Goonhammer Approved: The Crusade Balance Dataslate

We're nearly three years into the 9th edition of Warhammer 40,000, an edition which introduced us to Crusade Narrative play, and while we've had a large number of balance patches, FAQs, and errata come and go for the matched play rules in each codex, we've had almost nothing for Crusade. This is something that has been bugging us more and more over the last year as we've played more Crusade games ourselves and run events, and we figured it was as good a time as any to finally do something about it, since GW doesn't seem to want to.

So with that in mind, we'd like to present the December 2022 Balance Dataslate for Crusade. In this document you'll find a series of patches, fixes, and errata for the Crusade rules in nearly every book, shoring up some issues, fixing some broken rules, and boosting some factions. You can grab the dataslate by following the link below:

The Crusade Balance Dataslate

Designer's Commentary

This dataslate is largely a minimalist document; with one exception, in the section on Blood Angels. We've tried to address issues rather than create new rules whole cloth, aiming for small tweaks and fixes. Note that we've intentionally left out the Crusade supplements here, as those were beyond the scope of this document.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Core Rules - We've fixed some issues with weapon enhancements and the artisan bionics relic, and a major issue with vehicle squadrons that made it near impossible for knights, chaos knights, and other vehicle squadrons to work effectively in Crusade.
• Agendas - We've rebalanced the Agendas and made some improvements for them, giving knights a way to do more and reducing the number of "trap" choices.
• Missions - We've made some adjustments to the missions in the Core Rules, making them a bit more reasonable and making some of them a bit less insane.
• Ynnari and Drukhari - We adjusted the soul points mechanic to prevent it from leading to early runaway upgrades for Ynnari. Likewise with the Drukhari Agendas, which let you build legendary characters fairly trivially. We've also made it so some Ynnari relics can be taken by Drukhari.
• Blood Angels - We've added a mechanic for the flaw that lets units with flaw points activate Black Rage for a turn during games. This was to give the mechanic some upside; otherwise the Blood Angels rules are all downside, which sucks.
• Relic Weapons - There were quite a few relic weapons we made just takeable as additions to a model, rather than weapon replacements. This makes them a bit easier to take and none of the relics were strong enough to worry about them showing up on an off-meta character.

In addition to all this, we recommend (and always have) that you play your Crusade games with points instead of Power Level. Points are more granular, receive regular balance passes, and generally give you more flexibility in army construction.

That wraps up our look at this Crusade Errata doc but we're open to your feedback, and we're planning some big things in the future that use this doc - so stay tuned for those. In the meantime, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. 

And whether you're planning to run or play in a Crusade campaign, there's no better tool for managing your roster and players than our Administratum app.