1) They've got rid of Summoned Daemons
OK let's get the easy one out of the way first: In the old rules I think going back as far as 3rd edition you used to be able to summon a unit of Daemons from one of your Chaos Space Marine units, or summon a Greater Daemon by having it possess one of your characters. I guess it worked at the time, but it wasn't a popular move to make once Chaos Daemons became an army in their own right, and with the new rules for Allies in 6th Edition meaning you can field both armies at the same time, the ability to summon Daemons is pretty much meaningless anyway. The fact that in 4th edition the summoned Daemons would be significantly weaker than their codex couterparts wouldn't have helped. Overall it's not a rule I'm particularly sorry to lose.
2) Bezerkers et al back to Elite
What's happened here is that the Khorne Bezerkers, Noise Marines, Plague Marines and Thousand Sons are now Elite choices. Now if I remember rightly this was the case in 3rd edition as well, though if your commander had the mark of the relevant God, you would get one of them as troops choices. So, for example, if you had a Chaos Lord with the Mark of Slaanesh, you would be able to take Noise Marines - but not the others - as troops choices. In 4th edition they cut out the middle man and allowed you to take all 4 as Troops Choices, no matter what your commander was doing, and this lead to some pretty nasty tournament combos, so for balancing issues and also to remind us that there are actually Chaos Space Marines in the Chaos Space Marine Army, they've been put back up to Elite. They've also still got the option of taking the leader with the mark of the relevant god to put them back down to Troops Choices, plus the same rule applies if you take the relevant special character. Kharn the Betrayer, for example, would bring Khorne Bezerkers back to Troops choices.
For some reason, you can't do that with the Daemon Prince. Even though you HAVE to take a Daemon Prince of one of the Chaos Gods, which confers its own benefits, you can't take the relevant units as troops choices. I guess that would represent the idea that if a Champion of Chaos has made it as far as being a Daemon Prince, he'd have to be a lot less near-sighted than refusing to take anything but the units of your own Gods. And also, the Daemon Prince is a LOT more powerful in this new edition. Armies would be horribly unbalanced if they were then allowed to take, say, Bezerkers as Troops choices...
3) Wargear
There have been quite a few changes to the equipment that are going to affect my army lists quite a bit. Here's a selection of them:
- Daemon Weapons: Not sure what's happening with these at the moment. They work in pretty much the same way as they did in 4th edition, though there is no option to take it as a Daemon Weapon with the mark of the Chaos Gods in order to increase its potency and inherent risks. My problem is that there seems to be no way to give a Daemon Weapon to anybody other than Abbadon the Despoiler. They don't appear in the Wargear section as an option; am I missing something here? This means I'm going to have to change the weapon I've given one of my Chaos Lords, although a viable alternative is not far away, which brings me on to my next point:
- Chaos Artefacts: Unique magic items for Chaos? Yes please, we'll have some of that! Might seem a bit cheesy to do this in the new edition of 40K but it's not going to be bad. Some of them are actually Daemon Weapons, and all of them confer particularly nasty consequences for those that find themselves on their business end - but most of them are not without their risks, meaning that they're unlikely to find themselves on the tournament circuit that counts on dependability.
- Vehicle Upgrades: I wasn't particularly happy with the fact that they've weakened Daemonic Possession by having to roll a 2+ for its benefit - ignoring Crew Shaken and Crew Stunned results - to take effect, AND given the chance that a dedicated transport might start eating its own crew on a roll of a 1 as they embark or start the game. Granted if this happens it gets a hull point back, but losing a Chaos Space Marine of any kind is going to hurt. The benefit it is supposed to confer doesn't help all that much in 6th edition anyway since there are no Crew Shaken and Crew Stunned results off a glancing hit anymore. Thankfully they have at least had the presence of mind to reduce the points cost, but I can see myself taking Destroyer Blades instead, which for what I intend for Rhinos at any rate look a lot more useful. And Havoc Launchers are now twin-linked, which may help a little.
The psychic powers in the new codex, and in 40K in general, is a lot more, how can I put this? Comprehensive. There's a lot more going on now with the different disciplines so it was never going to be the same, but most of the old spells are gone. This will upset a lot of the tournament players who liked to bum-rape units by grouping them together with Lash of Submission, then take a massive 5" template-sized shit on the unit. Gift of Chaos is gone as well, though I'm not particularly sorry about this because I never used it. Instead we've got several of the disciplines in the rulebook at our disposal, plus some tasty-looking spells in the Codex. I'm not going to go too deeply into specifics here because I'll be here all day but it looks like they've got an eclectic mix of functional powers and kick-ass lightning-bolt style spells.
One spell that was probably overpowered but I will nonetheless miss is Warptime. My Chaos Sorcerer has only participated in 1 battle so far, but being able to re-roll all my hits and misses pretty much won that battle for me.
Well that's it for me so far, I'll come back maybe later with more changes to the rules, perhapes when I've played a couple of games and had a chance to try them.
I'll see you next time...
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