Tuesday 26 April 2022

Latest balance update

 As seems fairly common at the moment, there has been a small break in postings on here. There are various reasons for this, firstly we've all been down with COVID, which put a bit of a dampener on the school holidays. Luckily none of use were badly affected, just cold like symptoms and tiredness. Secondly, and this one is entirely my fault, I've got back in to playing PUBG mobile again. This means that a lot of my free time has been taken up by messing around in games, rather than spending the time writing on here. I need to get back to writing on here more, as I have half a dozen or more posts sat in my draft folder ready to write, including my army group pictures that I said I would publish ages ago. Anyway, back to the main point of the posts, the new updates.

There have been a couple of key updates and a couple more less important by still worthwhile updates. I will note here that this is the first draft of the update and does not include the updates regarding the scions and "hammer of the Emperor". Talking of which, here it is;


Now there are actually two new updates in here but I'll deal with hammer of the Emperor first. This is a pretty significant update and a huge boost for the guard as it increases our wound pool quite a bit, by a third actually. Most of the time were hitting on 4's, so making 6's auto wound means a third of our shots are auto wounding, which is huge for things like lasguns with there puny S3 shots. There have been many time I have pummeled an enemy unit with shots, hitting significantly more than I had any right to, only to fail almost every 5+ wounding roll. For things like battle cannons it's less important but still very welcome. The main downside to this is that Militarum Tempestus units are excluded from the rule. The was some discussion about it to start with but GW very quickly came out and said, no, they aren't included in this rule. Good that they were quick with the update, bad they didn't included them. 
The second update on the list above it at the bottom and concerns infantry squads. They have gone up in points again, to a total of 60, from 55 (originally they were only 50 points) but, and it's a big but, all upgrades are now free. This means that for me pretty much every squad in every army has dropped points, in my Hjaltland LI it's a total of 80 points dropped from the list but it should have been closer to 120 as I haven't included the vox casters that are actually modelled on some of the guys in my points. I can see what will happen now though, there will be a flood of heavy and special weapons in to the squads, most likely plasma and lascannons or missile launchers plus plasma pistols and power swords on the sgts, because why not! This will make the fire power output increase and tied with the 6's auto wound could make infantry squads a force to content with!


The last change to this update brings is to artillery or indirect fire weapons. Now in the guard we like our artillery so the little addendum on the end here is very welcome.  This rule takes us back a few edition to the BS modifier for firing indirect, as well as adding to the targets saving throw but removing the guard from these restrictions is great and continues to give us an advantage in an area where we should quite rightly have an advantage. With the changes also added for power armour, this could have killed guard artillery almost completely. 
So these three changes, along with all the previous additions and changes mean that we are slowly crawling out from.our pit of despair and disappointment, which given the next bit of new we received just added to the nice little role the guard are on.
In addition to the balance update we got clarification on which supplements are still valid and which are not, I think in part spurred on by the saga with the leviathan supplement and the crusher stampede. Anyway, we now have confirmation that the psychic awakening book is still in effect, so scions still get there doctrines, relics, warlord traits and other bits and bobs and we still get to use tank aces and the like.


We also got confirmation that the Cadian supplement is still active. This is good because it's probably one of the key reasons we are able to hold our own as much as we can, which isn't very much at all but it's better then nothing. 


There is however a problem with all of this and it's the fact that with all these new rules and keeping the supplement going, it might be a while until we see our new codex. Now, we know that Knights are next followed by CSM, which will probably take us through to July time. Then there is just us and Daemons left, but that doesn't include the League's of Votann! So if you put them in before the guard, which is entirely possible, it could be September before we get a codex. However, there is something else that may give us a clue as to when we'll get our codex, baring in mind that 8ts only us and Daemons left why did they need to put "Valid until January 2023" on the supplement update? They are not going to be bringing any of this back in, so why did they need to say that? They maybe just trying to give us a time frame for when it will all disappear but some of it is supplements to current 9th edition codices and I assume will remain valid until a new codex comes out for those armies, which won't be by Jan 2023 and will therefore need a new update to remove the other items that are no longer valid, which is mostly guard stuff or stuff for codices we already know are coming out and so will be ammended when that happens. So why put Jan 2023? Is it because that's when the last codex that will effect this list will be released? And as such the latest that anything on this list will be updated is then? I really hope that it won't be that long until we get a new book but it really is starting to look that way!

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