Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: Balance Dataslate First Impressions
Goatboy here and what a glorious day to be a gamer. Let’s talk about what the 40K Balance Dataslate means for the game.
It sounds like GW listened and will start to do a nice bit of balancing of the game now that we have the competitive scene chugging along. This is great and something much needed especially this day and age of event digestion, army breakdowns, and bandwagon riding. Overall I am pretty dang stoked with this update and have high hopes with the next one that comes out most likely at the beginning of the year. So with that – let’s go over some quick bits that I liked.
Necron Core Love!
First of all – they did a great service to those Necron players. A simple addition of the keyword CORE to a ton of units means the army has a real breath of fresh air. You can go hog wild on some crazy assault builds, make that excellent Destroyer army work, and even just have neat things other books can do now work within your army! Heck, the special character bumps by being able to affect more things make this a slam dunk of an update. This is how we wanted CORE to be utilized and we’ll see if it makes the Necrons too spicy to handle. Look for myself looking at some kind of massed assault builds as I love the idea of layered Destroyer nonsense doing the Silent King’s work.
Knights Sally Forth
From there we also see an Imperial/Chaos Knight bump by creating some objective secured options and AoS style updates to how big Knights count for holding objectives. I love this as a Knight player myself and can see some spoiler Knight lists show up. Either with the Freeblade nonsense or some kind of massed Armiger Madness builds. I always thought about getting a few more to run with some Chaos Knight nonsense. This is great and helps an army that people love to bring out to the competitive table tops. Plus it emphasizes pure Knight builds and those are fast to play.
Astra Militarum – ATTENTION!
Finally on the buff side, the 40K Balance Dataslate gives the Astra Militarum a nice buff with an Aura giving set of orders, stronger tanks, and the ability to order other tanks as well. All of these are interesting and again point to how they want to update AM in the future with Orders changing. I bet they utilize it like Prayers or Vows that spread out from a central leader/figure. It is interesting but I don’t know how much it will shift the Meta other than allowing these armies to work a bit better.
Stand Down, All is Well
Finally on the buff front Grey Knights, Sisters, Death Guard, Thousand Sons, Daemons, and Marines didn’t get any point increases or massive changes. All of these armies have been living in the upper middle and feel just about right. The only aggressive one in the list is probably Grey Knights as the army might be punching a bit too high. I expect some other nerfs coming that will shift how armies are made to help attack this and other future things. Will just have to wait and see.
Meet the Nerfbat!
Now we move to the nerfs – both Ad Mech and Drukhari took some big point hikes to all the things that are currently used heavily in their competitive builds. It seems Ad Mech took the biggest hit as it would seem it would just look at the current GW event winner’s unit taken and just hits them hard. On the DE side all the things that punched too high got hit a bit as well – but overall I don’t see them getting nearly as nerfed as Ad Mech did.
Flying Into the Sunset
Beyond the points, the next big hit is the limitation to Flyers that is hitting all armies. Most events will now only allow you 2 flyers in your army total and that is a much bigger hit to Ad Mech and Orks than it is to Dark Eldar and other builds. This is a huge hit to Freebootas and with the other Ork nerf should shift that army up pretty heavily. In fact I expect the army to really shift towards the Army of Renown that plays a ton of bikers as those flyers are not needed.
Hello Nerf-wagon!
The final hit in the Freeboota, Blood Axe, and Ork coffin is limiting buggies to one single unit choice for each type. This means at most you will see 3 of one Buggie type in one unit – which as shown by SoCal is not the strongest way to play them. It most likely means you will see a unit of 2 of something most of the time with a few single choices to round out your Buggie nonsense. It also means you will be worried about losing some specific avenues of your army if you do not go first or get caught out in the open. This is probably correct for the game as it was such a rough army to play against, to purchase, and just engage with.
40K Balance Dataslate Verdict
Overall this is great and with the chat about a quarterly review happening means that this game is going to be moving much faster to balance. It also means if you are building a new army and you find a unit that is too good – you might not want to invest a ton of time/money/super glue into getting it ready for the tabletop. The other crazy thing is these rules are going to be used for the next GW Event and all the other events coming down the pipeline for the rest of the year.
Download the Dataslate HERE
Good job GW and let’s see how the next round of events turn out!
