Canadian 5th wrote:Insectum just plays with his same casual meta year in and year out so he knows which opponents will make positioning errors to be exploited before he even sits down to play the game. His ideas simply don't work against a wider pool of highly skilled players.
Do you actually play 9th now (competitively, at that) or does this post just completely lack self-awareness?
yukishiro1 wrote: I don't think you've ever played DE if you think you can use deep strike to deliver 30 devilgaunts into a place where they can shoot more than one raider. Sounds a lot like theorycrafting that hasn't seen the real table. It just doesn't work, the thing about DE that is so strong is they just have so many piles of stuff that they will easily screen you out from DSing a 30-blob anywhere useful.
I mean, if they want to screen out to protect their Raiders from Devilgaunts. . . so I can shoot their infantry with Devilgaunts, that seems perfectly fine by me. It doesn't matter, the point is that because Raiders have only a 4+ they become more susceptible to small arms fire. A five man Tac squad with a Lascannon will average more damage to the Raider by rapid-firing their Bolters in Tactical Doctrine than with the Lascannon.
Insectum just plays with his same casual meta year in and year out so he knows which opponents will make positioning errors to be exploited before he even sits down to play the game. His ideas simply don't work against a wider pool of highly skilled players.
Canadian 5th has neither an argument, nor a point, so he resorts to asking for personal tourney results. I'll call it a victory.
Well he missed both DevilGaunts and Shock Cannons, both of which appear to get better results. The Shock Cannons because they get bonus MWs and the DevilGaunts because they spit a badjillion shots.
Your answer to Raiders is not the 36" no LOS gun, but the 24" gun because it can do a MW on a 4+? Your either not going to be in range, not have LoS or have moved so far forward the rest of the DE will wipe you off the table.
And Devilgaunt deepstrike requires you to get first turn, them not to screen with anything, kill 2 Raiders and then die to the contents of those raiders, who make their points back on your gaunts regardless.
Shock Cannons are not my "answer", they just put up really good numbers. Personally I'm not a huge fan.
The Devilgaunt Deepstrike is just an example of a potential move to make. The counter to it seems to ignore the fact that the Nid player has 1700 other points on the table that can attempt to counterplay the counterplay, etc etc.
Besides, I'm pretty sure the DE move isnt to just sit in the backfield, but to actually move up and take objectives, in which case deep striking may not be necessary and the Raiders might no longer be the right things to target, and there's going to be a lot more units in range to do, whatever they're gonna do.
I'm not trying to be rude, but it is super obvious from these comments that you haven't actually played vs a competitive DE list played by a competent player. What you wrote re: your plan to kill a bunch of raiders with deepstruck devilgaunts was just downright silly and a really prime example of theorycrafting that doesn't take into account how the game is actually played. If you put 210 points of gaunts in deepstrike they will absolutely screen you out so all you can shoot them at is one unit of crap, so conrgatulations, you just used 210 points of gaunts to kill...some mandrakes? An empty raider that's already delivered its dudes?
And then 10 wyches kills like 20 of your gaunts and traps the rest in combat to use as a shield.
This is what makes DE so strong - they have have piles and piles of cheap but extremely lethal junk they can afford to just toss away because they've got, well, pile and piles of it.
Sadly no, I haven't been able to get a game since covid began. Which is too bad because hearing about the DE really makes me want to play against it.
Canadian 5th wrote:Insectum just plays with his same casual meta year in and year out so he knows which opponents will make positioning errors to be exploited before he even sits down to play the game. His ideas simply don't work against a wider pool of highly skilled players.
Do you actually play 9th now (competitively, at that) or does this post just completely lack self-awareness?
And given this is someone who has explicitly stated they come on here to try and bait out reactions from people, I'm never sure why anyone takes his contributions with anything below a small mine of salt.
+ + +
Initial FAQ sorted out the Reavers, at least, even if that was the most blatant element that needed fixing - kinda agree that they may as well have included the Heat Lance in the FAQ points listing just for completeness, but that's a minor thing.
