I think spells racks was a great addition in MkIV. They provide a lot of theme to each army, and make it easier to understand what you might run into without knowing exactly what each caster does.
Like command cards, they do not involve models directly, so there’s nothing practical (except dev time, of course!) that stops this rule from being backported to earlier armies.
A slight simplification of the game, some more flexibility in all the Legacy armies, what’s not to like?
I think it is possible, but the real issue is that it would be a lot of work. Legacy armies are not likely to get that much extra work. Also, the mk4 armies are more unique and flexible for the rules, and I doubt PP want to remove the uniqueness for armies that are essentially no longer being developed.
This is exactly the reason. You’re talking about changing nearly 200 army-critical models, touching every single faction and army in the game, and retrofitting new rules on stuff simply not designed around the new rules.
Privateer no longer manufactures legacy models (outside of the random MiniCrate here and there, which is not germane to this discussion), so such an effort carries negative ROI. They lose money on such a project because they could have invested that time on making new products that they could sell.
Personally I sure hope they don’t. Legacy casters are tuned to work in a certain way; their spells are a core part of this. Giving them racks could easily undermine their character.
Also I feel like Mk4 has a different core philosophy than older editions when it comes to list building. In previous editions, if you needed a solution to something (e.g. Stealth), you would build your list to include models with solutions. But in Mk4, often you can include solutions by picking command cards, rack spells, and hardpoint options. I think that going back and trying to re-write legacy armies to work with the new philosophy doesn’t make sense.
It would take a lot more tinkering, and risk losing the character of legacy casters
Legacy casters are balanced around ~5 signature spells. Mk4 casters have around 2-3 plus 2-3 rack spells.
If you added rack to legacy casters, you’d also need to pick which 3 spells should be removed, plus which spells to put on the rack for each faction (or army) without breaking the game.
It’s not impossible, but it would cause a lot of disruption to the game for not much gain
I think the relative power level of the MKIV armies will keep increasing as more and more models are added, backporting the rack could be a good way to even the scales.
I looked through the Cygnar rack and Legacy casters (since that’s what I am playing), and I think you could add the Cygnar MKIV rack to Legacy Cygnar, delete a couple of the similar / non-interesting / niche / weird spells , without anything becoming totally broken.
Nothing leaped out as totally overpowered, but I could be missing someting of course. I’m guessing it’s the same for other factions.
Overall, the amount of rules on models would be reduced slightly, and the factions get a bit more thematic, at the expense of each individual caster. Just a nice little QoL update!
As a player who enjoys playing Legacy armies I don’t think it is realistic to get spell racks to legacy. As said, it is just too much work as it would require reworking so many models.
But what is a fact is that the power level between Legacy armies and MK4 armies is increasing. The sensible way would be to balance the individual models in legacy armies. This was already done in the January balancing update but it should have more changes next time. Also, adding some more options to the prime legacy armies from unlimited models would make totally sense.
I don’t know if that actually is a fact. A quick jaunt through the recent major events on Longshanks seems to indicate that Legacy and new armies are more or less at parity, as judged by the number of players running MK IV and Legacy armies.
(I just picked half a dozen 16+ player events from the last month or two and looked at them. I don’t have a Longshanks premium subscription, so I can’t claim I’ve done any deep analysis.)
Certain events seem to favor certain MK IV armies in terms of volume of appearance, but I’m guessing there’s some sort of region-based rationale, like certain groups of players tend to favor certain armies? One event has 5 Orgoth players, the next 5 Winter Korps players, the next 5 Brineblood players, and so forth…
Maybe the strength of Mk4 Legacy armies could be slowly buffed (if needed ofc) by slowly bringing more Unlimited models to Legacy armies? Personally that would make me very happy as I want to play Legacy armies but find it so hard to build lists when so many of my favourite models are Unlimited-only.
You don’t need premium subscription to see the win rates by faction. Here it is only for rated events and after the January balance update:
From here it is easy to see that MK4 factions are pretty well balanced around 50% but there are a couple of Legacy factions which are doing too well and the majority which are doing poorly. So your observation is probably correct but it applies only to a couple of legacy armies.
I don’t think Racks can just be easily ported backwards. Take Black Fleet for example, an army which has the following spell lists:
Dark Guidance, Backlash, Blood Rain, Hellfire, Ritual Sacrifice
Carnage, Curse of Shadows, Hunter’s Mark, Bleed, Rough Seas
Manifest Destiny, Scything Touch, Stranglehold, White Squall.
Dark Waves, Decel, Guided Fire, Ignite
Most of these are super interesting, cool spells. Most of these casters have been carefully balanced around specific interactions - like Skarre1 not having access to anti-shooting, threat range, or additional damage buffing (outside Dark Shroud).
I think it’s too easy to break legacy accidentally and a huge amount of rebalancing effort it’d be more or less a total redesign.
