Wednesday, August 27, 2014

7th Edition, First Impressions





I went up to my FLGS today to do some re-learning of Warhammer 40k, and perused my shiny new Ork Codex!   Keep in mind that I skipped 6th edition, so I'm really drawing parallels between 5th Edition and 7th Edition.  Observations and questions below, and PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GANDALF correct anything I've misunderstood.


Psychic Powers:
   -They have their own phase between movement and shooting now, psychic powers require warp points, and this will ease a lot of "When do psychic powers happen" issues. No more psychic powers during enemy assaults, or enemy shooting....a simplified all at once.
 - Psykers got stronger.  I don't know how they work yet, but lots of dice, complementing psykers...seems like they got stronger.

Assaulting:
-Assaulting got harder?  Every enemy unit you assault gets to unload snapshots in your face.  As an Orky assaulter, that's sad to hear.
-You now 2D6 all assaults?  Difficult Terrain even in the open?  Hrm.  
-Fearless wounds are gone!  I remember staging multi-assaults so that I could inflict wounds on fearless MCs, and the horror of losing combat as a fearless Ork mob, and losing almost as many boyz after the assault as during.

Vehicles:
I had heard that vehicles got worse in 6th, and better in 7th, but I don't have reference points - the differences I see: 
-Glances remove a structure point instead of rolling on the penetrate chart with a -1 modifier.
-AP1 and AP2 get a +1 to penetrate, and you need a....7? to penetrate?  I haven't figured that one out yet.
-Vehicles only need 20% obstruction to get cover now instead of 50%?

Pre-Measuring:
-Everyone can pre-measure whatever they want, whenever they want.  
-AAAAAAHHH-HAHAHAHAHA 
-BWAH HA HA HA HA HAaaaa.....

C'mon.  I'm not the only one who remembers all the angst around people who had a shifty means of pre-measuring (Vehicle movement) and people who didn't.  This will save lots of trouble, everywhere.

Shooting:
-Running in the shooting phase is now 2D6? Mayhap heard that wrong.  I need to get my hands on a rulebook.
-You can only kill what's in range to kill.  That's an interesting development. No more torrents of fire into a unit as long as one of them are in range.  On the flip side...I can see clever positioning and firing angles being used to assassinate particular members of a unit.

I'll be headed to my first tournament in two weeks, which will correspond to my first 40k games back in the hobby.  I intend to be massacred in all three games, but am going to meet new people and get some test games in.  It's a 1550 tournament with no restrictions on Force Org (I forget what that mode is called), so I'll bring my Orks, dink around, and see what folks have to teach me. :)