Warhammer 40K: How GW Can Update Army Wargear, Without Players Losing Their Minds
Goatboy here to talk about the painful dance of updating your Warhammer 40K army’s wargear. GW can, and should help.
I want to talk about how if you’ve been playing an army for you a while I am sure you’ve gone thru the snip, cut, repaint, and refresh stage of your army choices. The whole – oh crap this old choice that used to be terrible is now the best choice so where the heck do I find those bits again. It’s always the worst dance in this game we love – the idea that a wargear choice that used to be terrible, is all of a sudden the best weapon option in the game. We then have to go digging thru old sprues, finding this random weird plastic gun piece, and hope we can reconvert the model to look decent.
Welcome to the 40K “Wargear Update Dance”
Hell, how many fun or armies have you played against that have the “new” choice just glued to their back with the hand still attached? It’s always the frustration we have in this game when a new edition comes out or the rules shift. Then all of a sudden this new choice is the best. It really makes you want GW to be better about it and maybe just maybe – shift things in a better way for current players.
Here are three ideas I have to help with this. Some are easier than others and while nothing is the best choice it still makes me think there has to be way to save us from the snip, reglue and repaint dance we all dread. Or you do what I do is just make a new army with a different scheme or design to help you keep playing.
Option 1 – One “Averaged-in” Weapon Profile – for all the unit’s weapon options
What I mean by this is instead of having three different weapons that could do different things why not just like the unit do a bunch of shooting that somehow “averages in” all of these. We can see in how Space Marine Combi-Weapons have been shrunk down into this type of thing and some of the vehicles now just have 20 shots at stats X since they all were kind of the same. These sorts of things could just simplify the game a bit and while it isn’t “cool” as you lose your modeling choices directly matching, you can at least make the unit look dope like the box and let it still be effective.
Option 2 – Multiple Unit Variants – each with locked-in weapon choices
This way is a bit more of a pain in the butt but it does allow you to balance things easier with points. Just like the T’au Empire battlesuits have different unit choices with locked-in weapons we could see this in other armies. How much easier would it have been to have the Aeldari weapon platforms have three different fixed choices and thus making it easier for GW to price and balance the unit’s power.
Option 3 – Add Multi-profile Weapons – with various firing profiles
Look at how CSM Obliterators have three different weapon choices they can choose when shooting at the enemy. Why couldn’t other units have these types of weaponry? You could set things like this is the flamer option that has shorter range but torrent, the anti vehicle option with less shots, or the anti infantry option. This way you could set up your unit anyway you want and it just works because the player now has a choice when they shoot.
There is still a lot that could be done to simplify updating an army’s wargear. While I appreciate a lot of fun and regular changes in the armies I play with or against – I still think there is some room for improvement. The game dances on the edge of having cool models and letting players make cool models that always work once you wrapup your paintjobs is a good thing.
Are any of these options worth it to add to the game? Or do you actually like swapping all your weapons out after every Balance Dataslate?
