Please remember that this falls into the rumor category, take with a little salt.
via csjarrat
Was talking to jervis johnson in warhammer world today. My opponent was moaning about how the scraplauncher lost its large template and jervis said that large templates had a huge and unplanned boost in efficiency during the transition to 8th which gives some armies an inherent advantage over others that cant be accurately balanced.
The scraplauncher was the first to be nerfed deliberately to balance artillery power against blocks, at which point i asked about empire mortars. He said that large templates will be gone when they (game devs) get round to empire. He didnt say whether it would move to small templates or xD6 hits mechanics though.
He also said that the FAQs werent the right place to bring in army changing mechanics, and were more for fixing broken units with obsolete rules, hence we'll only see these changes in the army specific books when they are released and not retrofitted