Games Workshop has come into this new edition with the stated intention that 10th Edition will be less lethal than 9th Edition. To be fair, this is not hard. Basically every Codex that came out after Death Guard had units that could absolutely annihilate the toughest unit in the codex before it. From the sprinkling of AP received by Space Marines and Necrons, books started coming out filled with AP-3 and AP-4 weaponry. While Necrons started the Ignore Invuln trend with the Night Bringer, we thought weapons like that would be restricted to demigod entities. But soon it seemed every codex had at least something that could remove enemy Invulns. Then the Ignore Ignore Wounds rules started showing up, not only negating FNPs, but also Phase Caps and eventually Damage Reduction.
Now the Battlefields of the 41st Millennium are supposed to be hellish places. But this level of lethality had a direct impact on the game. Vehicles all but disappeared from the board. If it couldn't hide behind obscuring terrain or benefit from cover, it usually stayed home. The game became very focused on tough, minimum sized, elite infantry units and fast, glass cannon, damage dealers to take them out. On the one hand, this made the game focused on movement, positioning, firing lines, and board control, and I really enjoyed it. But the fun, flavorful, and impressive battle lines of previous editions were gone.
GW'S ANSWER
As I said in the rules roundup, GW has decided to approach this problem from two fronts: revising Strength and Toughness, and lowering AP.
GW has increased the Toughness of every Monster and Vehicle across the board. In general, starting with Toughness 7, they've changed each incremental step of Toughness to three steps.
So roughly:
- T7 -> T9-11
- T8 -> T12-14
- T9 -> T15-16
The weapons most impacted by this by far have been the mighty plasma guns and meltaguns. In 9th these were your go-to general purpose weapon, easily capable of killing elite infantry or tanks. Now, while they still have good AP, they'll find themselves struggling to wound the Monsters and Vehicles they hunted before.
By contrast, other weapons have gone up in Strength to compensate for this and designate them as Vehicle and Monster killers, in some cases far surpassing the pattern established for Toughness. In 9th Edition, the strongest weapon profile belongs to the Belicosa Volcano Cannon. At S20, even in 10th edition this Warlord Titan weapon with make a joke of nearly any model. But GW has already introduced tank weaponry with higher Strength, peaking with the Valiant's Thundercoil Harpoon and the Stormsurge's Pulse Blast Cannon, both weapons featuring a Strength of 24. Recently they unveiled the new Belicosa, at a whopping Strength 32.
By contrast, the AP reduction has been much more consistent. With a few exceptions, nearly every weapon previewed has gone down a pip of AP. Combined with sensible cover rules, armor saves will be much more useable. The heaviest armour of the 41st Millennium looks like it will actually stand up to the threats it was designed for.
Additionally, a lot of the things that get around saves are gone. Psychic powers are no longer raining down mortals. No profile, including some that had it before, has been shown that ignores FNP, and the only ignore invuln is a once per game ability on the Vindicare Assassin. So your defensives stats are more useful on the whole.
So that's that then! Vehicles and Monsters are tougher, high strength weaponry exists but it's confined to the big boys, and armor counts for more. Lethality fixed!
So why are people worried?
WEAPON SPECIAL RULES
In 8th Edition, weapons were defined by a single type rule. Every weapon was Assault, Grenade, Heavy, Melee, Pistol, or Rapid Fire. Then if a weapon needed further explanation, there was a section in the profile dedicated to special rules. This made it easy to know a guns capabilities from a glance, but it also lead to some weird design requirements. Starting with the 9th Edition Ork codexes, the design team felt they needed to introduce a new weapon type in order to make Ork weapons function the way they wanted. Then finally in Votann, they felt forced to introduce HunTR, a type that defined a weapon as just being a gun.
In 10th Edition, weapons are simply melee or ranged by default. Then one or more universal special rules can be tacked onto them. The overwhelming majority of weapons are defined by these rules alone. However, with these rules now in existence, GW has decided they can use them to make some of the basic weapons more interesting. Over the course of the faction focuses, fans have noted that some rules that greatly increase the effectiveness of a weapon seem to keep popping up.
