40K 5.5ed

Here's what I'm thinking.

Start with 5th ed.
Flyers are as they were at the end of 5th (Fast Skimmers)
No Allies
No Forts

Stuff to get fixed.
Cover
Vehicle damage
Wound Allocation

My suggestions:
Cover: As 5th but one pip worse (4+ cover is now 5+, etc. IF it was 6+ it now offers no cover)
Vehicle damage: No hull points. As in 5th, but glancing hits only -1 on the table. (ie. A glancing hit has a 1/6 chance of wrecking a vehicle)
: OR vehicle damage stacks. 2 stuns=1 shake, 2 shakes=WD, past that, as in 5th.
Wound Allocation: As per 5th, but Models are differentiated only by profile, not wargear. When removing models, closest to farthest from shooting unit.

There are still a LOT of issues to address, but this hits most of them.

I dunno, I don't know if this is necessary. Allies and Fortifications aren't breaking any games that I've seen happen here. I don't know if messing with Flyer rules is good, there's a lot of delicate things happening there, like requiring they come in from reserves.

Its more using the end of 5th as a starting point.

Taking flyers back to Fast Skimmers does several things at once. Scythes and Vendettas are insta-nerfed. They are no longer a "must-have" or a "must plan for" You do not have to have built in anti-air or be forced to take a flyer (such as chaos and the Heldrake). If someone can come up with a valid reason this is WORSE than existing 6th, I'm all ears.

Allies can be brought in with little effort, same with Forts.

If you turn my Doom Scythe into a Fast Skimmer, it gets to sit in one place and Death Ray you again and again and again. Just a heads up.

Yes it does. And I hit it at full BS and armor 11. With everything:)

Was it game breaking at the end of 5th? No, so it wouldn't be now.

It also puts it on the board turn one and allows me to strafe it an inch to qualify for a Jink save. Jinking only hits fliers hard with the snap fire rule, if I remember right, so as a Skimmer I could jink and still Death Ray.

We're using 5th as the baseline. No such thing as a "jink" save. You only get the "all-out" save but it precludes firing (since you're all out). Regardless, the issue has mainly been the durability of flyers due to snapshots. That is done like dinner.

Noone was complaining about Scythes, Vendettas and such being overpowered at the end of 5th.

Doom Scythe's were terrible in 5th, because AV11 is easy to take down at full BS.

They went from terrible to.... balanced. There's nothing wrong with the Doom Scythe today. It generally gets a chance to do it's thing.

Problems with flyers right now are that many codex's don't have an answer to flyers. The Chaos book had an opportunity to shift the meta, then priced it by 10 points too much per model (flakk). If the Dark Angels, Tau, and Eldar books shift the meta, then it'll work itself out.

6th isn't even a year old.

People are saying they don't like 6th. That they preferred 5th. I could take either one.

If you play 5th, you have the same issues we had at the end. Wound allocation shenanigans, mech and melta ruling the day, and so on. Playing with one set of broken rules over another set of broken rules is silly. Fix it. If GW won't, we should. If we say Snapfire 1/2's your BS rather than setting it to 1, the GW police will not arrest us.

I agree with you Mark, It's less than a year old, and we've had one codex. It probably is too soon to say "crap lets just play 5th." But then again, it took one read thru D&D 4th to realize that it wasn't what I was looking for. I'm simply saying if someone doesn't like 6th, what do you do with 5th?

Planes wrote:

Lore Weaver wrote:Doom Scythe's were terrible in 5th, because AV11 is easy to take down at full BS. their model didn't exist in 5th, and no scale existed for proxying.

Yes it did, I had one and played it. Also, people scratch built them.

Back to the subject at hand, though, I think I will stick with 6th myself. While it does chug on occasion, I found that most of the time it's resulted in closer (and bloodier!) games for me. The tie breaker points are HUGE, so that you don't just roll up a game of Tie (5th Ed Bases).

That's the whole idea of 6th I believe.

There is more randomness, so it is easier for a lesser skilled player to pull off an upset. This is not a bad thing. The mechanic of how it does that....

A 1500 pt games was roughly 2 hrs before. It is easily 2 1/2 now.

If people prefer 5th to 6th, how do we go about that? 2 leagues? "40k classic" and "40K new coke"?

Roland wrote:If people prefer 5th to 6th, how do we go about that? 2 leagues? "40k classic" and "40K new coke"?

6th isn't *THAT* bad! It's like... new slurm.

first blood actually seems to cause the game to shift a fair bit. that first point makes whoever gets it more defensive and the other more offensive.