DT looks like it is going to be a pain to find an elegant fix for - the Succubus/Razorflail/Comp. Edge set-up should be a little easier. Possibly just tweak the Flail wording so that the doubling of attacks only happens once per Combat Phase, or once per attack sequence? Not sure on the current wording, as I don't have the book.
Agree with whoever it was that said that if Trueborn are a problem, increase the cost of their upgrade rather than the cost of Master Archon - at least then the increase scales appropriately by usage, rather than skewing low or high depending on how many Trueborn turn up alongside the Archon.
Nice, it is good to hear from the playtesters that a core weapon on a core unit was not tested by them in a way it eneded up in the codex. I wonder if they have more stuff like that. Like we tested it at this points and with this rules, but then GW decided to turn a D1 or d3 weapon in to a D2 or D3.
Insectum7 wrote: Out of curiosity, do Wyches ignore Overwatch? Because 30 Devilgaunts average something like 8 Wyches killed on Overwatch.
They have a strat.
On the Goonhammer Changes - I think only the raider change is that impactful and I'd personally rather just push raiders up 15 and leave it at that. The Characters are undercosted - but 5 points is incredibly minor and I think weaker/more expensive transports would bring things in line. There's an argument this is foolish because Drazhar is I think an obvious auto-take if ever there was one - but equally he does depend on transportation. The internal soup seems like a bug - but I'm not sure its "that" much power. Ditto for the extra 2 CP for 3 Patrols (which I'm afraid may be a feature rather than a bug.)
I feel their proposed DT change is borderline pointless. Okay it adds insult to injury that a 5 man squad of Wracks can go jump on an objective turn 4/5 after killing 300% of their points cost - but realistically the issue is... that they get 100% of their points cost from pulling the trigger once. If over a game I get to fire 6~ Liquifiers, I don't care if I've melted the squad in the process.
I 100% ignore all TTS game data b.c their terrain set up and model placements are terrible. A 20man Hellion blob is as small as a 10man on a real table top, models over lap too easier and the WTC terrain IMO is a huge problem.
When you can hide 6 raiders, 40 Hellions 100% on turn 1 that is a big problem.
But that is more or less what happens on every table that has terrain build for 9th ed. And I must say I feel good, when designers say, that the core problem for DE and Harlequins is their super efficient transports.
Then on the other side, If I see it, then why didn't GW.
Karol wrote: But that is more or less what happens on every table that has terrain build for 9th ed. And I must say I feel good, when designers say, that the core problem for DE and Harlequins is their super efficient transports.
Then on the other side, If I see it, then why didn't GW.
It`s like saying that the problem of SM is the super effective infantry. This guys are not designers of the game, just free testers who give GW input, but don`t have real power how the rules or points will look at the end.
Every codex have some very good stuff and it`s the opponent job to play around it, counter it more heavily in building phase or simple ignore it.
Like A.Harrison sad, my flyer list was super strong, but it loses vs custodes bikes, so my plan is to hope i never play them and then he go to LVO final.
I 100% ignore all TTS game data b.c their terrain set up and model placements are terrible. A 20man Hellion blob is as small as a 10man on a real table top, models over lap too easier and the WTC terrain IMO is a huge problem.
When you can hide 6 raiders, 40 Hellions 100% on turn 1 that is a big problem.
I think you misread something here. TTT stands for Table Top Tactics, the name of the Youtube channel. TTS, as in Table Top Simulator is a program to virtualise boardgames.
Karol wrote: But that is more or less what happens on every table that has terrain build for 9th ed. And I must say I feel good, when designers say, that the core problem for DE and Harlequins is their super efficient transports.
Did you then just ignore the fact that their suggestions were:
Designer 1: +10pts to chassis, swap cost of Dissie to 0 and Dark Lance to 5
Designer 2: +5pts to chassis, swap cost of Dissie to 0 Dark lance to 5
And on the Venom: "It's fine base, the splinter cannon is too expensive."