Of primary concern, given GWs stated intentions and approach, are LETHAL HITS and DEVASTATING WOUNDS.
LETHAL HITS makes any Critical Hit automatically Wound the target. So far, we haven't seen too many rules that expand what counts as a Critical Hit, leaving this rule to trigger on an unmodified 6 in the vast majority of cases. But that potential means Tough targets can be taken down by saturation fire. Simply outfit your army with LETHAL HITS, then throw enough dice at something and it will die regardless of its Toughness.
DEVASTATING WOUNDS has a similar problem, but in this case the situation gets magnified. On a Critical Wound, the target takes a mortal wound and the attack sequence ends. The big deal here is that mortal wounds get around both armour and invuln saves. Armies with access to DEVASTATING WOUNDS could potentially rain mortals the way Psyker armies and Tyranids did in 9th. But here things get worse, as the ANTI rule expands the Critical Wound range for specific targets. When the two are combined, the chosen target can reliably have both its Toughness and Save bypassed.
Combine either of these rules with sources of re-rolls, and some players are concerned that the game will be right back where it started.
RE-ROLLS AND OTHER FACTION RULES
Starting with the reveal of Faction Rules for 10th Edition, there were concerns of access to both these rules and re-rolls. While GW had said they wanted to reduce the amount of re-rolls, the Space Marine Army Rule, Oath of Moment, gives every Space Marine model full re-rolls to Hit and Wound against a chosen target. And with Guilliman on the field, they get to pick a second target if they can eliminate the first.
In the same article, the Tyranid Detachment Rule, Hyper-Adaptations, has the ability to give every Tyranid model LETHAL HITS against Monsters and Vehicles. This means that a force made primarily of the new, tougher vehicles, could potentially be picked apart by an army designed for dice saturation.
And since then, more Faction Focuses have come out that can provide these powerful rules to an army. Many are starting to claim these Universal Special Rules are less special and more universal.
So is 10th Edition doomed to be another game of keeping your army hidden and trying to get the all important first strike?
MY ANALYSIS
I decided I wanted to do more than just ponder. I wanted to base my thoughts on as hard data as I could find. So I combed through the Warhammer Community articles to find every rule and profile I could get my hands on. I grouped the rules into three categories: offensive power, defensive power, and mixed or less obvious rules.
I then performed statistical tested a handful of weapons revealed from every faction, comparing them against their 9th Edition counterparts. Wherever possible I chose weapons with one or more special rules on them, though there were a few I picked because I was curious about them in particular. When performing these tests, I gave each unit access to their Army and Faction Rules and their own special rules, but nothing else. Prior to the Kansas City Open, we didn't have anywhere close to as full a picture on what was available in 10th over 9th. And in 9th, it's very easy to stack power. So I wanted to go for something more baseline instead of just letting the 9th Edition armies pile on as many rules as they wanted.
So what did I find?
THE DATA
Let's start with what this analysis and data doesn't show. This analysis does not show definitively whether 10th Edition is more or less killy than 9th Edition. The only way to know that is when we finally have our hands on the full rules and get some games in. I'm even working on a project that will give pretty sophisticated demonstrations of unit capabilities.
What we're looking at is whether the revealed rules depict a game that is more or less lethal than 9th Edition. In other words, "Is there any reason to believe that 10th Edition will be as bad or worse than 9th Edition?"
Let's start with the rules themselves. All told I found 242 beneficial special rules for Armies, Factions, Units, and Stratagems. Among them:
- 105 or ~43% are purely focused on making a unit more lethal
- 55 or ~23% only provide a defensive benefit to a unit
- 41 or ~17% give access to re-rolls or a means to bypass Save or Wound rolls
When you consider that GW has almost certainly been trying to show off things that will get players excited to play their favorite Faction, this doesn't feel like a lot to me. Less than half the rules are focused purely on lethality. Less than 20% are rules we're really concerned about. And since we don't know what the point tax on them will be, we have no means to decide how accessible they'll be.
