SkimaskMohawk

ToW is definitely highly fragmented in terms of what tournaments and regional list building looks like. But it still has an apex event in the WTC, which tends to have the same trickle down effect to the IRL events of the national team members. It also highly influences the online community. The only real difference is that it's not GW in the driver seat. Also, the square based terrain layouts suck (as do the WTC ones) and highly contribute to green knight problems.

Re terrain not being fair to certain unit types trying to score objectives, that used to be the point. Back in the day, one of the inherent ways that punished lopsided builds was that if you took too many monsters, cavalry and vehicles your opponent could just put objectives on the top floors of ruins and you wouldn't be able to contest them (or score if your plan was to dump troops out of devilfish or serpents). Now I know being penalized for making wrong decisions is a big taboo these days (see heavy weapons giving the extra bonus even if you still move up from literally can't do anything if you move of the past), but maybe not everything should be viable for every occasion?

Ya DG have the visual design language of fleshy, insectoid daemon engines so it fits right at home

Holy 10 pages in less than 24 hours. I remember back in 2016 feeling like the custodes were....a bit off. It was very remarked on then, and people were very lukewarm on the first ever official custodes models. Their weapons were gigantic and their armour was way more bulky than what the art work had ever shown. Missing their capes really made them look like big power armour people. These absolutely fit the bill. Ya there's the retcon about women. But I wouldn't have helmet less ones either way because the faceless sentinels vibe is essential imo.

Still hard to beat the dow2 cinematic

Back in 4th edition part of their chapter tactics was infiltration so....at least there's some sort of precedent lol

If theres a deep enough bench of ships to offer enough variety then it should be fineish if it's BFH. If it is BFG, I hope they don't slop it up like they did ripping LI from SM2 and actually smooth out balance issues (you get to lose into eldar unless you're necrons because they're just better than everyone!). Or make it so one offs don't get ruined by the mechanics meant for campaign play.

Always has, going back to the days of artificer armour as an upgrade for seargents. Whenever a non-terminator model had 2+ saves there were people to complain about it not being artificed enough lol

Las has always had different colours (much like plasma). But also, lasguns for imperial forces have traditionally been red. The mass of red las beams in dow1 is pretty iconic, and both darktide and space marine 2 also use the red beam. It's what people expect to see from guard lasguns in video games, just like they expect to see green zappy rays from the necrons.

Really happy that they brought these back. They added a ton of flavour to armies, both in rules and as modelling opportunities, and theyre very faithfully ported over. No conversions going to waste, fun builds preserved, garbage ones improved.

"+1 LD is plausible because they used to be fearless" Ignores....every other unit in the game that used to be fearless but has a pretty failable LD value. God shards are 6+, Celestine is 6+, primarchs are 5+, etc...

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.