6 months of 6th ed

Celebrate good times

So yes, it occurs to me that we are approaching the 6 month anniversary of 40k 6th edition (I hope you all have your bunting ready) so I thought I'd take a look back and see how it's affected the meta in general.

Now, I am a 5th ed player. I'll get this out into the open straight from the word go to clear things up. I'm not a veteran in the sense that I've been around for the long haul, I don't have any fantastic memories of the 'glory days' of 40k (not that I've heard that really, 5th ed seemed to go down very well).

He just wants a hug I'll bet

So this was my first edition change (for 40k, fantasy got a bit over excited) and it has seemed to jumble up peoples opinion of the game as a whole.

So, in 5th edition I'm sure it was fairly widely accepted that Tanks (or metal bawkses, the technical term) were kings, they were just a pain in the ass to deal with if you didn't have the proper tools to deal with them. And so, people got these weapons or they figured you can just ignore this by suppressing them with shaken results, a glance was enough. This lead to the ever-lovin' melta gun and missile launchers. One finisher weapon (well, pairs were the best really) and a metric tonne of mid strength to suppress everything.

Then 6th ed drops and we get Hull points and reduced combat 'APs' so more 'suppression fire' comes along. I use the inverted commas because suppression is more difficult (no table roll for a glance) but vehicle death is easier so we still just need to aim for those glances. This has the effect of plasma being the 'new thang', but some higher S weapon does start cropping up (eg Lascannons) just not a huge amount. Also, with the reduction in survivability of transports foot lists start seeming like the natural way to go. Why buy a tank if it's easier to kill now? Just get men surely...

Knee jerk maybe...?

Now what starts cropping up? The first codices. Now Anti-infantry starts becoming more apparent (none more so than the Chaos Codex. That Helldrake...). Yet still this idea of infantry being king persists.

Of course, time will tell if this settles out but I believe we will begin to form to a hybrid style of list. Vehicles are not dead, as I'm sure many people will agree, they are just not what they were. They now work in conjunction with the infantry of a force, instead of for them (see many 5th ed Coteaz lists for this) which I think is a much better arrangement. How I think it should be and how I think we were beginning to dip our toes into at the end of 5th.

I don't want to try and sound like I'm stating the obvious here, and I have gone against my own ideas in my conclusion (yes, I will still be playing a footslogging list come what may, regardless of how good it is) but I am interested in how fast the ideas behind list creation have adapted in such a short time and how much I'm sure they will continue to shift in the coming days. Even this without considering how fliers are impacting our games now.

So the question still remains, where is 6th ed leading us as a game?