Games Workshop has upped its teasers for Warhammer: The Horus Heresy third edition, with a post on Tuesday heralding ‘DROP MINUS 399 HOURS’ informing us that something will be arriving from the warp on Thursday, May 29. While the firm remains tight-lipped about what that may be, we’re confident that it’s a new edition: and these are the five things we most want it to feature.
GW began teasing Warhammer: The Horus Heresy third edition last Thursday with a very silly video, and a mock conspiracy website called ‘The Horus Hearsay’. As the second edition of Horus Heresy launched in summer 2022, we’re right on time for third edition to release this summer.
Here’s what we want to see from Horus Heresy: Third Edition:
Rebalanced legions
Not all the Space Marine Legions are created equal, at least not in the Heresy wargame. Between unique units, special characters, bespoke wargear, Rites of War, army-wide rules, and unique reactions, some Legions are just better than others.
Admittedly, if you ask any two Heresy players, you’ll probably get different answers about which Legions specifically are the best. Tabletop Tournament reports on the last six months of European tournaments, and gives White Scars the highest win rate, followed by Blood Angels, Space Wolves, and Emperor’s Children: Ultramarines, World Eaters, Thousand Sons, and Salamanders are at the bottom of the chart.
Viable vehicles
Despite the awesome range of vehicles in Heresy, many of them are too vulnerable to be relied on. Non-vehicle units have different defensive tech, whether it’s toughness values, armor saves, invulnerable saves, wounds, damage mitigation saves, or simply multiple bodies in a unit, that make different weapons better or worse at targeting them, creating a puzzle of army construction and unit positioning.
Vehicles have their hull points and their armor value – high strength weapons break vehicles, quickly or slowly, and most armies have them in high quantities to deal with Dreadnoughts anyway. The Glancing Hit and Penetrating Hit damage tables allow you to blast off vehicle tracks, disable their weapons, shake them so they can’t shoot straight – or blow them up in a single hit. It’s far too easy to lose a huge model to an unlucky roll, and while it’s narratively cool, it leaves them feeling far too unreliable.
An end to Dreadnought supremacy
Second edition tuned up Dreadnoughts a lot. With armor saves instead of armor values, multiple wounds, no risk of becoming immobilised or having weapons destroyed, no way to die in a single shot, Dreadnoughts are more survivable than vehicles, don’t lose effectiveness as they take wounds like Terminator Squads do, never break in combat, and can pack serious firepower or melee punch.
They’re just a bit too good for their points, a swiss army knife that is only vulnerable to being gummed up in melee by an enemy that’s not worth killing, other, equally powerful melee walkers, and Primarchs. Something needs to change.
Ordnance that makes an impact
Ordnance weapons were oppressive in first edition Heresy, with Medusas infamous for cracking open vehicles, blowing up dreadnoughts, and splattering marines by the score. Second edition reduced the armor penetration and the blast sizes for every ordnance weapon in the game, both indirect and direct firing versions, reducing their effectiveness against both infantry and vehicles, and leaving them all but useless against the new version of dreadnoughts.
The Solar Auxilia in particular notice this shortcoming, since their army list is packed with tanks and artillery. And as half the fun of Heresy is bringing super heavy vehicles that can fire weapons with templates the size of pies, some kind of buff to ordnance would benefit the Legions as well.
A thoughtful update, not a total rewrite
Heresy is a complex rules set – about as complex as I want a set of rules to be – and not a totally balanced one. But the bones are strong, and the game feels right. Maybe that’s nostalgia: it’s a direct game design descendant of 1998’s Warhammer 40k third edition.
But unlike its forebears in the main 40k line, Heresy’s complexity is focused into six main army lists: Space Marines, Imperial Army, Knights, Mechanicum, Talons of the Emperor, and Ruinstorm Daemons. Even the variation added by the different Legions doesn’t match the complexity of dozens of totally distinct Warhammer 40k factions. Each individual army can afford to be crunchier when there’s so few of them.
What could definitely be improved is the ways rules are written and presented. As a good example, in Warhammer 40k, reading a unit’s army list entry tells you most of how it works on the battlefield, and the army rules and detachment rules take up three pages.
In Heresy, a units rules also extend to its unit type, its unit subtype, its universal special rules, its weapon stats, any special rules its weapons might have, the rules for its wargear, any faction army rules, and Rite of War rules if you’ve chosen one. Characters may have Warlord Traits or Psychic Powers as well. And all those rules can be split through many sections of more than one huge book.
It’s just one barrier to entry for this already complex rules set, and there are plenty more. I adore the spirit of GW’s specialist games, and I would hate for the new edition to erode that – but Horus Heresy’s rules are prolix in ways that don’t add flavor or clarity. The new edition could stand to whip them into shape.
If I didn’t spend all my spare time reviewing Warhammer 40k Codex releases and testing other miniature wargames, I’d put many more hours into Heresy. If you’re a fellow fan, come and join me in the Wargamer Discord community – I’d love to see your Legion and hear of their exploits!
If you’re a fan of Heresy or 40k and want to get started with the novels, Wargamer has a very useful guide to the Horus Heresy books, which gives both the main reading order, and mini reading lists for each of the Legions. And check out our interview with the creators of the upcoming Horus Heresy roleplaying game!
Source: Wargamer
