It’s Balance Dataslate day once more, and as you’d expect, our competitive 40K writers have been hard at work digesting all the changes and figuring out what they mean for the metagame. For you, our beloved audience, that means a bumper crop of reviews, so grab a mug of your favoured hot beverage and get ready to dig in.
Huge thanks to Games Workshop for sending us a preview copy of the Dataslate and accompanying materials.
What’s in This Update
This time around, there are no major core changes to the rules. Tenth Edition’s fundamentals are now in a very healthy place, and there are no game-wide issues like 3″ Deep Strike that needed resolving. The magnitude and scope of balance changes is also smaller than it has been in previous iterations – there are a handful of major nerf packages handed out to overperforming Detachments, and one substantial buff to put Adepta Sororitas back on the map, but beyond that it’s fairly small tweaks.
This stability means that GW can start taking even more advantage of the modular nature of 10th’s Faction rules. It turns out that Grotmas never ends, because this Dataslate includes a revised Index for Chaos Daemons and four new detachments. You can find links to the Detachment Focus articles for each of these blow, but here’s the brief rundown:
- Chaos Daemons – Shadow Legion: Disciples of Be’lakor in a new hat, letting you add some Chaos Space Marines units to your Daemons army to create a super strong Chaos Space Marine/Daemon hybrid army.
- Orks – More Dakka!: A very strong shooting-focused detachment.
- T’au – Experimental Prototype Cadre: Big guns and battlesuits, with increased range on all your guns and some bonkers Stratagems for increasing your firepower.
- Adeptus Custodes – Lions of the Emperor: Aggressive melee tools that encourage you to hit hard and fast, and rewarding you for splitting your units up and acting independently.
Because so much of the dataslate is focused on Detachments and factions, there’s not a massive amount to put in this overview article. Instead, we’ve outlined our key takeaways of how this is all going to come together in the next section, and below that you can find the links to all our faction and Detachment overviews, where there real meat of the review can be found.
The Video Version
If you’d rather watch a short video about this update than read all of it – or better yet, you’d like to do both – then you can catch our video recap of the update here:
Otherwise read on for more detail about the update.
Key Takeaways
Let’s start with the broad takeaways. While points changed for almost every faction, they weren’t all meaningful. Here are the biggest movers this update:
The Big Losers
- Space Marines get a broad sweep of point increases on their cheap shooting platforms, and some targeted hits to Ultramarines Epic Heroes.
- Not-Blood Angels are banished; no more Liberator Assault Group with Oaths.
- Slaanesh Daemons get smashed, losing some key units and seeing nerfs to Datasheets and Stratagems.
- Bridgehead Strike gets triple tapped across points, Detachment Rule and Stratagems.
- Taktikal Brigade takes a surprisingly vicious mauling.
The Big Winners
- All Non-Slaanesh Daemons, especially Nurgle: Outside of Slaanesh, the faction’s Datasheets see huge improvements, and Nurgle Daemons look set to be an army to beat. Chaos soup enjoyers also win big from Be’lakor’s Shadow Legion, which is fantastic.
- Adepta Sororitas: Get healthy points drops and a partial rollback of the previous Miracle Dice nerf, which should put them back in the game.
- Orks, Somehow: Do not adjust your internet browser. Sure their best Detachment got nerfed, but what if at the same time they got a better one? What if that?
- Imperial Knights: The Knights skate by with no nerfs despite being a top army and get a plausibly relevant drop on Dominus Knights.
- Deathwatch: Like Knights, Deathwatch went into this as a top tier build, and they catch only the tiniest of nerfs, while also being vastly less impacted by the general Marine changes than all other flavours.
The Reviews
We’ve prepared four faction review docs as usual, each of which will cover a collected group of factions, the changes to each, and whether they are winners or losers in the update.
Factions
New Rules and Detachments
- Index Chaos Daemons 2.0: The Goonhammer Review
- Detachment Focus: Shadow Legion (Daemons)
- Detachment Focus: More Dakka! (Orks)
- Detachment Focus: Lions of the Emperor (Adeptus Custodes)
- Detachment Focus: Experimental Prototype Cadre (T’au)
Final Thoughts
It is, once again, a whole new world. One potentially filled with rokkits, but that happens occasionally. Almost all of the changes made in this pass made sense, and while there were some changes we’d have liked to see that didn’t get made, we’re pretty happy with this pass and how it’s likely to affect the metagame. All four of the new Detachments are at least interesting and at least three of them should see immediate competitive play. This is an exciting update which adds more to the game than just point and balance tweaks and we’re already thinking about which armies we want to test with the new rules. We’ll see you on the battlefield!
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