While steadily drinking the tea that keeps me moving here at the office, a random thought occurred to me…
"Does GW have some sort of design imperative that requires them to put at least one named character in each codex that makes absolutely no sense under the current rule set, knowing that the rule sets will change? And that the changes may or may not greatly benefit the random character?" It certainly does seem so, but that is of course just my opinion as always :-) I could easily be wrong or just thinking about it too much… Or just be American in my thinking rather than English, as we do appear to be far more competitive and demanding in terms of clear rules and the like…
First case in point, my Wolves have a Blood Claw upgrade character "Lukas the Trickster" ("Loki" since apparently creativity is somewhat lacking for their staff writers…)… He has a "Pelt of the Doppelganger" which forces the opponent to re-roll all hits allocated to him in HtH. Problem being, he is not an independent character, and so HE never gets "allocated" hits until he is the last one standing in the squad… So, to balance his very real disadvantages and cost, he has special rules that do not work and a weapons loadout that makes absolutely NO sense whatever. A shame really, I bought the figure because I really liked it… But I do not like the Blood Claws in the current (and 3rd ed) codex, so he'll join the Rackham Wolfen I have on shelves in the basement of doom…
The second case would be Castellan Crowe of the Grey Knights. Interesting concept, I'll probably end up playing him, but his rules really make no sense other than "balance". Specifically, he becomes in effect an additional tax to force players to actually think before simply taking the arguably superior Purifiers as "Troops" over the standard Strike Squads. I have not seen the model yet, but there is a pretty good chance I'll snag it if it is decent, as I think I can make Crowe actually work well enough in my lists, but there are serious disadvantages to him over a lot of the "normal" options. Not being an independent character I think is probably the worst one… No putting him in a squad to hide him or transport him easily means he'll likely get shot out of existence early on before he can showcase his exceptional melee abilities…
Anyway, those are just the ones that occurred to me this morning, I am sure there are others, but in codexes (codii? My Latin is not THAT good) that I am "less familiar" with…
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