Hey fam, it’s JStove, and do you know what day it is? It’s talk speculative tactics on an edition of 40k that doesn’t exist yet day!
In other words, it’s every day on the internet until the new edition drops. Oh boy, I can’t wait!
How I learned to stop worrying and love D6 flamers
Templates and blast markers are now D6 generators, I’m pleased I am personally happy about this. Here’s why- I think it’s going to make these weapons way more effective, and I could not care less about losing the scatter die or worrying about how many models got covered by a template.
I was a major flamer creep. I love flamers. I love 30k rending Death Guard flamers, I hate the heldrake but love the work he puts in, and before we had the Traitor Legion book, the Burning Brand of Skalathrax (torrent AP3 flamer) went into every list I wrote. I’m a fan of hellhounds and bought them by the grip when I used to run a guard allied detachment. Everyone was snatching up valkyries trying to get those hot vendetta lascannons, I was snatching up templates.
So you’d think I’m the kind of guy that would be bummed out to see the template go away, but I’m not. The truth is, the risk-vs-reward mechanic of lining up a good template shot was never really worth it. Very rarely did you ever actually hit multiple units with a template, and even more rarely was it ever actually a good idea- When 75% of the armies in the game are fearless or Know No Fear, spreading the fire around is never as good as just maximizing all the hatred on a single target and removing it completely. So even though there’s a certain seductive quality to putting that template down and counting all the models you hit, it’s actually decently hard to make that juicy mega template hit happen. (And I have owned and used literally every model in the 40k range that made it easier.)
One of the bigger problems in 6E and 7E 40k was that the biggest name of the game is risk mitigation. It doesn’t make sense to put in the effort of maneuvering your models for a good flamer hit when you can just buy a bunch of plasma guns instead and just shoot the bastards down. It’s hard to say no to high strength, low AP, high volume attacks that will consistently kill everything with a few dice no matter where the model is, especially when your alternative is a S4 stick that has to be elegantly positioned to generate a high volume of hits. In the time it took you to get the flamer where you need it, you could have just been pulling triggers and getting hot.
But although the new flamer and blast markers LOOK more random on paper, they are actually getting deadlier and more consistent as the game goes on and the number of models on the table diminishes. This means that a fat demolisher or battle cannon shell or a heldrake baleflamer actually gets better with age. On turn 1 when you fire off the pie plates and templates, they are looking fat because you have a lot of your opponent’s toys you can hit. But as you kill his stuff and the table isn’t as crowded, you lose more hits when you scatter or you get let less work out of your flamer when it hits fewer guys. But if you replace templates with a random number generator, then these guns only get better the more you shoot them.
For example, let’s say that I have demolisher cannon firing at 5 terminators, and we’ll make up a profile and say it gets D6 hits. (THIS IS AN EXAMPLE, NOBODY KNOWS HOW MANY HITS A LARGE BLAST WILL GENERATE YET) Let’s say that I roll 2, which is sad, and I only grease a couple nators… But think about this, if the template scattered, or if they made invulnerable saves, I might have only killed 2 anyway, there’s no way to account for randomness, whether it’s template based randomness or D6 based randomness. Don’t lose sleep over it. Now imagine that it’s the next turn, and I fire it again. This time I roll a 4. Still not very hot, but keep in mind those last 3 terminators are dead by the numbers, i’ve got more hits than they’ve got models. The weapon actually got more effective the more I shot them with the random number generator, and it would have been less effective with a scattering blast marker, because less models on the table means higher likelihood of scattering out and missing.
I can live with that! This also means that armies that close distance and do work in the assault phase are likely to get way more value out of stuff like flamers because as the game grinds on and models get removed, the shorter range of the flamer is a non-issue because you’re always going to be in the scrum.
Charger always strikes first, nothing happened except the power fist.
Charger always striking first doesn’t change anything except power fists and ork players, and that’s fine.
