Want to know why Primaris can never replace the Power Armor Space Marines we know and love? Jstove is back and he may be onto something…
I’ve been reading a lot of articles on the hobby blogosphere lately about how Primaris Marines are coming to retire your Loyalist Marine armies and make you play with two-wound fat babies instead.
Some of these articles are actually very well written and provide a lot of compelling evidence, there’s one specifically where the writer did a really great piece of hobby journalism and pointed out the dwindling number of marine models in recent GW product photography. I think that writer should be really proud of his work. If everyone wrote hobby blogs like he did, Rob Baer wouldn’t have to publish my heretic filth.
Unfortunately, all the Primaris doomsayers have failed to account for three major reasons why your vanilla Marine models will not retire and still be on the table in 2020. Want to know what they are? I’ll tell you, but in exchange, it’s going to cost you one box of Shadowspear or Doomspear or Spiderbot box or whatever the hell that new starter box is going to be called.
GW’s Design Studio Doesn’t Communicate With Rule Writers
This is one I constantly have to explain to people and it’s the biggest reason why armies in the 41st millennium are so wonky. Have you ever noticed when you crack open your codex that there are maybe if you’re lucky, two units in any given section that actually do their job? The rest are all benchwarmers that are just genetically inferior variants of the good unit.
The Games Workshop miniature designers and the rules writers do not have a dialog. If you read any design blog published in the White Dwarf about GW’s design process, they will tell you this. The miniature designers do whatever they think looks cool and will sell. Then, it’s the job of the rules writers to interpret that plastic into rules. The rules writers DON’T go to the designers and say, “This army needs this unit to do this.”
Hellblasters & The Repulsor
This is the primary reason why most Primaris units aren’t worth an Agriworld’s worth of grox fertilizer, and the only Primaris unit that only sees regular use in any above-average 40k meta is the plasma gunners. News flash- Hellblasters aren’t good because they’re new models with two wounds. They’re good because they all have plasma guns.
The greatest example of the lack of communication between the design studio and the rules writers is the Repulsor. It’s a giant, expensive, Primaris boondoggle. It’s a huge, pointless, $80 model that has one job: Get Primaris Marines from your deployment zone to somewhere else and then drop them off. Ultimately, the Repulsor massively expensive in both dollars and points. It has more guns than it will ever need and it’s strategically worthless. For the Repulsor to be useful, it needs to be a flying Rhino. A cheap flying Uhaul truck with a storm bolter and a smoke launcher. Instead, it’s a giant useless expensive brick covered in guns that doesn’t replace any other unit in the codex that can do the same job.
For Primaris Marines to effectively replace normal marines in your army, the design team would actually have to make Primaris Marines that do their job better than your vanilla Marines, and they don’t.
It Takes a Generation to Retire a Plastic Model
What do Abaddon the Despoiler and an Ork Warbuggy have in common?
They were both released around 1997. That means if you were born the same year those models hit the shelves, you grew up, went to school, and graduated from college in the time it took GW to replace those models. Games Workshop models go obsolete at a glacial pace.
While it’s true that GW has taken meteoric strides in product development over the last ten years with the integration of CAD design and 3d prototyping in the design studio, this HAS NOT changed the nature of the end product plastic.
There are very few kinds of plastic in the world that are recyclable. Plastic drinking straws, taco bell cups, shopping bags… Trash plastic is recyclable because it is made of thermoplastics that are designed to be recyclable. The plastic in your thermos that you take your coffee to work in every morning, the plastic that your children’s Little Tykes jungle gym and cozy coupe, and the plastic that your miniatures are made of are not this kind of plastic. The plastic used in consumer products has a very short window of recyclability during the manufacturing process when it is first fed into the machines.
GW Can’t Reuse Their Materials
Excess plastic from a casting mold in a liquid state can be reused and thrown back into the pot before it sets, but once most plastics used in consumer products sets, it’s done. It can’t be re-ground. GW can’t just take all the vanilla Marines it doesn’t want anymore and throw them in a grinder and squirt them out as Primaris Marines. It’s not like a Child’s Play sequel. You can’t kill Chucky in a toy factory by feeding him down an extruder and expect a reincarnated Chucky to come out the other end of the machine.
