After a relatively short season with the current MFM, it’s time for another balance update for Warhammer 40K, this time featuring both changes to the Balance Dataslate and MFM points. It does, of course, also land in the middle of the Grotmas calendar, so while the magnitude of changes within these is a bit smaller than the last few, there’s a bunch of other changes happening in parallel, with a result that come January, we’ll be entering a brave new world of Warhammer 40k.
As always, we’ve split our faction takes for the Dataslate across separate articles for each of Space Marines, Imperium, Xenos and Chaos, and that’s where the bulk of the content is going to be this time around, but there are a few game-wide changes to discuss up front, and it’s always useful to have somewhere to start. Let’s get stuck in.
Thanks to Games Workshop for providing us with a review copy of the Balance Dataslate.
Please do also remember when we talk about the individual factions – only twelve factions have unwrapped their Grotmas presents so far (thanks to a couple of double events), so there could be some changes to our evaluations once more of them have been revealed.
Overview
The big changes in the Dataslate are as follows:
- A game-wide nerf to 3” Deep Strike abilities (both Datasheets and Stratagems), which have all changed to be 6” instead.
- A game-wide nerf to AP reduction Stratagems, which all now only last for a single activation instead of a whole phase.
- A major buff pass on the weaker elements of the Space Marines Codex, improving many underutilised Datasheets, and adding some incentives for players that chose to forego access to Datasheets from non-Codex chapters.
- A rework of the Cult Ambush ability for Genestealer Cults, making it more predictable but lowering the power ceiling when they roll hot.
- A balance pass across detachments and army rules in general, mostly buffing weaker ones.
There’s also a new Munitorum Field Manual with changes for many factions, though substantially fewer of those than last time round, with the focus this time being on updates to the rules. Unlike last time, there are not any Rules Commentary or Errata updates to go with these.
We’ll cover the faction changes in the individual articles, which you can find below:
The Video Version
If you’d like a condensed version of all of this, just covering the ten biggest changes to the game’s core rules and factions, we’ve got you covered with this video here. It’s also a great primer before you dig into the minutiae:
If you’re still interested in the full, in-depth version, read on.
Core Changes
There are two major changes this time around which affect every army – or nearly every army. And even if your army didn’t have these abilities, you’ll certainly find it easier to go up against armies with these, as both changes are straight nerfs.
3” Deep Strikes Are Gone
All stratagems that allow a Deep Strike 3” horizontally away from enemies have been changed to allow units to arrive more than 6” horizontally away from any enemy units instead. In addition, all Datasheet rules providing 3” Deep Strikes have been changed to a 6” Deep Strike in the relevant faction section. This does, technically, open the door for a Datasheet to provide this again in future, but at the moment none do, and we suspect the reason that they haven’t applied a “global” change like the Stratagem one is to preserve extra special tricks like the Sanguinor and Yncarne. One other notable change is that the datasheets that received these changes also restricted the ability to work only in the controlling player’s Movement phase, which also prevents them from deep striking closer using Rapid Ingress.
Rest in peace 3” Deep Strike. Tempestus Aquilons appear to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back here, demonstrating that the ability is fairly miserable to play against when it’s easily accessible, and fairly uneven in how it impacts the viability of other factions, since some are vastly better at playing against it than others. 3” was such a short distance that screening it out was sometimes almost impossible, whereas 6” gives far more counterplay, while still adding extra pressure for foes having to deal with it.
This is, obviously, a big hit to any Detachment or Datasheet with access to it, as this was usually one of the biggest draws towards them. Astra Militarum, T’au, Grey Knights and Necrons were particularly prolific users of this, and will need to re-evaluate some of their choices accordingly (and for Grey Knights and Necrons, push players towards their new Detachments). The key culprits themselves, Tempestus Aquilons, also got a point hike that was probably harsher than needed once this change is factored in, and so they may chill out on shelves for a bit.