^and they did not say at all that Harlequins were broken because of their transports. They said Dark Eldar do what Harlequins do better. Which is true.
Automatically Appended Next Post: other TTT suggestions so far:
-no bonus +2CP for patrols (Agree)
-+15 to DL raider, +5 to dissie raider (Agree)
-No more mixymix transports and different subfactions ie DT in a BH raider (Agree)
-Get rid of the Razorflail/Compedge interaction (Agree, also duh)
-Wyches and Wracks +1pt (Agree, only one guy says Wracks)
-Burn Dark Tech to the ground (Great, fantastic, feth that tactic)
they're saying the exact thing that every sensible drukhari player is saying, they're just saing it in a video called 'Are Drukhari Broken' so the people chicken littling can screech 'SEE, I TOLD YOU THAT RAIDERS NEED TO BE ONE HUNDRED FIFTY POINTS!@!!!!!!"
Did you then just ignore the fact that their suggestions were:
^and they did not say at all that Harlequins were broken because of their transports. They said Dark Eldar do what Harlequins do better. Which is true.
they're saying the exact thing that every sensible drukhari player is saying, they're just saing it in a video called 'Are Drukhari Broken' so the people chicken littling can screech 'SEE, I TOLD YOU THAT RAIDERS NEED TO BE ONE HUNDRED FIFTY POINTS!@!!!!!!"
Show me when in this thread I said that raider should cost any points or 150pts. And ues the harlis transport do same stuff the DE transports do, with the small difference that they are not 10 to 15 pts undercosted. If they were or if they had access to more unit types, like mandrakes, they probably could have an even higher then 60%+ win rate. Through out all the marine hate threads, it was always ignored, that they did a lot better then any other good army in 9th. And when I said that they are eldar, I was called out to be wrong, only for weeks later CWE/harli mix lists to start taking tournaments in the US, the same they were doing in central europe for months.
Plus am not sure what the change are suppose to fix. They would still be better then any prior 9th ed book, and a lot better then the bad and good 8th ed books. So I guess their limiters would suppose to be armies that are to come out next. Which I guess is nice for the people who are getting those next 1-2 books, but it doesn't help for people whose books already exist or who will maybe get an update in 2022.
The changes would maybe affect stuff like the top 8 tables at large tournaments. Plus the whole adapt and wait and see thing, is thrown out in to the ether as if it really worked. As if DE players would not be able to adapt themselfs, and historically against the +70% win rate the adaptation doesn't seem to work. When IH 2.0 were like that no one could adapt to them. When in 9th, harlis sat a tier above every good army, people had over a year to adapt to them. Somehow the adaptation didn't happen and harlis were not brought down to the level of other top tier armies. And as we agreed before, even if harlequins were very good, the DE are a much better version of their game play. So I don't know how and why armies that won't be getting any updates soon , are suppose to change. And I hope this isn't going to come in the form of new castellan, by which I mean an obligatory high cost big kit that forces people to play soup again.
Karol wrote: But that is more or less what happens on every table that has terrain build for 9th ed. And I must say I feel good, when designers say, that the core problem for DE and Harlequins is their super efficient transports.
Then on the other side, If I see it, then why didn't GW.
It`s like saying that the problem of SM is the super effective infantry. This guys are not designers of the game, just free testers who give GW input, but don`t have real power how the rules or points will look at the end.
Every codex have some very good stuff and it`s the opponent job to play around it, counter it more heavily in building phase or simple ignore it.
Like A.Harrison sad, my flyer list was super strong, but it loses vs custodes bikes, so my plan is to hope i never play them and then he go to LVO final.
Well lets assume that people always over react to new stuff. That everything new is considered broken, with few exeptions. But we can still look at the data.
