Conspicuous Absence - 40k Rulebook Pulled from GW Site

As has been widely reported, GW retailers have been instructed to pull the 40k 5e rulebook this week and that appears to have taken effect on the GW web store as well. At approximately 01:00 May 28, 2012 UTC, Games Workshop officially pulled the 5th edition Warhammer 40,000 from all international sites thus signaling the death knell of the edition that brought us true line of sight, wound allocation wonders, and occupying buildings as if they were vehicles (oh wait, no one ever played that last one so forget about it).

Of course, blogs and forums and the such have been aflame (and atwitter and afacebook) with rampant and tawdry rules rumors, wishlisting, grumblings, and fornications (ok, given the community the last may strictly speaking not be true - but one never can know really). So in the spirit of all of the above, I will add my own meanderings on the subject.

Anything that puts paid to gridlock 40k cannot be a bad thing. I am tired of vehicles exploding catastrophically only to have a bunch of muscly rambo types emerge virtually unscathed and completely unphased in order to wreak havoc with their melta-nonsense. And this assumes that the vehicle didn't take umpteen shots that managed to simply stun it until the one lucky die roll turned it to rubble.

Granted the rumors about random pieces of terrain able to take psychic tests to force me to play with an army two tables down doesn't exactly leave me with a warm fuzzy. I do take some offense at the notion of a rock-paper-scissors test to resolve the single champions close combat although this would give my platoon commander a chance against Marneus Calgar. Or what about the universal special rule - Spiky Bits... any model with a spike on their codpiece grants a 1+ weapon skill?! At any rate, my firewarriors have already begun sporting attachments worthy of Tetsuo the Ironman!

Regardless, 6e should be a lot of fun. I mean clearly Games Workshop is looking to provide a more streamlined set of rules to alleviate much of the confusion that currently reigns at tournaments. To me this is no more evidenced than by their ardent and undying support for the officially sanctioned tournament scene.

I do feel some anguish for all those rhinos and chimeras that will soon languish in foam whilst their speedier (and more expensive) flier brethren flit about the battlefield mincing anything that dares pop its head out of some psychically active piece of random terrain that just magically appeared from my wargamers backpack...