7th Edition Eldar - First Impressions - The internet panics

7th Edition Eldar - First impressions

Before I start, I will admit I play eldar.  I have for twenty years, so I have seen quite few codexes come and go.

I have seen a lot of panic on the internet about how broken things are in this new book.  But this essentially boils down to two things.  Spamming list entries and tourney play.   I do neither, so I personally don't like to be tarred with that brush.

Games Workshop has said MANY times that their game is not designed with competitive play in mind.  It is beer and pretzels type gaming.  You may disagree with this all you like, but that is the fact.

There are, as far as I can tell only a small number of issues which people have with the eldar book.

Number 1.  Scatter bikers.  Every single jetbike can now take either a shuricannon or a scatter laser. I have to admit, this seems a no brainer.  There is a lot of fear about people spamming these, but it is fairly expensive to do, with the specialised FOC chart in the new book.  In casual play, taking a squad or two and limiting heavy weapons is more than fine. You probably want some ablative wounds anyway, as if ap3 ignore cover weapons come your way, then the squads going to lose a lot of models.  New good rules for new models, has been a thing for quite a while now.

Number 2. Wraithknight.  Hes now a jump gargantuan creature armed with two D guns.  He is also pretty cheap in terms of points.

Number 3. Ranged D guns on pretty much all wraith units.  I don't personally see the big deal here, most of these were s10 before, and never seemed all that great with them being a single shot, short ranged and no blast.  The D-flamers got a buff, but they can't instant death and suffer a penalty on the D chart.

Apart from that, there have been debuffs.  Serpents shields been nerfed quite heavily, although I think we all expected that.  Exarchs lost a lot of customisation options, as did the Avatar.

I dont think the Autarch is any better.  Certainly I wont be taking one.

Guardians are a bit naff still.  And unless you spam scatter bikers, you are taking some.

Free flak missiles as well as two wounds on the exarchs are welcome.

Destiny - Warlock

So this is my first class specific review on Destiny.  My main character for the majority of the game, the warlock is the balanced class in my experience.

The warlock currently comes in two flavours.  Voidwalker and Sunsinger.

When you start the game, until you get a character to level 15, you can only use a Voidwalker.

Voidwalker

Pros:  This is a strong solo class with some decent grenades in Axion bolts and vortex grenades, and its super is absolutely lethal with a lot more customisation to it than other classes supers.  I personally prefer having huge blasts with vortex so it remains in play for a lot longer, but others prefer lance which fires it straight forwards or shatter which gives you three smaller blasts.  A strong choice in pvp where the big blasts can wipe out entire teams of enemies.  As a warlock, your grenades don't harm you, so you can throw them around without too much worry.

Cons: In terms of defence, and overall game play, this class just seems lacking compared to the Sunsinger.  With no ability to get an overshield, you can get healing via energy drain, but it doesn't seem very practical in the higher end missions.  Like all of the initial classes, this class doesn't really contribute a great deal to team play in the nightfall or raids so you rarely see them at the top level.

Sunsinger

Pros: This class is all about two things.  Being able to self ressurect and control choke points with grenades.  The super allows you to chuck a bucket load of grenades in a short period of time which can be really handy.  Coming back to life helps no end with the raids, and nightfalls where dying is often fatal.  This class is an insurance policy to ensure you complete the harder missions.

Cons:  The super lacks punch.  In pvp you need to use tactics to make the most of this class, but it is considerably easier to switch out to Void walker.  In lower end missions where you are a couple of levels or higher than the mission, or on general patrols, then this class just feels lacking compared to the Voidwalker.    There are a lot less combinations available to max out a particular build style compared to Voidwalkers too.  Essentially you pick one of the three (all pretty good) grenades, and ensure you can resurect.  The rest doesn't really do much to determine your play style compared to the quite drastic changes that the Voidwalker can do with his.

Conclusion

For me, it is all about the Sunsinger.  Actually completing missions is more important to me than being the main man in damage dealing.  The Sunsinger trades the ability to do a huge explosion for being better balanced overall.  The voidwalker however is a very fun class to play and would suit someone who is more aggressively minded in their play style and assuming the other players in their party can cover the lack of a Sunsinger then it is good to go.   In overall terms, both of the Warlock classes seem to be fairly similar.  Certainly closer together than the two Titans and Hunters appear to be.

