norm).
@Neverness: Yup, grim-dark filters for the win!
Call me old fashioned, but it just seems open to easy abuse. Kinda like the maelstrom of war cards, where the game simply goes off of the rails due to a bunch of side boarded cards rather than just slugging it out with blade & bolter (or whatever your army's preference in basic weaponry is).
Good points, all.
Don't even get me started on the stupidity of random charge distance.....
lol, sadly that's one problem that I doubt will ever go away.
I get how Mortal Wounds were seen as part of a counter to some of the ridiculously durable Units of 5th-8th, but they're too easily spammable, and too effective against basically everything more expensive than a Tac Marine. It really doesn't help matters how thoroughly entangled they are with Psychic Powers and how unevenly distributed Psychic Defense is.
Command Points and Stratagems are kind of like Formations to me: I love the idea, but I can't argue that they're not unevenly distributed, both in quantity and quality. It's way too easy for some Armies to put together super cheap Battalions/Brigades for massive numbers of CP, while others struggle to get even a basic supply. I really do not like the various Warlord Traits and Relics that let people get CP back, especially since they're all on a fairly unreliable roll, so they're really feast or famine.
Actually, that ties into something else that GW has had issues with in those "remove from play" effects like D-Weapons, Stomps, Jaws of the World Wolf, etc.: Randomness is a really bad way of trying to balance out very powerful effects. It just means that they're either useless, or game deciding, and you have no way of knowing which.
What I've found best for Stratagems is to pick a handful of them that I'm likely to use regularly, keep those cards out and visible (or write up a list if I didn't buy the Datacards for that Faction), and just ignore the rest of them unless one happens to come to mind. For Tau, as an example, I'd probably just lay out Uplinked Markerlight, Automated Repair System, EMP Grenade, Neuroweb System Jammer, Stimulant Injector, and probably the one for whichever Sept I was playing.
Take a look at the Open War cards, maybe. They add a nice bit of variety, and you can pull the ones your group doesn't like out of the deck. They're also mostly based on progressive scoring, rather than everything coming down to what happens on the last Turn, which I like.
@Westrider: Yeah that's the meat of it right there: Uneven/random distribution! The Ork army I fielded 2 weeks ago would have just melted in front of this DA army, especially given all of the CP rerolls everywhere. I'm sure I could have used several Tau strategems, but the game was already taking so long as my opponent read thru his stack of cards every time I turned around in an attempt to find a fix for every situation, that it would have just compounded the problem if I was doing the same...
I'm not familiar with the open war cards, so I'll have to give them a look I guess.
Just curious, but when say "all of the CP re-rolls", you guys are remembering that it's only one CP re-roll per phase, right? Not trying to have a go at you, genuinely asking as I don't feel like it's that bad.
Oh, also, you can't counter the "fight out of order" Stratagem with another use of it. You can only play it after your Opponent finishes fighting with a Unit, so only one player at any given time has the opportunity to play it.
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