From a counterplay point of view, this eases up the pressure on backfield and glass cannon infantry choices, both of which were a huge liability against Tempestus Aquilons in particular. Realistically, whether you’re happy about this or not is likely to be heavily dependent on how available it was to your faction of choice, but overall it is probably good to remove anything where it is functionally never safe to print rules that supply it at an aggressive cost.
AP Reduction Stratagems End Sooner
All Stratagems that reduce incoming AP for a unit that previously did so for a phase (e.g. Armour of Contempt) now only do so for a single activation. This is more of a surprise change than the previous one, and is obviously a fairly major hit to Loyalist Marines (who all have it in their Detachments) and any other Detachment with access to it, where it was usually a key draw.
Why now, on this one? We suspect this is aimed at reducing the prevalence of hull-spamming builds in Detachments with access to it, as the combination of this and the ease of getting Cover on Vehicles in 10th can be frustrating to play against, especially as many guns lost a point of AP compared to 9th. These effects have also had a fairly warping effect on the viability of AP-1 weapons (and to some extent AP-2 shooting) for the whole Edition, because it makes them almost completely dead against anything with a 2+ save and access to AP reduction. It’s also possible that the design team felt it wasn’t safe to juice up loyalist Marines (as also happens in this Dataslate) with Armour of Contempt at its current power level, and they felt it was more interesting to have the units be more powerful than to have the faction leaning on the power of this Stratagem to get anything done.
In terms of impact, all bets are off here, and we’ll have to see what shakes out. For loyalist Marines, it’ll depend on whether the (big) buffs they also receive end up balancing this out – which is definitely plausible. Where this hits especially hard is actually elsewhere – the Index Grey Knights and Votann detachments, best Chaos Space Marine detachment and a strong Adepta Sororitas detachment all lean on this; weakening it is a blow, and reduces the effectiveness of 2+ save units in particular.
This plausibly kicks the Sororitas Bringers of Flame Detachment out of the metagame for a bit, as it gets double-tapped with some other nerfs as well, while Grey Knights getting two of their three best existing Stratagems nerfed probably pushes them towards the new Warpbane Task Force. Chaos Space Marines Detachments with this generally have other attractive things going on, so can probably roll with it a bit more, but it still hurts them at a time where they didn’t really need a nerf. Finally, for Votann it cuts both ways – weakening Void Armour hurts them but they also have a bunch of AP-1 and AP-2 weapons, and weakening this for everyone else plausibly ends up as a net win for them.
In terms of what else this improves, if you’ve been holding off on using AP-1 units, especially if they can get Ignore Cover (if they’re ranged), you can be slightly more aggressive about using them. Windriders, Vanguard Veterans, anything with Autocannons/Heavy Bolters, and plenty more all look appealing, and they probably wouldn’t if Marines had got a big buff without this also arriving. More options is definitely good, but there definitely is a concern this will hit the non-Loyalist Detachments with access to AoC too hard.
Core Rules Errata: Overwatch Can Only Be Declared When a Charge is Declared
In addition to these Balance Dataslate changes, Games Workshop also published a large number of errata and FAQ documents, though it’s not nearly as clear what changed in them. The biggest change by far among today’s changes was to Overwatch: The Fire Overwatch Stratagem can now be used when an enemy unit starts or ends a Normal, Advance or Fall Back move, or Declares a charge, meaning you can no longer Fire Overwatch at an enemy unit which has finished a charge move. This closes one of the game’s smallest and most confusing loopholes – namely, that the only time you could Fire Overwatch after a unit had completed a charge (and thus ended up within Engagement Range of enemy units) was if it was a vehicle – and even this was open to interpretation as it wasn’t clear whether that part of Big Guns Never Tire only applied to the Shooting phase. This removes that particular loophole and will hopefully make it less confusing to everyone who thought pistols would let them shoot at a unit after it charged them.
Final Thoughts
That’s it for the core changes – as we said, fewer this time around. Plenty more to dive into across factions though, especially in Space Marines, so make sure to check out all our reviews. We do sometimes make general predictions about the metagame at this point, but being only half way through Grotmas makes that seem foolhardy, so we’ll probably take a look at that once the full suite is available and we know what we’re working with in the new year.
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