Well FAQ this!

Well, It’s been a few weeks since the new FAQ’s came out, so in my usual delayed fashion, let’s see what’s changed…what’s good…what sucks and what GW may or may not have been smoking.  We’re going to start with the ones that will affect me since I play these armies and this is my great domain, so deal with it.

Chaos Space Marines:  At first looks, it seems like there wasn’t anything big here…until we really look at the psychic powers.  First Lash now needs to roll to hit.  It’s not a psychic shooting attack, but it needs to roll to hit.  It doesn’t inflict damage, but it needs to roll to hit.  Does this seem stupid to anyone else?  Now don’t get me wrong, Lash is a powerful ability…until you take into consideration the current meta which involves units in transports that don’t care about lash until their boxes are destroyed, but still it can lead to a dirty trick so fine.  The big one that pisses me off to no end is Warptime.  So now I roll a psychic test at the beginning of the turn that will give me the OPTION to re-roll ALL my to hit or to wound dice.  That’s, right ALL of them.  The successful and failed ones.  It’s an all-or-nothing deal.  Does anyone else have something this idiotic?  So CSM were just too broken, huh?  IG, Wolves and GK were so underpowered compared to CSM that the pointy marines just had to have this nerf.  On the good side my demon princes just got 15 points cheaper.

Space Marines: Vanilla marines only had one that extends to most chapters, so I’ll cover it here and be done with it… Combat Squads again work as most of us figured they do.  They are treated as one unit for the purpose of reserves and deployment, but can enter the battlefield as independent units, including infiltrating/outflanking separately.  At this point I don’t think this really changes much as the SM chapters that most people play don’t have combat squads.

Necrons: This was needed to put an end to some shenanigans mostly.  No, of course you can’t “conga line” scarabs from a spider.  That was just stupid and we all pretty much expected this.  Entropic strike works exactly as the sane among us figured.  A cryptek’s re-roll can be used against the stormlord’s roll to see if the storm ends if he’s in the same squad which again makes sense.  Lance works on the modified armor values (so it’s still 12 or lower) which again makes sense.  Most of this FAQ should have just been a big sign saying “don’t be stupid” in a big flashy font.

  

Dark Eldar: Again, nothing big beyond some common sense stuff.  Flicker fields don’t work against dangerous terrain.  Um…yeah.  The save is taken against “glancing and penetrating hits”  Dangerous terrain doesn’t penetrate…it just immobilizes so of course you don’t get a save.  You got a great new book…dominated the model release schedule for over a year…isn’t that enough?

Space Wolves/Blood Angels: Well, they basically got the reverse of Lash.  Jaws and blood lance do not need to roll to hit.  They are psychic shooting attacks…they do inflict damage, but they don’t need to roll.  Fluff-wise I guess this makes sense, but especially with Jaws, this just makes an overpowered ability just a bit nastier.

Tyranids: This was a biggie.  GW finally realized how stupid magic Rhinos were, so yes Psykers in vehicles are affected by Shadows.  Why wouldn’t they be?  In the fluff, whole systems fall into the Shadow in the Warp when the Hive draws near..unless you climb into a Winnebago and they can’t touch you.  Well, now it’s back to the way it should be.  Sadly, you still can’t join IC’s to squads in spores (and again we don’t know why beyond the fact that the game designers don’t like Xenos) but you got one at least.

Eldar: See above…”Don’t be stupid”.  Of course Star Engines can’t ram…ramming happens in the movement phase and star engines work in shooting.  That’s where most of us checked in 4 years ago, but for the few and foolish, there it is.   They re-worded how runes work for psychic powers, but again left the effect Shadows has to this clear as mud.  Come, on GW…make a call on this one..ANY call.  I don’t care if it stupid for both armies as long as it’s a concrete ruling.  I know you guys don’t like that and prefer your fanbase to be as pissed off as possible, leaving decisions up to local players and leading to riots in regional events but come on.  Give us something dammit.

Imperial Guard: Yes the army that just makes you want to puke in your soup.  The army that reinvented what it means to be broken.  Well, for those few that don’t spam veterans, have I got news for you.  Your Platoons are now broken too!  A platoon now counts as one unit for reserves (which I’m ok with) and deployment…and there it is.  Hello, Dawn of War.  Now an IG player can line the center of the board with a SW toting command squad, 50 guardsmen, 9 heavy weapons, 3 special weapon squads..and that’s ONE troop choice.  By comparison, even the “broken” Grey knights…they get 10 Terminators with 2 Psycannons for the same deployment.  So if you have 2 platoons…you can double this.  And remember, you don’t have to blob it up.  You can split fire across the board and force your opponent to either deploy on his table edge, or roll on to be shot to hell and back.  You know, it’s stupid, horrible rules like this that are why my interest has shifted away from 40K to Fantasy lately.

And there you have it.  There were some other tweaks here and there, but these were probably the big ones.  It’s nice to see GW occasionally making rules calls and finally fixing a few bad ones (see Tyranids) but in the end as many have been saying for years if GW did some real play-testing these issues could have been fixed much earlier…and they’d see some of the big dumb issues they’ve once again ignored.  6^th edition, please come soon and bring some balance to the force…