Checking In and Where I've Been

Hello, Nikephoros checking in. 

I’ve had a bunch of emails lately from you nice folks asking what I’ve been up to and what my thoughts on the state of the game is.  So I think I should make a post about those things.

I have been still going strong with Guild Wars 2 to get my gaming fix.  I am a member of a srs bsns guild, Death and Taxes [DnT] on Blackgate server.  The guild is a PvE dungeon/fractal speed clear guild with the top players, and has been super fun.  We have started playing tournament pvp for fun and its hilarious since we are so low ranked in pvp yet since most of us are really good players we still beat much higher rated teams.  Lot’s of QQ and all that.  A guildmate, Strife, posts video speed run guides to each dungeon some of which I am in so if anyone is interested I can post those here. 

In non-gaming updates, I’m still going hard with my cycling training and racing season starts for me this Sunday.  I have a 60 mile road race, which is a fun way to kick off the season since in a large field race I don’t have high expectations and I can just test myself and get a gauge for my fitness.  I hit 12,000 miles on the bike last year, and I basically had to destroy my social life and alienate all my friends and family to do that.  This year I am paring it back to 10,000 in hopes of maybe having some kind of interpersonal relationships with other humans.

So enough about my life, what about Warhams?!

Bluntly: 6^th Edition killed 40k for me.  I played a bunch of games when 6^th came out and I didn’t have any fun.  After the last game I played I asked myself, “Am I even enjoying this?  If not, why am I spending my valuable Saturday free time doing something I don’t enjoy?”  The answer, sadly, was that I wasn’t getting anything from it.

6^th Edition forces me to play a style of army I don’t particularly enjoy.  I am 100% sure that when I say “6^th edition doesn’t reward maneuver” someone will try to prove me wrong.  Fine, whatever.  Maybe I am wrong.  But my experience was that 5^th Edition greatly rewarded playskill by emphasizing maneuver and timing.  In 6^th Edition, my experience has been that the ability to outmaneuver your opponent to gain an advantage is significantly less.  Again, I’m sure someone will try to tell me that isn’t the case but I really don’t care as I’m talking about my personal experience.  I don’t want to play an IG blob, I don’t want to play with allies, and I don’t want to play an all foot army against other all foot armies.  So the style of army is not my cup of tea.

Additionally, I like to play Black Templars.  I think we can all agree that BT are essentially unplayable in a competitive setting at this point.  Especially without allies, because as I said above, I don’t want to use allies.  I do still have my GK that I could readily play but I would have to spend another couple hundred dollars to make them ready for 6^th edition, and that would mean a foot army.  Since I don’t enjoy foot armies, spending hundreds of dollars and hours of time modeling and painting just so I can play something I don’t enjoy… that makes no sense.  My vanilla marines army is what I played in the games I did play, and it just reminded me how little I enjoy vanilla marines.  Boring army with no flavor that just does stuff and has no edge to leverage.  The wins are close and the losses are close.  Maybe that works for some people but it’s not interesting to me.

When the new BT codex comes out in the White Dwarf in 2015 or whatever the rumor is this week, I’ll buy it and if I like the way it looks I’ll give it a shot.  But I don’t see any chance of me coming back to 40k without a new BT book OR a vanilla marine book that is like the 4^th edition book that allowed you to use traits to make interesting armies.

As far as fantasy goes, 8^th Edition was never seriously competitive due to the magic system being so over the top.  What killed Fantasy was the Storm of Magic or whatever supplement that came out and took the worst part of 8^th edition, Magic, and made it 10x worse.  I COULD just ignore that supplement, except for a good 6 month period no one locally played anything else.  And once ‘Ard Boyz was canceled there was literally no reason to play what passes for competitive Fantasy.  If you’re going to go carebear fluff bunny, might as well go full carebear and play Storm of Magic.  Unfortunately, going carebear doesn’t interest me.  So much like 40k, I’m not going to waste my Saturday playing a game for 3 hours that I don’t find compelling.  I read on the rumor site that Dark Elves are getting a new book next year.  Sad to this one go as it has some pretty OP stuff I enjoyed using, but maybe the next one will rekindle some kind of interest in Fantasy for me.

That’s about it, I’ll check in again when I have something for ya!