By contrast nearly every army in 9th Edition has an HQ with a re-roll aura.
As for the weapons themselves, I found a total of 331 weapon profiles, not including generic close combat weapons (as well as things like armoured tracks and xenos claws and teeth.) Of them:
- 113 or ~34% have no special rules or only detrimental rules (HAZARDOUS, PSYCHIC, ONE SHOT)
- 25 or ~7.6% just have a rule that makes them more useful (ASSAULT, PISTOL)
- 192 or ~58% have one or more rules that make the weapon more effective
- 51 or ~15% have LETHAL HITS or DEVASTATING WOUNDS
Again, considering that GW is trying to get us excited in these previews, this doesn't seem very impressive. But this is still pretty subjective. What do the statistical studies show?
STATISTACL TESTS
Over all, I've found it hard to find specific patterns for sure other than "there's a lot of red on the spreadsheet." The game seems less lethal, on the whole with maybe Infantry having more to worry about, and Vehicles having less to worry about. Lets go faction by faction. Each set was tested against Cadians, Intercessors, Blightlords, Rhinos, Landraiders, and Monoliths.
Adeptus Sororitas
Tested Weapons: ministorum flamer, Exorcist conflagration rockets, and Exorcist missile launcher
Other than some ability to spike damage using 9th edition rules, Sisters look over all more effective against infantry and less effective against vehicles.
Adeptus Custodes
Tested Weapons: Executioner greatblade, Guardian spear, and Castellan axe
All weapons were unchanged or less effective, save against Blightlords. The loss of Disgustingly Resilient allows Custodes to be much more effective now.
Adeptus Mechanicus
Tested Weapons: radium carbine, arc rifle, and solar atomiser
Other than spike damage, the carbine is slightly more effective now against hard targets. Conversely, the solar atomiser is slightly more effective now against light targets. In all other ways AdMech have lost damage.
Aeldari
Tested Weapons: witchblade, singing spear, bright lance, focused lance.
The singing spear shows decent improvements against hard targets. In all other cases the weaponry is either similar or has dropped in effectiveness.
Chaos Daemons
Tested Weapons: bileblade, Witstealer, The Blade of Shadows on the strike
Witstealer has also benefited from the loss of -1 to Damage. Otherwise, these weapons are less effective.
Chaos Knights
Tested Weapons: hellstorm autocannon, Despoiler battle cannon, Desecrator laser destructor, volkite combustor, warpstrike strike
Again, losing -1 to Damage hurts Death Guard. The Despoiler's battle cannon absolutely shreds light targets now, while the Desecrator is all around more powerful. Everything else took a nerf.
Chaos Space Marines
Tested Weapons: Fleshmetal guns warp hail and salvo and Drach'nyen
Other than good performance against Guard, everything got nerfed.
Death Guard
Tested weapons: combi-weapon, bubotic blade, reaper autocannon, Plagueburst mortar
Death Guard is all around more effective against Infantry now. The reaper is also mostly better now. Vehicles are now slightly, to much more tough against Death Guard weaponry.
Drukhari
Tested weapons: twin splinter rifle, splinter cannon, twin Drukhari haywire blaster, Lelith's blade
Providing they're Empowered, Drukhari are much more deadly now. One of the more buffed factions.
Imperial Agents
Tested weapons: Exitus rifle and Castigation
Now that Headshot is no longer a dice game, the Vindicare is all around more powerful. Only the Monolith shrugs that shot off at all well. Castigation is strictly worse as a weapon than a power.
Imperial Guard
Tested weapons: lasgun, plasma gun, demolisher cannon, volcano cannon
The change to toughness really shows on the plasma gun, being more effective against infantry but far less effective against vehicles. The Demolisher cannon is significantly improved though, while the volcano cannon and humble lasgun have taken a nerf.
Imperial Knights
Tested weapons: Questoris heavy stubber, Chainbreaker las-impulsor on low intensity, thermal spear, thundercoil harpoon
One of the more erratic datasets. On the whole, the heavy stubber is more effective, while the low intensity las-impulsor is suitably strong against infantry and week against vehicles. Other than some outliers for Death Guard and the Rhino, the thermal spear and the thundercoil are nerfed.
