Warhammer 40,000

I... don't see why you wouldn't? They get paid to test out the game and offer feedback to the rules writers, and even some of the most negativity-averse and optimistic of them were saying that Iron Hands were a bit much but GW didn't really take their feedback into consideration.

Do they playtest better now? They used to playtest almost completely in-house and were very loose about RAW IIRC, which is an amusing contrast to the playerbase, who tend to obey RAW to the letter, especially in the tournament settings. Do they playtest in a live setting now with external playtesters?

One of the articles in White Dwarf was all about how they go about playtesting. Can't remember which one I am afraid.

EDIT: Found it, it is the Echoes from the Warp article from the July 2019 issue. They do have external playtesters with diffeant playtesters for Narrative and Matched play rules. Two of the playtest groups are the Mournival (broadly Matched Play) and the Infinity Circuit (broadly Narrative Play).

Edited by SebastianGray on Oct 17th 2019 at 10:11:50 AM

The one I remember described their playtesting (of a few years ago) as being very out of touch with how the game was actually played. They tested units for how fun they felt on the battlefield rather than for internal and external balance, and they often homeruled that one player could have an extra unit or two because they had nothing to deal with the other guy's best unit or w/e and it was the kind of thing that just doesn't happen in normal games because players don't, on the whole, tend to listen to the "these are all guidelines and you can homerule whatever the fuck you want" disclaimers in the rulebooks and tend to be shifty about deviating from RAW. On the whole.

To quote from this year's article:

Yeah, it does seem they've shaped up.

Salamanders Preview today

Hmmm. If the Salamanders have the Promethean psychic discipline, who is going to get Pyromancy?

Edited by SebastianGray on Oct 17th 2019 at 4:21:33 PM

I'm not where I can do a deep dive on the links; did they lose their "reroll one failed hit roll and/or one failed wound roll" ability?

Also, not gonna lie, that new special character not having a typical Nocturnian name grates on my nerves something fierce.

Edited by Willbyr on Oct 17th 2019 at 10:40:33 AM

I am pretty sure all the Supplement Chapters still get their core Codex Chapter Tactics rules in addition to the Supplement rules. Also the new guy isn't quite new, he was briefly in the first book in the Tome of Fire series (another 40K Literature page that needs renaming and cleaning) apparently.

Edited by SebastianGray on Oct 17th 2019 at 5:06:36 PM

Can someone explain what these tactical doctrine and devastator doctrine are? I play Thousand Sons, so I'm not really clear on what they are talking about.

something like an army-wide stance system?

Ah, okay...it's been several years since I read those.

Somewhat yes. It is one of the army wide rules introduced in the second 8th Edition Codex.

There are three Doctrines: Devastator (AP of Heavy & Grenade weapons improved by 1); Tactical (AP of Rapid Fire & Assault weapons improved by 1); Assault (AP of Pistol & Melee weapons improved by 1).

All Marine armies start at Devastator and at the start of each battle round after the first the army can chose to change the Doctrine but Devastator can only be changed to Tactical and Tactical can only change to Assault, you can't go back or in a different order unless the army has a Chapter Specific special rules/Stratagem/etc such as the Ultramarines Cycle of War Stratagem that allows them to change Assault to Devastator.

Edited by SebastianGray on Oct 17th 2019 at 8:21:14 PM

Ok. Thanks!

Yeah, on the whole GW has shaped up a lot in the rules department this edition. Which is why a lot of people were up in arms about Iron Hands (again, including some of the external playtesters), they had something absurd like an 80% winrate in tournaments. The balance had been mostly decent barring a couple outliers (coughcastellancough) for the edition and the top-end meta was pretty stable and diverse, so when IH and Marines in general started to run roughshod over it all it soured a lot of people's opinions of the rules team.

So today they dropped the FAQ for the IH and RG supplements (customarily done two weeks after launch, this time a full month afterwards) which they had been delaying in order to gather feedback (which I presume was mostly of the "WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING" variety). Long story short Iron Hands took a bunch of nerfs to some of the more ridiculous abilities they had, will still be dominant but a bit less "no point in even trying" than before.

The lists that were winning are still going to dominate though; Iron Hands air forces are still laughing their way to the top tables.

(in my opinion)

So does anyone think Roboute counts as an example of Awesomeness by Analysis? His main thing is being able to process information very quickly, after all. His Forge World version even ties this into gameplay. The longer he fights against a foe the better he gets at fighting said foe.

Edited by M84 on Oct 22nd 2019 at 11:10:06 PM

Oh, absolutely. Like in Know No Fear where he just sits down and absorbs data after the Word Bearer attack happens, and finds the one (seemingly insignificant) detail that proves that this was a premeditated attack and not a tragic accident or misunderstanding.

The trope is "Using observation and calculation to succeed" and that does seem very Guilliman like

And as mentioned, it's even part of his 30K Forge World model's abilities. The 1d4chan page on him that pits him 1 vs. 1 against other Primarchs has him winning against most of them because of his ability to get better each round. He only loses out to more specialized damage dealers and such, like Angron, Horus, Leman Russ, Sanguinius, and Fulgrim (not surprising).

Edited by M84 on Oct 24th 2019 at 3:35:57 AM

I don't particularly trust 1d4chan in the least but I haven't enough knowledge of Age of Darkness to comment on that.

On a connected note however, where should tropes from the Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness game be listed as it doesn't have its own page. Personally I believe they should be put on the Horus Heresy pages rather than the main 40K pages as it is effectively the game of that book series.

PS: M84, I moved your Vulkan Lives edit to the Horus Heresy character page for Vulcan. As it referred directly to events in that series.

Well, the 1d4chan "which Primarch would win" sections are pure mathhammer based on the 30k rules, and you can even scrutinise their working out, so it seems ironclad to me.

I was wondering if I should have put that in the Horus Heresy page instead. Oh well.

I'll take your word for it. My maths skills are a little lacking.

Its cool, I just get a little OCD about things being in the right place sometimes.

On a different note, I have been slowly updating the Iron Hands' tropes with info from the Supplement and other sources and was wondering what to do with the Jerkass Realization as I am not sure if it is actually an example. While they have had a revelation, I have read it more as "what we thought was a strength is actually a weakness" than "We're being Jerkasses", with them becoming less Jerkass being more of a side effect than the actual plan, they are still Jerks even after the revelation after all, just not quite as much.

Also should the King in the Mountain trope be moved to Ferrus' section on the Founders page as it is about him or kept in the Iron Hands' section as it is their belief?

Maybe Epiphany Therapy would be a better fit?

Hmmm. That could work, I'll see what I can work out with it. Thanks

Edited by SebastianGray on Oct 23rd 2019 at 10:46:18 AM