I fear nothing!

[Tomgar]

Totally agree, ATSKNF and Fearless are so ubiquitous that they've rendered fear into nothing more than a useless points tax that you have to pay for models who happen to have the rule.

Fearless should be *much* rarer and ATSKNF should be totally overhauled too. As a Dark Eldar player, it's kind of annoying that whole swathes of wargear are made totally pointless because of ATSKNF being on half the armies in the game. I'd happily see that rule just straight up removed from the game tbh, I find it incredibly OP. Like, how is it fair that my 10 man Tactical Squad gets butchered down to 3 men by my buddy's Orks, only for me to run, auto-rally and waste half his Boyz mob with the flamer he didn't manage to kill?

My favourite part of playing Horus Heresy is that morale actually matters and it's glorious. It feels like 40k as it should be.

[Desert Rat]

I believe that pinning weapons should ignore fear, atsknf. Not having fear and being cautious are two different things. Combined arms forces would work better together this way. E.g. IG snipers kill a few marines, force them to hunker down a second (snipers should be a minus one to leadership) so the ogryn can as salt them and get bonuses to the assault. Ordinance, mortars and snipers would then have more affect overall instead of just killing units.

[Halollet]

I'm with lord Manton, I really like the idea of terror being added. It acting just like fear with penalties to checks while Atsknf reduces those penalties and fearless has a bonus to the check.

Nids would love their MCs to cause terror and the hive tyrant's indescribable horror ability would be amazing! One of my flyrants has the maw claws so it has mouths instead of claws. And it has to eat to gain bonuses so can you imagine fighting something that's looking at your while one of its arms devourers one of your comrades alive? I'm sorry, but that's a leadership check for something even on a spacemarine.

[Fueldrop]

I recently noticed something: ATSKNF does absolutely nothing against pinning.

This'd be great... if it weren't for the fact that most sources of pinning have vanished. Sniper? Not pinning. Actually, flipping through the BRB I only found psyker powers and one warlord trait with pinning. Not exactly wide spread.

[Alaric]

Id just invent some modifiers. Easier than inventing whole new rules. An example: less than half Squad means morale checks at minus whatever.

There are existing ways to modify leaderships to be beneficial to fear using armies but people rarely take them.

[Charon]

There are existing ways to modify leaderships to be beneficial to fear using armies but people rarely take them.

Because it does not matter.
I can reduce a space marines ld by -7 (so he sticks with ld 1) and he still is immune to fear and will regroup automatically/can't be routed.