We have had almost a month with the new Chaos Marine codex,
I have been pouring over the codex and even tried out some games with it. Now
it is time for me to share my honest assessment of the codex.
Let me start off by saying that I had high hopes the Phil
Kelly would do the Traitorous sons of the Emperor justice. I will say that the
codex has tons of options and you can build viable lists with it; with that
said I think the codex is a huge missed opportunity.
It has some really glaring flaws. The Champions of Chaos
special rule may extremely good from fluffy standpoint, but it totally screws
up the effectiveness of squads, leading to a lot of dead aspiring champions.
This rule should only be forced onto Independent Characters only, this way we
could have a great fluff driven rule without screwing every unit in the codex.
I don’t understand why they stripped the teleport homers
from the Icons: did I miss the memo where this was breaking the game? Also with
the vast amount of ways to snipe specific models out of squads Icons are
universally overpriced. Cause if you opponent wants them dead, they will
usually die.
There is no free imbalanced army wide rule like ATSKNF. Hell
Veterans of the Long War could have been free, and then it would at least have
appeared that GW was throwing Chaos Marine players a bone. Now I am not
complaining that CSM don’t have ATSKNF, I don’t think they should, but think
about it, most of them live in warp anomalies and see hellish nightmares every
day. So they should not easily brake from losing combat, they certainly should not be swept away by losing an assault. They could have easily made a rule that just stopped CSM units from being swept when falling back from an assault.
Two of the new “assault” units just don’t seem finished.
Warp Talons and Mutilators feel very last minute, and dedicated assault units
without frag grenades make them even worse, seriously.
There also should have been a more robust system for force
organization shenanigans. Yes it is nice to be able to move the cult units from
Elites to troops, but I think that Bike or Jump Pack Lords should move Bikes or
Raptors from FA to Troops.
This codex should easily be twice as big as it is to
properly represent Chaos Marines properly. Since GW seem dead set on keeping
all the forces of Traitor Marines in one book. I know many with disagree with
me and that’s fine, but let’s imagine if all Loyalists were represented in one
codex.
Here is a list of the things that I believe should have been in the
codex, but are not.
Chosen Terminators similar to GK Paladins, seriously Chaos
should have a really elite yet expensive as hell Terminator unit to represent
the best of the best that the traitors have to offer.
There should be a Cult terminators entry, please don’t tell
me marked terminators are good enough, because they are not.
Where are the legion specific rules? How are we supposed to
represent the Night Lords or Alpha Legion properly on the tabletop?
I see a severe lack of god specific Wargear and gifts, seriously each god would favor
their followers in specific ways.
A Chaos version of the Whirlwind, it is a heresy era vehicle
that does not seem all that hard to maintain since it is on a Rhino chassis.
An assault based Chaos Land Raider variant, for goodness
sake most Chaos forces are assault based, you’d think they might strip out the
Lascannons for some extra transport capacity since their loyalist brothers have
shown that is can be done.
The codex is missing a proper Chaos Marine flyer; while the
Heldrake has some great background, did it have to really look like a Fraking
dragon?
A Chaos drop pod or mass integration of the Dread Claw. For
Crap sake if they had just added this option the codex would have been 10 times
better received than it is.
Let me wrap this up again by saying, it's not that I think the codex cannot be used to make some really diverse interesting list. It can and has the options to do so, but it still fails to properly cover the forces of Chaos in my eyes.