The truth is that 6-7 40k was a shooting gallery, and the few assault armies that were big enough bullies to get in and throw bricks were already walking in with frag grenades and swinging fast, so nothing really changed. When I think of assault armies, I think of Thunderwolf Cavalry, Wulfen, Chaos Spawn, Nurgle Bikers, Harlies and Wyches, and Maulerfiends. What all those units have in common is that they’re fast as hell. The only difference after that is that they either have mega high initiative or fat toughness or invulnerable saves to either get their hits in first or be buff enough to take one on the chin and still be standing to hit back. So when you look at the dominant assault units in the game and they all fall into that category, you’re looking at a bunch of units that were either already going first, or didn’t give a s*** that they were going last. What does it mean? Realistically it means that a bully unit that can trash your army in the assault phase is only going to trash it faster, not a lot besides that really changes.
The guys this change really works out for are anyone with a fist/hammer and massed infantry units that were okaaaay in combat if they actually got to swing. If orks weren’t I2, they’d be bastards. But now that initiative is going away and the charger goes first, a big fat mob of shoota boys with 2 attacks each is looking pretty healthy. The power fist was also a big winner here, but in the end, I don’t think it changes everything- Like I said, most models that are kitted to win fights are either looking to outlast you long enough to throw fat haymakers, or go fast enough to kill you before you swing. So really, the guys who won the most here were shoota boys, cultists, and whiteshield blobs, that might actually now be able to drown someone in bayonets before they die, if they can actually get the charge.
Everyone gets Hit And Run, and it works out great for assault armies.
The biggest deal for charger strikes first is that you can’t automatically lock someone in combat anymore, because everyone can now voluntarily leave combat. The unit that punks out can’t run, shoot, or charge in their own turn, but they can now walk away so their friends can shoot. Big news for Tau players everywhere, who probably can’t wait to be cowards!
This sounds like it could really punish assault armies that rely on locking up shooty armies so that they can’t pull triggers, but I think in practice this isn’t about punishing assault armies, it’s about giving them more strikes first opportunities. “Everyone gets Hit and Run” is more like “assault armies go first and then go first again.”
Here’s why I think that- Everyone who ran assault armies already understood the art of the disorganized charge. When you’re trying to run down a gunline, you don’t care about charging one unit and getting a bonus attack. You care about them not shooting you. So you skip the bonus attack and go throw your weight around, trying to splash as much juice as possible on your opponent’s line to bunch them up and keep them from shooting.
Now of course, all those jerks that don’t want to be fight are all going to try to walk out on their own turn… But that also means they aren’t allowed to do anything. This means that lining up the juicy multi-charge is actually MORE EFFECTIVE THAN EVER, because it guarantees that cowards can’t do shit for a turn, and then you CHARGE THEM AGAIN.
Walking out of combat for most opponents of an assault-oriented army is effectively a trap. Since the assault army’s objective is to stop as many units in the opponent’s army from shooting as possible for the longest possible amount of time, trying to escape combat doesn’t actually solve that problem, because it completely immobilizes the battle line for a turn… And the assault army will just jump in and stick them again. 8E shooty armies that can actually walk out of melee actually SHOOT LESS than 7E shooty armies that were stuck in combat.
The Movement Stat is the new God Stat of 40k.
The old gods of 6-7E 40k were Toughness, which determined whether or not you got instant deathed or kept you safe, Psyker level, the higher it was the more you could cheat, and Ballistic Skill- The higher the number, the less math you needed to kill your opponent, because your guns always hit. (You could argue that saving throw was a god stat, but I’d say that saving throw counts as Psyker level, because you could use cheater magic to make your save better by improving it or using other spells to increase survivability.)
But if chargers go first, and cowards trying to flee combat get locked down, that means there’s a new God Stat in 40k that trumps the old Holy Trinity of Toughness-Psyker level-BS, and it’s MOVEMENT.
In 6E-7E, movement was important for positioning your shooting and grabbing objectives, but your ability to use brain magic to cheat at the game and give yourself badass invulnerable saves or shoot the shit out of your opponent was way more important. If you have a re-rolling 2++, you don’t care if you’re standing in a bunker or in a volcano full of hot lava surrounded by all your opponent’s guns.
