A Commentary on Contemporary Balance in 40K

[Denzark]

Did you manage it?

Did I bollocks. But only because I was languishing in myopic utopianism and by the time I saw this reminder most people had sloped off home!

Ach well there is always tomorrow.

[vonDietdrich]

And, I'd add, you don't know that the Eldar Codex is broken, you haven't read it. People cried that Nercons were broken at this stage and they're strong, but not overly so, and the fluffier Detachments are very popular.

Necrons were primarily buffed in the defense department and certain things were made nigh unkillable (except to the now-plentiful Strength D weapons). While certain mechanics in the army are quite strong, they didn't hand out Strength D to everything and their offense is generally on par with other armies. Even the White Dwarf acknowledges that the Necron equivalent of the Wraithknight can't compete in the same weight class mechanically. Necrons also do not have psykers or Battle Brothers, which balances out things like Gauss a bit.

Eldar, on the other hand, have the absolute best overall offense in the game now while also being quite difficult to kill if played competently, two books of Battle Brothers (three once Corsairs get an update), and a very powerful stable of psykers.

As to the second point.. I have read it, although I had to brush up on my Spanish a bit. And even when I posted this, I was only using sources who had taken a picture of their possession of the Codex and were vetted as credible (since then, everything that they posted has been verified as the truth by other owners of the codex and then the inevitable pictures). This is the internet, y'know. You can't stop the signal.

Edited out some sneaky typos.

[Grand Master Raziel]

Well, that was a big pile of GW-apologist trash. Accept the game for what it is? No. As long as the game is as flawed as it is, we as a community should continue calling GW out on it until they actually do something about it.

Can the game be perfectly balanced? I'll admit, probably not. That said, GW could be doing a much better job than they currently are. Employing basic math to come up with prices based on statlines would be a good start - they may need to use a different formula than they did in 2nd ed, but there's no reason they can't do things that way. That would clear up a lot of criticisms all by itself.

Second, they could emulate other companies and be a lot more responsive to player concerns about balance. One would think this would be in their own interests - if a unit is seriously underpowered/overpriced, it's going to languish on shelves. Word of mouth is going to work against those units. You'd think they'd at least buff underpowered units, but instead GW has shown those units will languish in mediocrity until the next codex, and then there's no guarantee they'll get fixed because GW doesn't pay attention to their customer base.