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.