SkimaskMohawk

Didn't stop em with the firstborn lol.

Headless cross has consistently, wildly wrong takes of the older editions. Up until formations and knights and all that ruined 6th, the bolter profile was useful. It wasnt game breaking or oppressive, but it was flexible with its range and stats; you could fend off light skimmers, threaten trukks, and put pressure on a good amount of troops. That was important because you either needed to be a troop to score, or needed to be above 50% unit strength back before 5th. It was also important to thin out ork boys, hormagaunts, stealers and the like as soon as you could, which the bolter did pretty well. No one worried about getting more bolters in lists because you either had a bunch of tacs in rhinos (which incidentally brought more), a bunch of tacs and some other units in pods (which also brought more), or bikers (who leveraged the bolters the best). That was enough to deal with most infantry in TAC lists, especially with free missile launchers littered through your tac squads in 5th. But others have pointed out (and i mentioned it too), that that was before the crazy stuff like knights and super high toughness values were common occurences. Back when you had to have a relatively mixed composition army from both the foc and the scoring (all bikes were great up until an objective was placed on the third story of ruins and you couldn't capture or contest it). Modern 40k conflict and unit scale doesn't really support small arms being as useful.

I love that the "skyfire weapons with light isn't a mistake because they might add something" defence is somehow still alive. It is and always was nonsense. The solar aux planes all getting Light AT on their heavy bolters was enough; the avenger getting it on the heavy stubber should have underlined the design intent for these otherwise anti-infantry weapons with skyfire. Iirc the point defence rule already gives overwatch bonuses, so skyfire is a completely dead rule on these weapons. As to what units they could add that would fit into non-vehicle flyers? Well, pulling from 1st edition heresy (the concept for turfed for 2nd and 3rd), there were 4. The daemon regent, khabanda, the daemon shrike, and the vulturax; all the units that were flying monstrous creatures and could engage swoop to act similarly to flyers. The vulturax has LI rules and very much is not a flyer, so I don't see any of the daemon units following suit, especially as they're melee units and need to charge - something the flyer rules don't support. The game is about to be 2 years old. Having a pointless rule combination on weapons for one faction while the other faction can target vehicles, all in the hopes they one day add a unit or two to give a super niche use case against is an insane position.

Literal honour guard to chapter high command (including primarch) may be slightly more decorated than other chapters non-body guard elites. Shocker.

Uh, there was very little squad tactics in the campaigns. The seargents had all the abilities and damage output, and were what got revived; the squadies were largely incidental. It got really obvious too if you were trying to get extra deployments per day in vanilla, as you just plowed through the levels using all the seargents abilities. And got extra extra obvious once you got Thule and solod levels with him. It was effectively a 4 hero, realtime, isometric rpg. Multiplayer actually...used squads. And tactics. Smart positioning and unit combinations really played a big part through a match.

People loved dow1 because it let them go off the rails with huge 40k armies mixed with RTS Sim city. The campaigns were also all really memorable for both good and bad reasons. Dow2s campaign was very hero and rpg focussed without the grand scale of 1, and that threw a lot of people off. But the multiplayer...man that was something special. The escalation of early tactical skirmishes into what felt like a full game of 1500 points was really fun.

It's pretty obvious they're doing the strategy of not making the game for pre-existing players. They want those big 8th-10th edition sales and the cross over from 40k players, and are starting to apply a lot of the same concepts to their book writing. It's really not meant for old players, even less than 2nd.

That was also a common occurrence for legion units that went to legacies in 2nd. Ultramarines units broadly escaped, but the majority were...iffy. Especially if it was an exemplary battle unit.

Stuff that had models went into legacy in 2nd too. It wasn't very consistent and speaks to them not really having a firm plan.

I'm glad most stuff made it back in. It was always irksome to have long standing units removed for no reason. Im less glad to see a lot of the exemplary battle units are just...3rdified versions of the terrible 2nd incarnations. Fulmentaris got their nerf reapplied and the missiles are basically plasma guns? The tartaros siege can have a very similar output (albeit at shorter range) for 200? Also it's funny seeing the stats for a Medusa and basilisk now and comparing it to goonhammers coverage of them. Pinning (1) drastically improves their lethality! Drop str 10 pie plates as a reaction on tactical squads, it's terrifyingly good! Str 5 isn't good, but a str 10 large blast is terrifying and powerful. Am I missing what barrage does, or is not killing a rhino and only killing an average of 50% power armour hits really bad in terms of lethality. Like I'm sure removing scoring through pinning is useful, they're just very far from being lethal.

Ya I was going to say something similar. They suck at the roadmaps and PDFs. I remember when they promised a chaos cult list for 2nd and then...never delivered it lol

I remember adding purity seals or medals from the force commander plastic kit to models after they did something sick (like a seargent surviving two rounds against a daemon prince and getting his last wound with his chain sword in 5th). Or kill marks on a plasma cannon gunners backpack after each game. The old-old-old site had some really great articles on it back in the day. One of my favorites was a black templars progression and all the different free handed badges, script and icons at the end point of that progression.

But they definitely weren't balanced to be a takeable choice or with the rest of the printed stuff in mind lol. 2nds legacy units were very much token supported by having rules, but the rules being so bad the units had no impact on the game or design space.

Ehhhh.....they definitely weren't in 2nd lol

Very happy to be wrong. Very happy they're not binning people's collections 40k 10th style, and I'm hopeful that the usability of legacies is better than 2nds track record. I'm personally still not a fan of the army building structure and super not a fan of how they wrote the rules, but I'm interested in at least looking at the edition and glad for the people who don't share my particularities.