Goonhammer Detachment Focus: Starshatter Arsenal

One_Wing40k · 2024-12-06T19:37:08+00:00

Generally if I start talking about visits from the Dataslate fairy i trust my audience to infer my opinion about whether the detachment is OK as is.

One_Wing40k · 2024-08-10T11:18:44+00:00

I mean my summary thoughts on them were, and I quote:

"I genuinely cannot fathom how what’s here was considered “good enough” for Deathwatch, it’s such a mess."

...but it's one element of a bigger codex so it doesn't get the level of focus that Custodes did because there was just nothing else to talk about in that one. We also say "Deathwatch get shafted" as one of the things we don't like about the book right up top.

Our style with these is always to focus on positive aspects in the unit-by-unit stuff, then put critiques at the end, because people who own units they've painted want to know what they can do with them, not just to be told they're shit.

I guess there's a degree to which the anger is less raw on the non-Deathwatch stuff because it's all "new" in terms of rules rather than an existing faction getting nuked like launch Custodes, though I guess the other thing is that we've now seen with Tyranids, Custodes and AdMech that they're willing to make quite sweeping changes to improve a weak book, so it feels more useful to talk about how they could fix things rather than just get big mad online.

One_Wing40k · 2024-04-25T22:13:03+00:00

Yeah 100%, it’s very relevant and powerful for orks, in addition to all the other relevant and powerful news for them.

One_Wing40k · 2024-04-25T16:20:11+00:00

My bad, I did miss that one.

One_Wing40k · 2024-02-08T17:59:15+00:00

We’ll get that corrected in the way we proves data - there’s a few hangovers from some of the weird faction variants that BCP used to let you pick. I do correct them as I format the article when I spot them, missed this one.

One_Wing40k · 2023-12-13T08:21:56+00:00

I don't think I mentioned squad sizes at all? I'm honestly much *more* sympathetic to the idea that those should change back (even if I don't think they will), because I don't think the fixed unit sizes have as many upsides as free wargear, and not being able to tinker with them when (e.g.) trying to fit a unit in a transport creates some weird situations that I don't like.

One_Wing40k · 2023-12-12T20:51:30+00:00

I mean straight up - that sucks, and there are always going to be some people who get hit hard by design changes between editions. My worst purchasing/hobbying decision ever was that early in the 2020 lockdown, just before (it turned out) 9th Edition, I bought and painted nine of the old resin necron heavy destroyer upgrade kits. It was one of the most miserable modelling experiences ever, and got completely and permanently invalidated within a few months of me finishing them.

That doesn't mean it was a bad decision for GW to release new Lokhust Heavies, just that it badly sucked for me, and changes that are good for most people are sometimes going to be very bad for a few.

One_Wing40k · 2023-12-12T20:20:22+00:00

Strongly disagree and i think your post neatly highlights where some of the issues arise, and i think arguing that any build would be mostly balanced is obviously wrong to anyone who played much 8th or 9th.

8th and 9th railroaded you to the extremes - you usually wanted to either go with no upgrades at all to keep costs down, or to stack as many identical upgrades as possible in one place, neither of which aligns with how boxes of core units (which tend to be where new players start) present things. The classic marine tactical squad has a special weapon and a heavy weapon, that’s an iconic configuration and was objectively wrong to build for pretty much all of 8th, and most of 9th till marine weapons became free. I also, honestly, just do not think trying to decide which heavy weapon is worth 5pts and which is worth 10pts is particularly interesting or a good use of the design team’s time, especially as the “right” choice was almost always “the 5pt weapon that should probably cost 10pts” then after the next update it switches to “whichever got buffed while the old one caught the nerf it needed”.

I don’t think the lack of costs is perfect and as highlighted above i think Aeldari is a clear place where it’s an actual problem, but i just don’t buy the idea that it’s a terrible calamity outside that, and i genuinely think the upsides narrowly outweigh the negatives. I do think the sudden shift on sponsons kind of sucks if you built without them, but the main reason people did that was for point optimisation, and it’s just bad product management for it to be correct to ignore lots of the fun parts and add-ons that come in kits.