Genestealer Cults
Tested weapons: webber, seismic cannon, mining laser, Patriarch's claws
This dataset initially looks erratic, but that's only because the webber can now do damage to vehicles where it couldn't before. It's otherwise mostly nerfed. The seismic cannon is almost purely better, but the mining laser and Patriarch aren't fairing as well.
Grey Knights
Tested weapons: purifying flame, Nemesis force weapon, greatsword on strike, and daemon greathammer
It's almost all red. The Grey Knights appear to have taken a nerf for now.
Leagues of Votann
Tested weapons: ion blaster, twin ion beamer, SP heavy conversion beamer, and heavy magna-rail cannon
Leagues felt like they took the biggest nerf of any faction focus. But while they're also mostly in the red, the two beam weapons are more effective against Infantry now.
Necrons
Tested weapons: gauss flayer, deathray, particle whip, and doomsday cannon
Even with the new LETHAL HITS the guass flayer is still all around less effective. The larger weaponry seems to have done far better, though the Land Raider and Monolith still shrug some of it off.
Orks
Tested weapons: Makari's stabba, choppa, 'Eadbanger
These weapons are still mostly best against light targets, though 'Eadbanger can at least hurt vehicles now.
Space Marines
Tested weapons: bolt rifles, multi-melta, Godhammer lascannon, heavy laser destroyer
Marines suffered from early codex syndrome and now they've been heavily buffed. It's nearly all good news for them.
Space Marine Chapters
Tested weapons: master-crafted power weapon, frag cannon, Blood Reaver, Fealty on the strike
The non-compliant Chapters still get the huge buff from Oath of Moment, while The Lion seems to have traded some of his offense for defense.
T'au Empire
Tested weapons: EMP grenade, twin pulse carbine, rail rifle, railgun
It's mostly bad news, though the EMP can actually hurt vehicles now. The railgun has been buffed though.
Thousand Sons
Tested weapons: Doombolt, warpsmite, Psychic Stalk
And here we see how the changes to Psychic Powers have affected their most dependent faction. It's also mostly bad news, though Psychic Stalk can now hit vehicles.
Tyranids
Tested weapons: fleshborers, Genestealer claws and talons, Screamer-killer talons, rupture cannon
Even with the new adaptive trait, it's not good news for my 'Nids. Genestealers really enjoy that WS 2+ though.
World Eaters
Tested weapons: Berzerker chainblade, Khornate eviscerator, daemongore cannon, Samni'arius and Spinegrinder on the strike
Again, it's bad news. Though the daemongore appears to have taken a bit of a buff against lighter targets.
FINAL CONCLUSIONS
This is not an incremental step in the rules like 9th was. This is a big enough change that GW saw fit to bring us back to Indexes. And honestly, I feel like the data points to that. There are definitely places where things feel considerably less lethal, just as GW intended. But I'm also seeing places where GW has decide to give some love to things that might have been suffering.
In some cases, I think the design team has taken a step back and rethought what some weapons and units represent. In others, they've really leaned into it. The result is a hodgepodge of data that doesn't show a clear narrative, as should be expected from cherry picked rules and units that were revealed with the purpose of generating hype.
I began this project relatively early on as I started hearing concerns and even had a few of my own. As I write this, the Kansas City Open is ongoing. I have to admit, I wasn't expecting things to come this fast and furious. My initial plan to present some form of evidence either for or against a lethality narrative has been superseded by live gameplay. Soon enough we'll start to see if GW has succeeded in making the game less killy and more interactive like they wanted.
If anyone wants, I'll post my compilations and calculations as a Google doc. I'm sure I made mistakes somewhere, despite my efforts, especially when fudging single re-rolls or 2 Damage and variable damage weapons against the Death Guard's 3 wounds. But even then, I think most would agree the data doesn't tell much of a story one way or another.
And if things keep going well, someday I'll have the tool I'm planning available. And then much better analysis can be done with a full set of data.
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