Monday, April 23, 2012

Grey Knights for the win... sigh...

So, looking briefly at the Adepticon results...  8 of the top 16 playing for the Championship ended up being Grey Knights, and the overall champion was one of them.  I'm shocked, simply shocked to see so many there :-)  Yes, I am a big fan of "Casablanca"...  When I do play the GK, I almost feel like I HAVE to tone them down just to be fair to the opponent...  Not that I am just that much better than the other folks playing, but that I really feel the army is just that far out of line with the rest of them out there.  Any time you get so many special rules modifying or changing basic rules of the game, there is at the very least potential for it to be unbalanced and game breaking.  :-)  Not going to go into the ones I feel are game breakingly powerful, but there are sure a lot of them.  I have heard them called the "Easy Button" of 40K, and I think  that is a fairly accurate description iff you try to build a powerful competitive army...  Building to the "fluff" or artificial background, you tend to get powerful, but balanced forces...  Expensive, elite armies that can probably go toe to toe with anything in the game and fare reasonably well.  Guessing this is what GW play-tested and accepted as "This is how the Army will play"...  Now, if you go in looking at the min/max potential, the system starts to break down quickly.  And there are several REALLY good, powerful builds available to the Knights, far more than just about any other Codex out there...  Note, this, like everything else I write is just my opinion of course, based on my experiences and such...  But I am fairly good at math ( :-)) and have a fair bit of experience playing the game to base the opinion on...

Looking back I think it really was about the time I read through the GK codex that my "40K Malaise" really started...  I was able to spot a good number of game breakingly stupid combos on my initial quick skimming of the book, and more and more kept popping up.  I thought that it just could be my interpretation of the rules/book, but after the FAQs confirming them, no...  So, back in the back of my mind I think I started thinking that I've seen this all before, this is a game ending a cycle, ripe for a "new version that will fix it all"...  So, the company either intentionally breaks their stuff or realizes that "codex creep" has gotten to a point when a complete rebuild is the only option...  Sadly, this is also about the time I started to pull way back on my model purchases...  The GK Dreadknight is a neat model, glad I snagged one, and I play it in my forces...  Just it is one of the very few over costed things in the book given how silly the standard DN's are...  So, neat model, really expensive ($ and points), and essentially worthless on the field...  The Storm Raven is a very powerful model, I just can't stand the way it looks :-)...  Personal preference thing, but given how amazing the Vendetta/Valkyrie looks, the SR just does not work for me...  That and GW going over to a fairly poor resin for a metal replacement...  Understandable, I actually have "some" experience casting in resin myself, and with that silly useless Mechanical (Industrial) Engineering degree, I know WHY it is the best, most logical thing for the company to do...  Just that the results are far less than what I would have considered acceptable...  Guessing I'm more of a perfectionist there though, and without knowing a lot of the behind the scene details, that is just a WAG on my part...  But it was a factor in my decision not to be buying more stuff until it either evened out, or I found something I REALLY wanted...  And, sadly that has not happened or appeared...  Guessing my wife is happier about it a bit as not a lot of the wee toy soldiers are appearing to haunt the shelves in the basement, but going "static"in terms of what I have is slightly limiting...  Only slightly, I have a LOT of them in various stages of painting and assembly...

I THINK our 40K group will survive the summer, but if 6th hits and is complete crap...  Maybe not.  Already looking like we'll be losing a few folks here and there with real life stuff...  Maybe Confrontation, Infinity or Warmachine/Hordes will rise up and fill that gap...  :-)  As it happens I have a few armies out there, so will probably be fine with any of them, assuming that there is a regular night to game...  Needing that stress relief more than ever these days...  We'll see I guess.  If not, I guess I pick up some vid games and spend more time riding the motorcycle to blow off steam...


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