Horus Heresy: The Legion Tier List
We all know that Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness isn’t the meta chasing hobby exercise that 40K is. But we’re ranking every 30K Legion just the same!
So I was sitting here on a Friday afternoon, deciding how I wanted to approach this subject. As a 40k refugee and 30k enthusiast, I love, love, love Horus Heresy. I enjoy the community, the hobby aspect, and the many ways that the game ties into the lore and how it feels like a historical game without being mired in the details of being truly historical. There is enough written to easily build armies around, but enough left understated and unsaid that hobbyists and lore aficionados can make practically any army and, dare I say, any paint scheme work. I’ve often heard the phrase, “If Warhammer 40k is a drag race, then Horus Heresy is a Car show”
Some Context
My late father was a bigtime gearhead and car guy I spent many days and nights at the drag strip, circle track, bank track, COTA, Sebring, the Bonneville salt flats…basically any surface you can drive a car on I’ve probably been to at least a dozen times. Racing is the will to move something and be first across the finish line. The shape of your car, the color, the rust on the body, the engine doesn’t matter so long as you fall within the safety and class parameters and you cross the finish line ahead of the other guy or get there faster. Car shows on the other hand, are plenty competitive but in different ways. People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or more on getting the minutia right; tracking down hard-to-find parts, swapping, trading, stomping through barns to find hidden gems, and then spending years bringing them back to life to drive around in and experience nostalgia or be seen or just because they have a passion for it. There is no metric for winning a Car Show, the judging is wholly subjective.
What I think I appreciate most about the hobby of cars is that the Race Guys and the Restores have a deep-seated respect for one another, they see themselves as part of a bigger hobby/profession. It’s easy to respect a great driver just like its easy to respect a team of restorers and engineers putting out amazing work. One group is not telling the others how to have fun in their hobby. If you go to a race there will definitely be a car show in the parking lot. If you go to a car show they may have vintage races or race demonstrations.
A Community and Game Built in Our Own Images
I think as Wargamers we get very set in our ways and want our hobby to reflect our own individual preferences within it. The casual players yell at the GT players because the game is too competitive. The GT players yell back “get good”. The hobbyists turn up their collective noses at everyone playing gray plastic or not having a fully painted army. Finally the Lore Warriors button count and inform you when your army is not accurate to the books. Around and around this goes with no end. Every edition, every book release, every tournament, like clockwork we project our own desires for a community custom-made in our own ideals of fun. We should all take a clue from hobbies outside of Wargaming and stop trying to build communities in the shape of what we want out of the game. I can respect the Golden Demon winner and their hundreds of hours of effort, much like I can respect the Dad rasing 3 kids who gets 4 hours on a weekend once a month and shows up with 1000 points of primed models before he has to retreat to reality, just as I can respect Goatboy or Nick Siegler for a tournament win.
The Tier List
If you missed it here is the Tier List we came up with:
This brings me finally, in a long-winded way, to my point. Myself (Ryan), Monji, and Dan sat down and filmed a video about our thoughts on the current Meta in Horus Heresy. We did this in what is arguably the easiest format to generate, the Tier List. We don’t consider ourselves ultra-competitive players, and like any tier list, it’s going to be subjective. It most definitely takes into account our own play experiences within the meta, it takes the wrath from online sources and, of course, discussions we’ve all had online and in person with the community, online groups, discords, etc. The other very important thing to remember is that Horus Heresy doesn’t have a huge pool of data from events worldwide as WH40k does. So in many ways, we are limited by our own observations of what is occurring in our own local gaming body and region. We tried to distill that down into an easy-to-read list with plenty of justification as to why we made our choices the way we did. We definitely expected blowback and disagreement (it’s why we made the list). In fact, we were more or less hoping to get opinions, people’s own experience and start a larger dialogue. I think we were able to achieve that to a degree. So thanks to those that reached out.
Take It With a Grain of Salt
The inherent problem with Tier lists is that whether its a desired outcome or not, they can shift people away from an army they are passionate about collecting to one that they don’t really care about and then, after a little time, fall out of love with it when the Meta moves on. If playability and competitive appeal matters to you, Tier listing can bias you away from adopting a middling army that you love for a competitive one that you hate.
One of the points that was raised by a comment was something akin to, “Tier lists are great if you want people to play only a handful of armies.” In some ways, I can see how this could be true. Warhammer 40k has a long history of pushing people to army hop, moving from faction to faction to keep pace with the Meta, and trading in an army to trade up for a couple of months We can observe this occurring, especially since 8th Edition where the codex release speed was breakneck and the intention was to release that iteration of the game in 3 years and then change editions. On the other hand, I find that very few Horus Heresy players are that green when it comes to wargaming and most take up armies as passion projects. Most players are seasoned veterans coming from other games looking for a different experience where lore and hobby are taken more seriously and play, and competition are relaxed. This attitude is what I think many HH veterans want to preserve and why army ranking or unit ranking is discouraged or met with hostility.
I’m not in the business of telling people how to have fun with their hobbies. While I think the vast majority of the HH community enjoys the game in a narrative sense, there is a subsect of the community that has an eye on making the game more competitive by creating missions with Primary and Secondary objectives, making rules changes to try and balance out the game and finally trying to get the game to a similar competitive footing as MTG or Warhammer 40k.
Where To Go From Here?
While Dan, myself, and Monji do enjoy providing Horus Heresy content immensely, we want to do so in a way that doesn’t turn the game and the hobby into meta-chasing. All of us love what Horus Heresy is. In a nutshell a Historical Wargame set in the greater Warhammer Universe. At the end of the day, we will discuss Heresy endlessly, whether it is hobby techniques, list building, theory crafting, or lore. While we have greatly enjoyed the Tier list exercise, we’ll be changing up the format to hopefully inform people of ways to get the best out of their armies rather than simply ranking them. We like seeing list variety, army variety, and the myriad of ways in which people build into and play this game, and we don’t want to impede that.
Do you find a Tier lists valuable? Do they have a place in Horus Heresy or do they do more damage than good?