Roland wrote:A 1500 pt games was roughly 2 hrs before. It is easily 2 1/2 now.

The nature of the armies being played does tend to swing those numbers around quite a bit, though. Horde armies always take longer, and things like Boxes or Draigo Wing tends to go faster due to less plastic. I know that in my match against Gain we were done inside an hour due to both of us playing highly mechanized armies. If 6th did anything to lengthen the game, I'd say the biggest thing was to make the meta more favorable to hybrid armies, as tanks are no longer king of the hill.

First blood is a pain in the butt. Slay the warlord and linebreaker.. Sure.. Np. Im just not a fan of it.. Probably becuase i twnd to cough it up each game somehow even when i only have.av14/13 vehicles on the table to start

I also dont like warlord traits. The built in chaos ones are great because you can plan for it.. The random ones are garbage.. And more annoying than anything.

I hate mysterious objectives.. Hate them. Every objective every game being mysterious makes no sense to me. Cant stand it. Id much prefer something like roll a d6 for each objective .. If you roll a 6 then its mysterious. Just a default mysterious is irritating.

I think the current warlord trait table is meant to be something to hold all the other races over until they have their own charts. The more Codices we get, the less people will use the BRB chart, me thinks.

Lol! So, we'll have 6-8 new(!) awsome charts by the time 7th edition is out and all the other armies can keep on truckin' with random crap! Exciting! More great game design!

Ive said this a few times I think.

5th is "Lets see who is the better general/more skilled".

6th is "Lets get drunk and shoot the shit while we pretend to shoot each other/I don't care who wins as long as I'm pleasantly toasted"

Roland wrote:Ive said this a few times I think.

5th is "Lets see who is the better general/more skilled".

6th is "Lets get drunk and shoot the shit while we pretend to shoot each other/I don't care who wins as long as I'm pleasantly toasted"

That's a good sum up.
At first i was against 6th, but now that i have had more games its been kinda growing on me as i find my new position within the edition.
Any new leagues i hope stay 6th and not 5.5... Amalgamating (sp?) the rules seems wrong to me...

Agreed Matt.

That said, I'm all for custom scenarios. I think the nature of deploying objectives, mysterious objectives, and the scouring random VP's are issues that would strike a good balance without messing with the rules.

I agree, the rules are good but different missions wouldn't go unnoticed.

Charts for warlord traits, charts for mysterious objectives, a million charts for psychic powers, charts for chaos boons, charts to see which charts you roll on....

If any of these added any depth to the gameplay it would be fine, but it is just randomness for the sake of randomness. It's like someone was nostalgic for Rogue Trader and they decided to revive it. There's a reason why that game was cool but ultimately unbalanced and unplayable.

There is a good discussion on BoLS right now. Reecius posted an article last week about why he didn't like the CSM book. Goatboy responded with an article defending it this week. I don't fully agree with either of their arguments, but the response to Goatboy's article is bang on. It captures my feeling towards 6th edition and the CSM book's place in it perfectly. Well said Malthrak, well said:
http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2012/12/goatboys-40k-malarkey-chaos-dont-suck.html

Roland wrote:Ive said this a few times I think.

5th is "Lets see who is the better general/more skilled".

6th is "Lets get drunk and shoot the shit while we pretend to shoot each other/I don't care who wins as long as I'm pleasantly toasted"

This is a bit of an oversimplification but I agree with it in principle. The problem is, why settle for this? I would rather drink and shoot the shit while also playing a game that tests my skill. Not my ability to roll a dope psychic power or hope I get a good mysterious objective. Goatboy made a good point in his article about the unbalanced nature of the codexes. GK, IG, and Necrons are clearly at the top of the heap. Instead of addressing this with codex creep it appears GW has decided to go the the other way and tone down the codexes (if CSM is any indication). This is fine, but it means the game will be broken until those armies get new books which will be about 4 years. In the meanwhile it also means that those books will get even stronger by comparison. Apparently fantasy has gone through a similar evolution. The new books were considered not strong until the old books had all been replaced. The problem with that is fantasy players quit in droves because they were pissed off. I don't have any numbers, but I suspect fantasy numbers are down. I can see a similar thing happening with 40K.

I'm not going to go kneejerk and fire sale all of my stuff, but I'm certainly not going to be buying any or playing much 40K in the near future. It just doesn't interest me at all. If anyone wants to try out some Flames of War and/or Dystopian Wars let me know. I'll also be looking into Infinity and Dropzone Commander. I'd rather support a company that puts their gamers and customers first.