This is why you’re not supposed to put plastic in the microwave unless it’s microwave safe. If you put non-safe plastic in the microwave, it just melts and becomes toxic goop. It’s the same story with burned out cars. You can’t salvage a modern wreck because there’s so much plastic in cars now that most of it just becomes molten toxic goop in a car fire that requires hazmat specialists to clean up. That’s why Fury Road Warboys only drive classics. They’re made of steel and leather.
For GW to retire your vanilla Marines, they have to sell them to you. Pewter miniatures can go in a meltdown pile and be remade into spoons, but hard consumer plastics cannot be used for re-grind once they are set.
Primaris Units Lack the Strategic Backbone
The final reason your vanilla Marines aren’t going to retire is in the codex and the rulebook. It’s a few dirty little tricks we call “auras” and “command points.”
Here’s a homework assignment for you. Search up all the tournament reports on the hobby blogosphere and look for pictures of Marine armies and Chaos armies. What are you looking for? Tanks. The most popular piece of Marine armor in the game is the Predator. Why is that? On its own, the Predator isn’t that great. It’s a beer can with guns glued to it. But when you look at PREDATOR KILLSHOT in the back of your Marine or CSM codex, the Predator goes from “Why didn’t I just take Obliterators?” to “Holy crap my opponent is going to get his teeth kicked out of his skull if he doesn’t pop Predators.”
Kill Shot changes a Predator from a free victory point into a model your opponent must kill on turn one. Killshot has kept Predators in the game when literally every other Marine model just gets bullied.
The strategic depth of tactical resources keeps vanilla Marines in the game. How many Primaris marines can use Hellfire shells or Flakk Missile? None of them. They don’t have heavy bolters or missile launchers. Do you know how good a heavy bolter or a missile launcher is in 8th edition? They went from bottom of the pack to priceless. Any gun that can spit a mortal wound whenever you want for a command point is a big deal.
Now let’s consider auras. Marine armies are full of them. Your Chapter Master, your Lieutenants, and your Chapter Tactics all have wacky ways that are either cooked in or based on proximity bubbles to hand you re-rolls and pick up ones to take the randomness out of your dice.
Auras Are Force Multipliers
Since auras and re-rolls scale in effectiveness linearly based strictly on numbers, this means that more bodies mean more effectiveness. This means that paying extra points for the same marine to have two wounds and a -1AP bolter is almost NEVER as good as just paying for two one-wound marines with twice the guns. You will roll more dice and pick up more ones.
Every Loyalist Marine model in the game got new bolter beta rules to make their firepower last longer. This has a lot more value to cheaper one-wound Marines that can cram into a bubble than an equal wound count of Primaris marines with half the dice.
You’re Paying More For Less
Ultimately, paying extra for fewer Marines and more wounds do not help you juice your dice. It hurts you. It is not difficult in this game to find weapons that do D3 damage or 2 damage per shot. (Even worse, there are units in Death Guard and Dark Angels that can carry overflow wounds from model to model.) There are a wide variety of units in every tactical role in every army in the game that can punch a Primaris Marine off his feet like his second wound didn’t exist. They will laugh all the way to the bank knowing that you paid for a wound that did nothing.
Your second wound actually pulls dice out of your guns and doesn’t economically take advantage of your auras and Chapter Tactics, and that second wound goes straight into the trash can.
What it All Boils Down T0
So, here’s everything in conclusion, for all you corpse-loving lapdogs that were under-educated in Imperial public schools.
- Your vanilla Marines aren’t going anywhere because GW doesn’t design tactically superior units that make your existing units obsolete. If they did, you would have cause for alarm, but they don’t. The miniature designers work in a vacuum. Any new unit that replaces an older unit is more of a happy accident than intentional obsolescence.
- Your models are not recyclable. Once a one-wound Marine comes out of the mold, that model exists forever. GW can’t recall every one-wound Marine kit on the shelf overnight. They’re not going to throw it into a grinder to make a new model.
- Primaris Marines are fundamentally disadvantaged compared to vanilla Marines in the core game mechanics and tactical toolbox.
- Your little thousand Marine two-wound baby Chapters are adorable compared to the might of the Traitor Legions.\
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About the Author: Jack Stover
