7th Edition so Far…

by Kirby



– 7th edition has been around for a while now and although my playing time hasn't been nearly as extensive as I'd like it to be, I wanted to run through some things I've noticed so far and I'd like all of you to chime in as well.


•Psychic powers aren't nearly the shit we thought; ya they still are and we're still seeing people using giant psychic fueled deathstars which is annoying but for the most part it seems to have come down significantly (and summon spam never took off as a complete concept; it was and still is required with a good core army concept to lead it). Once the Culexus Assassin gets some time on the sun I think this will drop even further but all in all the psychic hasn't led to more extreme polarisation than 6th edition deathstars

•Imperial Knights are a much bigger deal than we thought; as we've seen in recent results an army with a Knight or a Knight formation is really quite common and most armies have not adapted to this.

•Army composition; CAD + one other source allows those smaller books a chance to actually see time without a huge opportunity cost. I know a couple of the larger tournaments were trying this out initially but it seems to have filtered down reasonably well. All your Inqusition, Sisters, Legion of the Damned, etc. users can still bring multiple other options to actually make a workable list and this hasn't lead to any “breaking”. Yes most are still steering away from CAD despite the multiple FoC arguments reviewed in 6th edition but I think this ends up as a fine compromise anyway while avoiding the stupid of unbound.

•Eldar are still the king; Wave Serpents with objective secured and good access to psychic powers do that however; based upon results coming in from tournaments we're seeing a greater spread of armies beneath Eldar (rather than just Tau, Daemons and Necrons). Ironically despite Tau having strong options against Eldar (Buffmander w/Crisis suits all split firing drops Serpents pretty quickly), they seem to have regressed the most of the “top armies” of 6th edition despite still having the best shooting.

•Objective Secured isn't as big; I expect this will slowly change with time but it appears that everything accessing scoring has led to a much bigger move away from Troops than originally thought. I imagine this will even out as psychic deathstars are poked by Assassins but the variety of builds which seem to be minimising Troops currently seems quite high. Access to good Detachments from new books has also contributed to this and there are obvious army exceptions but in general, Troops seem to have taken a slight backseat as 7th has kicked off given that everything else scores currently.

•Vehicles in general; there's been an increase but not a massive one. Light vehicles are still largely being left at home and although some vehicles have increased in usage, they are mostly coming from decent durability to points costs options or for Objective Secured purposes (but as discussed above, this hasn't been a big a boon initially as many expected). High AV vehicles are probably seeing more time – specifically Imperial Knights; and interestingly a move to more capacity to deal with these has not yet happened; who is running a balanced army that can deal with three IK currently? Still waiting for more meltaguns…

I still feel 7th edition is better than 6th edition (despite my decreased motivation to play due to other factoids currently) though the release rate still makes it hard to keep up. I'm still curious to see more information from the Imperial Guard / Astra Militarium players and get my own head around how Space Wolves and Grey Knights fall into the mix.