Editing Gav Thorpe (section)

==Chaos in the 4th Edition Codex==
With regards to his [[skub|contentious]] handling of the Chaos Space Marines Codex back in 2004, it's worth noting that the very character-filled and developed army lists of the previous Codex: CSM were replaced with much-more-generic-flavor army lists. Thrope claimed in a number of interviews that there were plans to eventually produce codexes for each of the cult legions, including Death Guard and Thousand Sons. These did not materialise until almost 11 years later, while Chaos Space Marines did not receive Legion Rules again until 2016 (which lasted only for a few months). While defenders of Thrope's 4th ed codex often cite the notably unbalanced nature of the 3.5ed Chaos Space Marine codex and it's tendency towards monolists, a majority of competitive armies following the 4th ed book ''followed the same formula'' of Lash Prince, Obliterators and Plague Marines. At least the 3.5ed armies had consistent themes. 

This was over a decade ago. Some of us are still VERY annoyed by it.

It also completely removed several if not all options for viable weapons, utterly buttfucking any possibility of running variant legions. If you were running a Night Lords stealth army, an Iron Warriors warband with additional heavy support, or an Alpha Legion cult strike force, you would find that the new rules simply removed those options. 

Hell, several normal CSM troops were rendered fucking useless: Raptors and Obliterators are no longer hard-capped (Obliterators becoming a staple of competitive CSM armies, Raptors otherwise have never been good). Special rules for Word Bearer champions, Iron Warriors Warsmiths, and Alpha Legion cultists were all completely absent. Faction-specific armies didn't suffer anywhere near as much - except in one critical role:

'''''[[Daemon]]s.'''''

Chaos lost ''all'' faction-and-Chaos-specific Daemons, and any army that relied on them - especially the Word Bearers, which could field more than any other force - was completely and utterly screwed, either for fluff reasons or crunch reasons. Keep in mind, pretty much all the Daemons were viable at one point or another in 3rd Edition. CSM didn't even get to keep the Chaos Undivided Furies, for fuck's sake. Chaos also lost Greater Daemons of all stripes, and all we got in exchange were GENERIC DAEMON PACK and GENERIC GREATER DAEMON which, while still useful (as many players made GOOD use of them during official tournaments), are nothing but a pale shadow of what used to be available to Chaos Space Marines.

Why did Chaos lose them? Because Gav Thorpe decided that the Daemons needed [[Warhammer 40,000/5th Edition Tactics/Chaos Daemons|their own Codex]] and update. By and large, players refer to most of the new Daemon models that followed this Codex to be fail; the new "one boob only" [[Daemonette]]s are absolutely fail-tastic compared to the lithe and graceful-looking ones of the previous edition (though Gav is not in charge of model design, so that wasn't his fault). Oh, think that's bad? It happened in Fantasy too, breaking up [[Hordes of Chaos]] into [[Beastmen]], Daemons and [[Warriors of Chaos]]. Only the last was truly competitive, the first being fucked to pieces on release. The crunch is also a mixed bag in the new edition - updated sucktastic Chaos Lords, heavily-diminished setups using the Chaos Mark system, and more.

The end result is that most Chaos players will continue to loathe his very existence and long to drag his soul screaming to the [[Warp]] when his time is finally up. Granted, this may be a mulligan on Thorpe's part: while he's considered a bad codex writer and did fuck up at least a few other codices as well, his involvement in the 'Nids codex in particular was fairly light (plus [[Robin Cruddance]] took that opportunity to nerf the shit out of them, so not really Thorpe's fault).

In addition, [[Matt Ward]] later wrote the Iyanden mini-dex which has them win their battles, something Gav apparently cannot do. However, the Supplement also writes Iyanden as being incompetent assholes who didn't even listen to ELDRAD when he stopped by to warn them of their Tyranid-chow future, in a rare example of him not being a dick. It's fair to call it even.