In my absence, several discussions have raged full force in a limited part of the blog-o-sphere. Namely between here, Bigdunc's blog, B&C, and YTTH. If you haven't noticed already, Stelek introduced forums into his blog so that it would ease his email counts. I've been quite active on them thus far, primarily in the Black Templars and Dark Eldar forums (as those are my armies of choice).
Several serious discussions have resulted from my prodding. The first one was in reference to 10-man Warrior squads armed with a Blaster and Splinter Cannon in a Raider. I noted that almost everyone was bashing them, but I could not understand why as the unit provides excellent duality. This prompted a special blog post by Stelek, explaining his reasoning (albeit not very well). I can understand why they would take this position, but I'm not sold on it. Fortunately, none of my armies currently make use of that type of setup, so it doesn't matter a whole lot. It was more out of curiosity sake.
There were two other main discussions. The first started out in regards to the Righteous Zeal move, its interaction with "Go to Ground", and the new FAQ ruling. Its caused quite a stir between Black Templars players, as well as a duel of wills: Stelek vs Bigdunc. Its somewhat humorous and I'm only watching, though I side with Bigdunce more than I do Stelek on their points of argument.
The last discussion was prompted solely by me and my tactics for the "Defensive" Drop Pod list. I had been attempting to teach the Black Templars players out there how to use my list, as it occurred to me that they weren't using them optimally, nor to the army's strengths. In that thread, Bigdunc presented some possible basic alterations to my list that I liked a bit, so I decided to put it on YTTH to garner opinions before I play-tested it.
That is when Stelek went off the handle, calling B&C numerous derogatory names, as well as calling into question MY list building skills/tactics, even though the list was created using Bigdunc's changes. But Stelek criticizing my tactics, I couldn't stand by. So I proceeded to defend my tactics. Unfortunately, Stelek neglected to read the entire B&C thread I purposefully linked in my original post, so did not get to my tactica for using the list. Figures. But it annoyed me that he criticized the list when it was almost exactly the same as his "Best Of" list for the Black Templars. I even mentioned that I had built off the tactics he very basically described in that article, but he wouldn't see reason, making the assumption that because I called the list "defensive" and that it used "defensive, not offensive tactics"...that the list and my tactics were flawed.
At that point, Thanksgiving was upon us. Fortunately, Bigdunc had my back (Thanks sir) and continued the fight in my stead. To make a long story short, Stelek ended up describing almost to the letter how I play the list (minus some devious manipulation tactics that I make use of). So his whole argument was based on a flawed assumption that could have simply been corrected if he had spend the time to read a few more posts down in the B&C thread to read my tactics. So yeah. I win (with Bigdunc's assistance). :D
You'll be seeing a much more refined article this next month as a result of these discussions, so I'm glad we've done this exercise. Hopefully I can do the same for my Gunline army. ;)