In 8E, Movement will be a god stat because it is the difference between you forcing/escaping a lockdown from your opponent. If your army is locked in a losing melee and you need to dip from combat, then those units that are running from the fight can’t do anything. If 80 Khorne Berzerkers make it across the table and lock up your whole army, they have won the game whether or not they kill you, because they’ll spread like butter across your gunline and you’ll spend the rest of the game trying to unlock. The only effective strategy for preventing a table lock is going to be not getting caught. That means that the next arms race in 40k isn’t who’s summoning the most demons or buffing the fattest saving throw or rolling 2s to hit with the biggest guns, it’s who is getting where they want to go the fastest, because depending on how badly you want to be in or out of melee, they will decide the pace of the game.
Snap Fire is dead, long live Snap Fire!
In 8E, snap fire is abolished. Moving and shooting a heavy weapon now incurs a -1 penalty to hit, and not only does this rule apply to infantry models, but to vehicles as well. I don’t have a positive or negative opinion on this right now, but I do think it’s very interesting. First things first, this makes weapons like the Noise Marine Blastmaster and the Plasma Cannon very attractive. In 7E, these guns were extremely powerful but were difficult picks because they required effective positioning and huge investments in order to capitalize on. Plasma cannon devastators sat still for the whole game, and were a major points commitment for such an immobile and easy to target unit. The blastmaster was an even bigger offender- At 40 points a model and a 1 for every 5 models unit tax, it effectively cost 200 points just for one, and like the plasma cannon, it had to sit still for maximum effect. This made already prohibitively expensive units unattractive and non-competitive, but for a -1 to hit, this is a small price to pay for mobility.
An even bigger deal for the -1 to hit heavy weapons though are gunboat tanks. Fully kitted and sponsoned up leman russes and predator annihilators are looking really good. Being able to maintain mobility and still shoot off all those guns should go a long way to making a lot of dakka tanks that were previously not very hot picks way more interesting. Since mobility is going to be such a big deal in 8E, a tank that can consistently floor it up the table or throw it in reverse and still chuck dice downfield is going to make things interesting.
The Plasma Pistol is Back!
This is one I’m still struggling with. The plasma pistol is back. In every previous edition of 40k I’ve ever played going all the way back to 3rd, the plasma pistol was a joke. You couldn’t shoot it in melee, so you completely lost out on that S7 AP2, and if you pulled that trigger in the shooting phase, you could accidentally kill the closest model to you and potentially prevent your own charge from going off in the assault phase. But with the new rules that allow pistol users to fire their guns in melee combat, the plasma pistol is for the first time since second edition actually worth the pile of points that could have been a power weapon. The iconic Blood Angel inferno pistol is now also a huge hoser! Never saw that one coming.
While space marines can practically shit plasma pistols, the real winner here are the low budget value models like guard officers, Scions, and Mechanicus dudes that could all get wicked pistols, but never actually wanted to be close enough to a fight to use them. Now having a magnum in your pocket is actually a trump card. Imagine charging a blob of fifty whiteshields into a meat grinder unit like warp talons or terminators. Scared? Hell no, there’s 5 sergeants hiding inside that blob of bodies with plasma pistols ready to pull triggers and put them down!
Another pocket winner in the pistol category are the cirque’du’eldar, specifically wyches and harlies. I was a little worried about these elite melee units since they relied on high initiative to hit before their opponents, and initiative is getting thrown out. But what do harlies and wyches have that breathes new life into a very fragile, very specialized unit? Extremely effective pistols. If the rules for splinter weapons stay anything like they are in 7E, I think wych spam could be devastating. The girls could hop out of a raider anywhere in your opponent’s line, charge wherever they want to charge, whatever they want to charge, lock it up in combat, and just pull triggers and gas it down. It wouldn’t work if you only used one unit of wyches… But wyches and raiders are cheap!
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About the Author: Jack Stover
