Warhammer 40k Hot Mess – World Eaters Are Bloody (Terrible)
World Eaters have gone from hero to zero in Warhammer 40K – Here’s what this week’s hot mess need to win.
How crazy is it that a new 40K army just gets crapped on so badly in the new edition? World Eaters was the darling of a lot of players this past 9th edition, with interesting avenues into winning the game. They had a playstyle that emphasizes go big, and a not caring attitude about all your buddies eating it. A new edition’s big shift into Assault being bad has created a hot mess of an army. So, let’s talk about how to fix our favorite Legion of Khorne. First of all – why do World Eaters well – kinda suck right now.
Assault is Bad in 10th Edition
Assault itself isn’t a bad rule, but right now, unless you are extremely survivable, you just won’t make it into combat. There isn’t a whole lot of hope to make it across the field and into combat when all your hitting has gotten weaker (less AP & Damage), and the bodies carrying the damage are weaker at the same time. It just doesn’t work that well right now beyond some hope that you somehow gain movement out of it. Right now – even if you get there, you are just barely slapping the enemy and waiting for them to walk away, shoot you, and then overwatch you when you try to get at them again.
World Eater Units are Priced Too High!
It’s one thing to make assault worse, but the other bigger issue is that these units cost too much. Their job is to get into your line but if they cost too much – any loss is devastating to the army. Especially since you have Overwatch and armies that can Overwatch twice with auto-hitting nonsense, this hits your army in multiple phases of shooting as you twiddle what used to be thumbs and hope you make your armor saves. I don’t know about you – but hoping to make Armor saves in order to get the job done is not a method for winning the game.
How Do We Fix World Eaters?
Well, I think there are multiple ways to fix this. The biggest changes should most likely come in the form of a book update to World Eater points. I hope we see this when the new codexes come out for these Assault books. Alright, let’s get the thinking caps on, your skull-shaped helmet set up right, and your teeth gritted.
Codex Fixes
I think the biggest way to fix this is to somehow allow your units to be better at surviving getting shot. This isn’t just armor saves but could be better set up to utilize things that make it harder to hit your guys. Things like Be’lakor’s shadow option to turn off shooting at a certain distance would be sweet. Instead of all the other “Blessing of Khorne” options, we could have something like – Rain of Blood for any 3 of a kind that would either give the army some negatives to hit or let them not be hit over 18″ away. Something simple like this would be huge as a method to survive, not going first and trying not to get shot to pieces from across the tabletop.
Beyond this sort of thing, too, we could look at other fun things like Auras of FNP from certain characters and units. This way, they could still make the damage in the face, but you could create some unique combos with these characters and the FNP power from the Blessings of Khorne. I love the idea of the Blessings and the nature of “creating” your avenue for victory with the roll out, but it needs more levels of better protection abilities.
Beyond just that we should also look at increasing all of the units Assault AP in the game. At the very least give them more explosives hits when they do charge into combat. Some units should get +1 damage and +1 AP when they charge into the fight. This makes all successes for their unit amazing and lets you have 2 to 3 guys go murder crazy into the enemy in a way that makes it feel very Khorne-like. I just really feel like the army doesn’t feel nearly as exciting as the 9th book we just got to play with for a few months. Khorne is crying on the Brass Throne.
World Eater Point Fixes
Man, this army needs a steep drop in points amongst all the units. Just allowing you to field more jerks on the tabletop will help. If your plan is to punch someone in the face – you better have enough friends to take bullets for you. So the survivors can punch them in the face. Some of these units are so small that any loss of a bullet-taking body is a huge blow to the army. Just having more World Eaters on the table is probably the easiest and most likely fix we’ll actually see at some point.
The shift in points feels just the best answer we can get just due to not needing to reprint cards, reprint PDFs, and admit the the index build of this book wasn’t working out too well. It is a shame, as I feel a lot of it is pretty good and spot on. The undercurrent of an interesting faction is there and it has me thinking the actual World Eaters codex might work out for the best.
So Many Questions…
What do you think? Can points fix this enough to allow it to compete and win more than 25% of their games? Do you wish assault was better? Could we instead see the main book reals fixed to better help assault units, like – limiting Overwatch in some way? Could Overwatch only be able to activate by a unit that is within 12″ of the thing it needs to shoot at good enough or increase the CP? How about limiting to always 1 a turn so we don’t see multiple stacks of it with armies that can do it versus other armies that can’t?
If you were Khorne, what would you do?