DA were suppose to be the doom marine+ army, DA broken on top of marine broken. The win rates over all wen from 49% to 51% with more people playing the army. The thing DE did is uncomperable to what other armies did, with maybe the exeption of 2,0 IH. And 2.0 IH are considered to be the text book of broken design . And army does not go to almost 80% win rate, with a new book. This is not just a case of a bit better then others. This ia 16y old lifting competion, suddenly having some kid from turkmenistan lift 200kg.
If there were hard counters to DE, and top players both are playtesters and/or know playtesters, there would be people playing them. Or at least there would be people playing them after the 4-5th tournament over run with DE or DE soup lists. This is an extrem version of the harlequins situation. DE have more unit options and better rules then harlis. And no army went to become the harli de throners, not the DA and not even the DG. And both those armies were considered strong, and are strong. But not comparing to the real deal. I mean it has to mean something when a big GT winners says that he picked DE, because he didn't think he could beat anything that could beat DE right now. And then the top 8 has 2/3 of it full with DE or DE soup lists.
I 100% ignore all TTS game data b.c their terrain set up and model placements are terrible. A 20man Hellion blob is as small as a 10man on a real table top, models over lap too easier and the WTC terrain IMO is a huge problem.
When you can hide 6 raiders, 40 Hellions 100% on turn 1 that is a big problem.
I think you misread something here. TTT stands for Table Top Tactics, the name of the Youtube channel. TTS, as in Table Top Simulator is a program to virtualise boardgames.
Soory I woke up and read it (4am for me lol) must have missed read TTT and TTS.
Did you then just ignore the fact that their suggestions were:
^and they did not say at all that Harlequins were broken because of their transports. They said Dark Eldar do what Harlequins do better. Which is true.
they're saying the exact thing that every sensible drukhari player is saying, they're just saing it in a video called 'Are Drukhari Broken' so the people chicken littling can screech 'SEE, I TOLD YOU THAT RAIDERS NEED TO BE ONE HUNDRED FIFTY POINTS!@!!!!!!"
Show me when in this thread I said that raider should cost any points or 150pts. And ues the harlis transport do same stuff the DE transports do, with the small difference that they are not 10 to 15 pts undercosted. If they were or if they had access to more unit types, like mandrakes, they probably could have an even higher then 60%+ win rate. Through out all the marine hate threads, it was always ignored, that they did a lot better then any other good army in 9th. And when I said that they are eldar, I was called out to be wrong, only for weeks later CWE/harli mix lists to start taking tournaments in the US, the same they were doing in central europe for months.
Plus am not sure what the change are suppose to fix. They would still be better then any prior 9th ed book, and a lot better then the bad and good 8th ed books. So I guess their limiters would suppose to be armies that are to come out next. Which I guess is nice for the people who are getting those next 1-2 books, but it doesn't help for people whose books already exist or who will maybe get an update in 2022.
The changes would maybe affect stuff like the top 8 tables at large tournaments. Plus the whole adapt and wait and see thing, is thrown out in to the ether as if it really worked. As if DE players would not be able to adapt themselfs, and historically against the +70% win rate the adaptation doesn't seem to work. When IH 2.0 were like that no one could adapt to them. When in 9th, harlis sat a tier above every good army, people had over a year to adapt to them. Somehow the adaptation didn't happen and harlis were not brought down to the level of other top tier armies. And as we agreed before, even if harlequins were very good, the DE are a much better version of their game play. So I don't know how and why armies that won't be getting any updates soon , are suppose to change. And I hope this isn't going to come in the form of new castellan, by which I mean an obligatory high cost big kit that forces people to play soup again.
Yea, stats shows that you are not right. Repeating the some thing over and over again, dont make it truth. For every tournament that have harlequin + cwe on top 3, i can show you 2 of chaos or imperium without trying.
You are just speculating on what you think is to strong, harlequins and craftwords aeldar factions summary have the some placing in top 3 like custodes. Pure harlequins were doing better than the soup, with the new drukhari that can probably change, because CWE have units that are very good vs drukhari. Look at regions like Australia and Sweden, who practically did not stop tournaments, in those regions we also don`t see the dreaded harlequin superiority. Local central Europe TTS metta is not real prove for anything.
