1. Auras Still Suck
There needs to be less auras abilities and more targeted abilities. I.E. instead of one lieutenant giving everything with 6" re-roll 1s, have him have a fixed number of units per turn he can apply it to. More expensive characters can have more targets.
SHOOT EVERYTHING BETTER
2. Command Points and Soup Still a Problem
Guard battalions are the biggest offenders here, but CPs/Soup in general need to be curbed somehow.
The easiest thing I can think of without screwing to much up, is to give the battle-forged bonus (also maybe increasing it) only to Armies that have at least 2 matching faction keywords.
Also CP regeneration needs to have limits, definitely no stacking multiple abilities.
Other possible limiting factors could be you HAVE to share the same faction keyword as the detachment you want to spend the CP on. This way you could have something like Cadians spending CP across multiple Cadian detachments, but not on their Allied Blood Angels.
3. Planes
Need to be harder to kill. I'm saying this fully understanding that it will make my arch nemesis the Fire-Raptor better. But I think a leaf on the wind should be harder to hit than a Eldar Pathfinder in tree-camo hiding in a open field.
Grunt "Captain that bush shot us"
Captain "There's nothing there, must be your imagination"
Grunt "Bob is Dead!"
Captain "It looks like a mystery is a foot!"
All planes, save Alaitoc Hemlocks, are way to easy to kill. And I think to the thing to do is to change "Hard to Hit" to -2 to hit, but make it so 6s always hit.
A crazy thought would be to change that to only apply to planes without hover, but I would hate to be actually murdered by any fire-raptors that take offense to that.....
This needs to become first strike in the rule book. The game is already so Alpha-strike oriented, we essentially reward people a secondary objective for winning the roll off to see who goes first. It is crap.
First Strike is a point so long as you kill something 1st turn- this gives both players a chance to score it. Several tournament systems have already moved towards this.
Alternatively, you could do First Blood/Last Blood- a point for the First AND Last thing killed in the game. This gives the second player a distinct advantage at the end of a game to counter the 1st turn advantage their opponent had.
5. Deepstrike
I really like the changes to reserves the "BIG" Faq made. The turn 1 only being able to arrive in your own deployment zone, overnight changed the game so that you can't both shoot and punch the table turn one (usually).
And it also meant that everyone wasn't burning a ton of time in deployment trying to fence off areas.
But I do think it needs to be revisited. 40k is still primarily a shooting game, and the "BIG" didn't do anything to address that with alpha striking. I don't expect them to change that really, but I think reserve rules could be lacked a little bit to account for it.
Change it again. To only being able to deploy in your table half turn 1, or at most just not your opponents deployment zone. Brings back some pressure, just not too much.