Destiny - Why is it so addictive

So I have been mostly playing Destiny, for the last two or so months.  While I am not as experienced as some players, I do have two level 32s and a 31 who just needs some shards to reach level 32, ive completed Crota hard raid and every week I do three nightfalls, three raids and three weeklies.

So it is safe to say I have reached the end game.  Well until House of Wolves comes out later this year and ruins all my hard work so far!

By all rights, I should hate this game.  I dislike first person shooters, I despise first person shooters with death matches and I especially loathe people camping and shooting you with a sniper rifles from the other side of the map.

However I don't.  The key to this is the co-op mode.  Being able to play through the entire game with my friends is why I keep going back.

Actually playing the game has, in my eyes, several key stages.

Levels 1-20 - The training stage.  You play through the story, either alone or in a party.  In the grand scheme of things you are quite limited to what you can do, because you have only one sub class up to level 15 and gear is somewhat random.  You can (and should) actively do bounties at this stage as they give up a lot of exp compared to doing missions.  If you can stay ahead of the curve (1-2 levels above the recommended) then soloing is easy enough.  If you are in a party you can do most missions under levelled.

Levels 20-28  - The quest for legendary gear.  You are looking for your entry level legendary gear and some exotics. At this stage grab whatever armour exotics you can from Xur when he turns up if it is your class specific as that will help considerably with your level.  I was stuck at 26 for several weeks because I didn't understand how to progress.  The best way to get out of the slump here is to save up vanguard marks and just buy your armour.  Drops are very random and the key to getting better gear is to be able to compete in the higher level events.  

Levels 29-32 - The end game.  At this stage you can compete in the top end events. Raids, Nightfalls, 9 coin weeklies all should be competed in.  This give you the best rewards in the game, but you may find yourself casting off gear you only bought a few days/weeks ago to get you to this stage.

Throughout the game you can play pvp in various flavours as well.  The key is that there is always something to occupy your time with and a change to a different type of gaming.

At the moment I am trying to get better spec raid gear for my hunter so I can level it up to 32.  My Warlock is more or less complete and my Titan is done as much as I care to do on it.

Adeptus Mechanicus

The forthcoming release of Adeptus Mechanicus is something I have been waiting on for a long time.
They are the biggest faction in 40k to never really have a model range.  All the Forge World releases have been really exciting with the Horus Heresy range so it is good to see that they are finally doing a 40k version of this army.

From the sneak peeks it looks like they occupy a space around the eldar in terms of weapons and indeed in terms of statistics and points.  This could make them a very unusual imperial army.

The models themselves look solid.  Not forge world amazing but good.  I was hoping for some Johnny 5 type robots, or at least some tracked heavy weapons servitors, but nothing of that ilk seems to have been seen yet.

I plan on having a combined Ad mech and Knight army, but it is dependant on the codex options.

Just how accurate are blast weapons? The maths revealed

Its been a fair while between posts, I don't update as often as I used to do.  I have however been thinking about just how accurate a blast weapon is, opposed to a regular shot from a unit.  Consider some basic units;

Ork: BS2
Guardsman/fire warrior/termagant: BS3
Space Marine: BS4

These are some of the common basic unit types in the game.  They cover the three most common ballistic skill levels.  An ork has 1/3 chance of a hit, a guardsman a 1/2 chance of a hit and a marine a fairly high 2/3 chance of a hit.

So how does this compare to blast weapons?  Lets consider the two basic sizes, small blast at 3 inches and the larger one at 5 inches.

All blast weapons have a 1/3 chance of a hit, from the off.  This matches what Orks already get, but is worse than the other races standard BS.  So straight away, you might be thinking, why would you use such an innacurate weapon?

Well the good folks at GW allow you to take your BS into account when seeing if you hit.  As you know, you have a mighty 3/36 or 1/12 chance of rolling a double one, or a one and a two.  This is a bonus chance of hitting, should your shot scatter.

So you will find an Ork has roughly a 0.36 chance of a hit with a blast weapon.  Except that in reality he doesn't.  Because, as you know the template is bigger than 1 inch wide, so if it scatters only 1 inch, you will still hit at least the target model.  With the larger blast, you will still hit them if it scatters 2 inches.  So what does that do to the maths?  Well it improves the chance of the ork hitting to a mighty 0.39 for the smaller blast and a fairly impressive 0.50 with the larger blast.  You also have a chance of hitting other models in the squad!