Insectum7 wrote: You can say that all you want but when I'm looking at a single unit of Termagants putting 18 wounds across two Raiders, I'm gonna be rethinking "good weapon profiles".
Yes, 210 points of models can almost but not quite kill an 85 point model with average rolls. Clearly, this is a reliable winning strategy...
Also, how are those 90 shots dealing 18 wounds across 2 T6 4+ armor models?
Single minded annihilation for 180 shots.
If you add Kronos then it gets up to 20.4 wounds, with Symbiostorm 27.
So that's 210 points, 2CP, and it assumes that your opponent doesn't use a -1 to hit strategy. It also requires you to be within 18" of the raider so it gives them an entire turn to move where they like.
Yeah, this isn't exactly a winning move.
It requires a trygon (155 points) to really pull off. It's a powerful Strat but it's a turn 2 play and while it might kill 2 raiders. A -1 to hit cuts it to 1.
Insectum7 wrote: You can say that all you want but when I'm looking at a single unit of Termagants putting 18 wounds across two Raiders, I'm gonna be rethinking "good weapon profiles".
Yes, 210 points of models can almost but not quite kill an 85 point model with average rolls. Clearly, this is a reliable winning strategy...
Also, how are those 90 shots dealing 18 wounds across 2 T6 4+ armor models?
Single minded annihilation for 180 shots.
If you add Kronos then it gets up to 20.4 wounds, with Symbiostorm 27.
So that's 210 points, 2CP, and it assumes that your opponent doesn't use a -1 to hit strategy. It also requires you to be within 18" of the raider so it gives them an entire turn to move where they like.
Yeah, this isn't exactly a winning move.
It requires a trygon (155 points) to really pull off. It's a powerful Strat but it's a turn 2 play and while it might kill 2 raiders. A -1 to hit cuts it to 1.
You can strategic reserves now, I have not look at it in a while so correct me if I am wrong but you can use the Lictor Stratagem now for 1CP to pull them from reserves to the lictor instead.
Xenomancers wrote: It requires a trygon (155 points) to really pull off. It's a powerful Strat but it's a turn 2 play and while it might kill 2 raiders. A -1 to hit cuts it to 1.
I play Jorm and it's usually Raveners that are bringing other models in. Not too fussed about the -1 since it only works on one Raider, and there will be more units to supplement fire/more available targets.
I love TTT. Looks like they're seeing the same problems as everyone else, and their fixes are similar to what others have suggested. It should be noted as well that both of these guys are Drukhari players. Now gw just needs to get on with it.
Karol wrote:Nice, it is good to hear from the playtesters that a core weapon on a core unit was not tested by them in a way it eneded up in the codex. I wonder if they have more stuff like that. Like we tested it at this points and with this rules, but then GW decided to turn a D1 or d3 weapon in to a D2 or D3.
Yeah, I found that interesting as well. You'd think they'd go back and playtest it again after the change. But it's entirely possible that they did, just not with TTT. I don't think Dd3+3 Dark Lances are the problem though.
The cope is strong with the Forge the Narrative podcast, they suggest 65% win rate is the new GW (TM) balance so Drukhari are actually not that far from being balanced, asking for 55% WR max on a faction isn't fair against a small indie studio like GW.
Nothing can or should stop TOs from putting a pts comp in place, you can even score ITC pts I believe.
Spoletta wrote: I'm completely against removing army rules if that army overperforms, especially in the case of the DE dex which is really really really well done.
The codex for the most part is well balanced internally AND externally. It is really just a few interactions and maybe one undercosted model which are causing the W/L ratio skyrocketing. We all know which are the suspects, so I don't see why firing with a shotgun at the target when you can snipe it.
Have you seen Wrack and Succubus options? Why are Haemonculus unpopular while HAEMONCULUS Covens are common.