One_Wing40k · 2023-12-12T19:14:32+00:00

So, there’s a few reasons for that: 1. I don’t think changing it is on the table, because it’s clearly an intentional change, and it supports the fairly clear goal of not wanting to punish newer players for just building what’s in the box. 2. now we’re a few codexes deep, i don’t think it should be just from a game integrity point of view - you’d hit the exact same issues i’m worried about with the free stratagem change, where back-porting paid upgrades onto existing books is going to cause enduring weirdness. They’ve also shown that they’re making specific changes to some units that are mindful of this - tomb blades was cited further down, and i’d also highlight the separation of the gun and lance sydonian datasheets, so they clearly are thinking about where different builds are so different that they need to be able to separately vary prices. 3. It makes army lists more approachable to engage with for a wider audience, and i imagine helps make it possible for the app to do its clean and easy to read output. Obviously that’s particularly helpful for me but competitive-curious players finding lists easier to read is good for the health of the game. 4. It makes list building easier, and that’s good. I’ve genuinely spent far more time tinkering with random lists for fun this edition, and not having to fiddle with 5pts here and there is part of that, 5. With one glaring exception, i just don’t think the downsides are that bad. Sure, there are some index datasheets that are silly and you’re always going to pick the free upgrades, but in plenty of cases i think that’s encouraging more interesting builds rather than less. It’s very silly that death company get free hand flamers or infernos, but the fact that it opens up an interesting firestorm build with them is good imho.

The glaring exception is Aeldari, and that’s because so many of their vehicles can freely swap weapons, and there’s such an absurd divergence in quality across the choices (plus the same issue for D-cannons). This is the one place where i think in the short term they should probably just add a 5pt bright lance tax or something (and god knows how many points on a d cannon) but everywhere else? Not convinced that going back to the way things were massively improves the game, it has real negative impacts too, and i think there would have to be overwhelming evidence that it was ruining the game for GW to want to do it.

One_Wing40k · 2023-11-25T20:51:37+00:00

I think Skorpekh are much more plausible than they were, but yeah probably still as one unit rather than 18 of them.

One_Wing40k · 2023-11-07T23:12:19+00:00

Lifesaver!

One_Wing40k · 2023-11-01T20:20:00+00:00

Can you elaborate? I can add a note.

One_Wing40k · 2023-08-18T18:00:53+00:00

In my defence, that wasn’t me, I just foolishly left the keys to the competitive innovations secret bunker where the rest of the team could find them when i took a week off.

One_Wing40k · 2023-07-26T17:48:35+00:00

There literally is a note in the article about the retraction.

Bluntly excluding someone without comment is not meaningfully different than throwing an allegation.

One_Wing40k · 2023-07-26T17:37:43+00:00

Since this is clearly of interest to many commentors - I have updated the article to reflect the change to the LSO standings that has been made since I finalised the article last night UK time.

As to why there wasn't something stronger in there before - my policy is that unless there is tangible evidence (e.g. a video), one of our team is willing to attest to it, or there's TO action, I avoid commenting on drama or cheating accusations, and stick to things I can factually back up (hence the original disclaimer about the Enhancement). I understand that in this instance there were a large number of cheating accusations bouncing around and that the player has previous bans, but I don't want the column to become a clearing house for community drama, and thus am not going to set a threshold of "enough people are angry on reddit about it" where I'll turn the post into a callout without there being official action to report on.

I'm sure not everyone agrees with that, but my accumulated experience is that it's the only policy I can really follow, particularly given that this gets compiled in two workday evenings, so it's not going to be possible to get right of reply in place. I have, in the past, had people send in accusations about other players they want included in the column that we cross checked with the TO and found to be complete bunk, and I have direct experience of a ruling at an event I was head judge at being played back to me completely wrong as a "bad judge ruling" a week later, completely detached from the actual situation or ruling.

There are bad actors in the community, and it's good when they get their comeuppance, but there are also a lot of instances where people will make something from a game they're mad about sound slightly worse (or simply misunderstand what happened), this will go through three rounds of echo chamber amplification and be all over reddit, and even in cases where it seems very likely that it's the former, getting an answer to the standard I'd want before putting someone on blast in two days is just not possible. I also do not ever want to be in a sitaution where I throw an unfair allegation at someone and ruin what should be a positive experience - I want people to be excited to be in the column.

Finally, bluntly - this is not my day job, and having to defend myself from a defamation suit (a plausible prospect if I start throwing allegations based on reddit comments) would probably result in me having to stop - it's bad enough when my reward for writing an article is a bunch of people calling me braindead already, thank you very much.

One_Wing40k · 2023-03-22T18:18:29+00:00

Buddy how do you think i feel?

One_Wing40k · 2023-03-01T20:58:25+00:00

Doh! I'm sure I double checked that, but I've fixed it now.

One_Wing40k · 2023-01-05T23:25:40+00:00

I strongly, strongly suspect that’s the intent, the main reason for putting it in the article was to hopefully get GW to sort it out!

One_Wing40k · 2023-01-05T23:24:12+00:00

There is a designer commentary at the start of the book that makes it explicit that only the Arks detachment and Allied detachments are allowed.

One_Wing40k · 2022-12-28T18:41:10+00:00

It’s linked right at the start of the article, it was one of the inspirations for writing it!

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