So for orks, its an entirely positive experience using blast weapons.  Unfortunately, if you have more than BS2, they get less of a boost and with bs4 small blasts are less accurate than firing a normal gun.

Chance of hitting the exact model with bs 3 is 0.42 and with scattering the small blast hits 0.50 and the larger one 0.61.
Chance of hitting the exact model with bs4 is 0.50 and with scattering the small blast hits 0.61 and the larger one 0.75.

7th Edition. Is it really 6.5?

So after a fairly long hiatus, I have finally got around to looking at the 7th edition rules.

I have to say, I am not really impressed.  For a rough estimate, I would suggest around 95% of the core rules and around 99% of special and weapon rules have stayed the same.  For the price of the books I expected more.

Which brings me to the books.  There is a big rule book, a background book and a sort of painting book.

The painting book has mostly big photos of models with no real explanation on how they were painted. There is a heavy emphasis on Ultramarines and not much on other factions and something that may possibly be classed as tactics, but it really doesn't come across that way in reading it.  I could quite happily have never seen this book, never mind paid actual money for it.  If it had shown a few more gamers armies, or shown how to do some of the painted models, or painting methods, then I would have been much more impressed.

The background book is a rehash of what has been said in previous publications.  I couldn't actually see anything new in this whole book.  While I am sure it is of some value to new gamers, to someone who has been playing for near twenty years, its not very much use to me.  The specific sections on different factions is covered in much better details in their own codexes.

Now those books have been dealt with, back to the rules.  The rules are really just 6th edition with a couple of changes.  This isn't a bad thing as 6th was a solid set of rules.

Big changes, as far as I can tell are as follows;

Psychic phase.  It looks like initially a small nerf in the volume of powers cast, although certain armies will see a boost I think.  Its quite similar to the old fashioned dice pools for casting from fantasy.  Its early to say for sure, but focused witchfires actually look usable now, which is a nice change.   There doesn't appear to be an upper limit on how many dice you use to cast either.  This means you can throw all your dice at a spell you really want.  I also like how you get the primaris power for free if you pick all your powers from the same deck.  Overall this is an improvement.

Shooting phase.  There has been a fairly interesting change.  You now roll all the weapons of one type, then resolve the effects before rolling the next set.  This will slow games down, but provides a tactical choice to the game in trying to stack melta hits on characters when the fodder is hosed down in front of him with lesser weapons.  I like this.

Charge ranges:  Has stayed the same, but with small changes.  Now difficult terrain reduces the charge by a set distance.  Makes it a bit more predictable.  I think this is good too.

Vehicle damage:  It is now no longer possible to blow up a vehicle in one hit with an Ap3 or worse weapon. This makes vehicles across the board tougher and thus more desirable.  Except oddly landraiders, and other 14 all round vehicles, which were virtually impervious to these lower damage weapons in the first place.    I am unsure how much of an effect this will have, except armour 10 vehicles become considerably tougher.

Lords of war are now included in the Force Organisation Chart.

New missions are far more dynamic, allowing armies built around speed and reaction to do well, where as static armies may struggle.

Overall my impressions are that 7th is a positive step forwards.  I can't think of any changes that have been for the worse, but it does strike me as more 6.5 than a new version of the rules.

New Tyranids, a brief look at the new codex

There has been a lot of hate on the Internet about the new book.  But some crucial points have either been missed or brushed under the carpet.

A lot of units have a sizable points reduction.  Anywhere between 20 and 25% in some cases.  Their statistics mostly remain the same.

They now also gain a bonus attack from two sets of melee weapons.  Something they never used to have.

For me, most of the book is usable with a couple of exceptions.  The Tyranid Prime is massively over priced now, and I think everyone could see Tervigons being hit by the nerf bat.  Lictors, previously the worst unit are slightly improved now having infiltrate.  The Deathleaper is a really good unit.

Boneswords being AP 3 didn't surprise me.  It doesn't affect MCs but warriors suffer.  But were you really expecting them to go up against terminators?  I didn't think so.

Daemons got similar points drops and they had reductions in statistics.  Their book is very usable and I really see no reason to not think the Tyranid one will be too.

Also, the Tyrant gets very cheap wings. Expect to see ALL flying tyrants unless someone stumps up the points for Swarmlord and Tyrant guard.