Turn 1 charges, re-rolls in every roll and magical 6s that make saving throws a pain, badly designed rules should go.
Dark lance wasn't tested at D3+3 dmg, designers too confident in their ideas again, imbeciles are wasting the time of the playtesters.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I don't think Dd3+3 Dark Lances are the problem though.
You are right, but dissies are no longer worth more points than dark lances. The lack of testing is evident. The damage change should have been done before testing or during narrative testing. Using TTT for anything but points adjustments and finding broken combos is bonkers. Get the Knife Ear podcasters to figure out whether 2d3 or 3+d3 is more thematic and fun and then get TTT to find out what it's worth on the tabletop.
Insectum7 wrote: You can say that all you want but when I'm looking at a single unit of Termagants putting 18 wounds across two Raiders, I'm gonna be rethinking "good weapon profiles".
Yes, 210 points of models can almost but not quite kill an 85 point model with average rolls. Clearly, this is a reliable winning strategy...
Also, how are those 90 shots dealing 18 wounds across 2 T6 4+ armor models?
Single minded annihilation for 180 shots.
If you add Kronos then it gets up to 20.4 wounds, with Symbiostorm 27.
So that's 210 points, 2CP, and it assumes that your opponent doesn't use a -1 to hit strategy. It also requires you to be within 18" of the raider so it gives them an entire turn to move where they like.
Yeah, this isn't exactly a winning move.
It requires a trygon (155 points) to really pull off. It's a powerful Strat but it's a turn 2 play and while it might kill 2 raiders. A -1 to hit cuts it to 1.
You can strategic reserves now, I have not look at it in a while so correct me if I am wrong but you can use the Lictor Stratagem now for 1CP to pull them from reserves to the lictor instead.
18" gun is the issue. Might even be a turn 3 play from SR. Jorm can do with lictors or raveners true. Trygon is the way I do it an I can not run a complete ass hive fleet. Levi for the win. Anyways this is really off topic. Nids are hella bad right now except for the forgeworld update which clearly under-points some super beasts. Hopefully they will be getting a new codex within the next 6 months.
Want to talk about laughable...A tyrranocyte costs more than a raider lol.
Karol wrote: But that is more or less what happens on every table that has terrain build for 9th ed. And I must say I feel good, when designers say, that the core problem for DE and Harlequins is their super efficient transports.
Then on the other side, If I see it, then why didn't GW.
What makes you think they didn't?
You've said earlier that you've noticed that some forces seem almost pre-built.
That x units + x# transports + ?? Fit nicely into 2k pts is not a coincidence.
GW has a plan (despite any current supply issues) concerning how many Raider kits they aiming to sell to the average Drukhari player.
Karol wrote: But that is more or less what happens on every table that has terrain build for 9th ed. And I must say I feel good, when designers say, that the core problem for DE and Harlequins is their super efficient transports.
Then on the other side, If I see it, then why didn't GW.
GW has a plan (despite any current supply issues) concerning how many Raider kits they aiming to sell to the average Drukhari player.
"clearly gw is displaying their diabolical mad genius 9 billion D chess plan to make raiders (the kit they've included in every bundle box ever for drukhari that every drukhari player has seven of and that you CANT EVEN fething BUY from games workshop currently) so OP that everyone....um.....buys...them."
.....naw dawg theyre just like 10-15pts undercosted. Calm down, its OK, fluoride and 5G didn't do 9-11.
So can we stop with the "I can't buy DE, so they aren't broken" arguement? It's so missing the point. There are currently 4 Start Collecting boxes for DE and three of their big character guy, at my tiny local hobby store. There are countless ones on EBAY and amazon. Focus on the argument, not the factors.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: So can we stop with the "I can't buy DE, so they aren't broken" arguement? It's so missing the point. There are currently 4 Start Collecting boxes for DE and three of their big character guy, at my tiny local hobby store. There are countless ones on EBAY and amazon. Focus on the argument, not the factors.
That's not the argument, the argument is "I can't buy DE, so they weren't made OP to sell more boxes". They were made OP because the designer felt like the stats should change and the team doesn't give more than half a gak about the balance of the points because they are filthy narrative players.
I think the Raider/Venom stuff is standard GW being 12~ months behind the curve and overcompensating as a result.
Players: "Raiders are bad, venoms are much better."
Also Players: "Venoms have problems versus Marines though. And as that's the whole meta now maybe Raiders are the way to go."
"Huh? Okay lets buff the raider and make splinter cannons do 2 damage. Problem solved. The players will love it."
So yeah - you heard it here first. Burna Boyz Meta coming soon.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: So can we stop with the "I can't buy DE, so they aren't broken" arguement? It's so missing the point. There are currently 4 Start Collecting boxes for DE and three of their big character guy, at my tiny local hobby store. There are countless ones on EBAY and amazon. Focus on the argument, not the factors.
That's not the argument being made at all.
The argument being made, which, amazingly, does apparently need to be made, is that if DE were intentionally made broken to sell models, then GW would have stocked enough dark eldar to keep any of them in stock up until anyone actually got to read the new broken rules.
And, cherry on top, they PROBABLY would have gone ahead and made the only new model in the entire codex intentionally broken, instead of a transport that has already been sold to players in the old start collecting box and both the transport+troop bundle boxes they made in 7th ed and now also in the new combat patrol box.
Dark eldar have been totally out of stock since before anyone got a full picture of their rules, and you could not have chosen a single worse unit to make intentionally busted to push sales except for possibly Kabalite Raiders in Venoms. Raiders are the Techpriest Dominus of drukhari. Everyone who plays the army has had to purposefully avoid buying bundle boxes if they didn't want to end up with at least 3.
Karol wrote: But that is more or less what happens on every table that has terrain build for 9th ed. And I must say I feel good, when designers say, that the core problem for DE and Harlequins is their super efficient transports.
Then on the other side, If I see it, then why didn't GW.
GW has a plan (despite any current supply issues) concerning how many Raider kits they aiming to sell to the average Drukhari player.
"clearly gw is displaying their diabolical mad genius 9 billion D chess plan to make raiders (the kit they've included in every bundle box ever for drukhari that every drukhari player has seven of and that you CANT EVEN fething BUY from games workshop currently) so OP that everyone....um.....buys...them."
.....naw dawg theyre just like 10-15pts undercosted. Calm down, its OK, fluoride and 5G didn't do 9-11.
Nothing to calm down about, it's just a casual observation made over decades of miniature gaming experience (with GW & others).
The companies have sales plans that don't involve game balance.
All you existing players with your multiple raiders?
GW got your $ already. IE; You aren't the customers they give a damn about when they plan on how many raiders to sell.
And clearly they do intend to sell more raiders as they're a key part of the list & imagery of the force.
So who're they planning to sell these raiders to? New players of course....
Current supply problems - there's a great # of things you can't buy from GW right now, not just raiders. And this was the case well before the Drukhari codex hit the shelves. Obviously this supply issue didn't affect how they planned & wrote the codex.
Nothing to calm down about, it's just a casual observation made over decades of miniature gaming experience (with GW & others).
The companies have sales plans that don't involve game balance.
All you existing players with your multiple raiders?
GW got your $ already. IE; You aren't the customers they give a damn about when they plan on how many raiders to sell.
And clearly they do intend to sell more raiders as they're a key part of the list & imagery of the force.
So who're they planning to sell these raiders to? New players of course....
Current supply problems - there's a great # of things you can't buy from GW right now, not just raiders. And this was the case well before the Drukhari codex hit the shelves. Obviously this supply issue didn't affect how they planned & wrote the codex.
Then why didn't they make Lelith the best succubus?
Well anyone who wants to start DE is going to buy 4-6 raiders, unless in the next 2-3 days something crazy happens and they suddenly costs 100+pts.
By the metric of people owning 6000pts in to multiple armies, practicaly everything that wasn't bad for multiple editions is going to be owned already by veteran players. I have a feeling though, which could be wrong, that GW is very much focused on the new buyers and not the people who just buy the codex, because they already have all the other models.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
ccs 797783 11121333 wrote:
What makes you think they didn't?
You've said earlier that you've noticed that some forces seem almost pre-built.
That x units + x# transports + ?? Fit nicely into 2k pts is not a coincidence.
GW has a plan (despite any current supply issues) concerning how many Raider kits they aiming to sell to the average Drukhari player.
Then it would mean they made broken rules on purpose. I get it why they may want to do it for factions they don't care about, or which they don't want people to play. But as you said, and I think I said it too. The DE lists that exists right now. Looks and feels as if someone sat down, wrote a list, wrote down what they want the list to do, and then put specific rules on models and add point costs. But that seems very unprofessional to me. Or professional in the sense head of olympic wrestling division writing rules in a such a way, that they greatly favour people from his country.
Karol wrote: Well anyone who wants to start DE is going to buy 4-6 raiders, unless in the next 2-3 days something crazy happens and they suddenly costs 100+pts.
By the metric of people owning 6000pts in to multiple armies, practicaly everything that wasn't bad for multiple editions is going to be owned already by veteran players. I have a feeling though, which could be wrong, that GW is very much focused on the new buyers and not the people who just buy the codex, because they already have all the other models.
^I think this is very true. I haven't had to purchase much for my SMs since 6th editon. I bought a few more Transports in 7th (Gladius) and some Attack Bikes in 8th (good investment for 9th! ). Most of what I've purchased in the meantime has been for the sake of collection rather than gaming efficacy.
Dude...I legit traded my raiders away. about 2 years ago because all I was doing was spamming venoms since forever ago. Every DE player I know has an over abundance of venoms and maybe a few raiders. 2/3...
They wanted to sell their combat patrol box. It comes with 2 raiders if you want to build them that way...I built 4 raiders out of 2 of them. I didn't realize it was a trap at that point - all I could think was how happy I was that raiders were going to be worth it. I did not realize at that point they were going to be OP as fck at that point cost but they are. It's sad too. Because raiders will certainly be nerfed...but stuff like DT will probably escape serious nerfs.
Insectum7 wrote: You can say that all you want but when I'm looking at a single unit of Termagants putting 18 wounds across two Raiders, I'm gonna be rethinking "good weapon profiles".
Yes, 210 points of models can almost but not quite kill an 85 point model with average rolls. Clearly, this is a reliable winning strategy...
Also, how are those 90 shots dealing 18 wounds across 2 T6 4+ armor models?
Single minded annihilation for 180 shots.
If you add Kronos then it gets up to 20.4 wounds, with Symbiostorm 27.
So that's 210 points, 2CP, and it assumes that your opponent doesn't use a -1 to hit strategy. It also requires you to be within 18" of the raider so it gives them an entire turn to move where they like.
Yeah, this isn't exactly a winning move.
It requires a trygon (155 points) to really pull off. It's a powerful Strat but it's a turn 2 play and while it might kill 2 raiders. A -1 to hit cuts it to 1.
You can strategic reserves now, I have not look at it in a while so correct me if I am wrong but you can use the Lictor Stratagem now for 1CP to pull them from reserves to the lictor instead.
18" gun is the issue. Might even be a turn 3 play from SR. Jorm can do with lictors or raveners true. Trygon is the way I do it an I can not run a complete ass hive fleet. Levi for the win. Anyways this is really off topic. Nids are hella bad right now except for the forgeworld update which clearly under-points some super beasts. Hopefully they will be getting a new codex within the next 6 months.
Want to talk about laughable...A tyrranocyte costs more than a raider lol.
I played nids up until start of 9th and I always used a 20man Devilgants, never was an issue for me, now you don't need a pod or Trygon at the cost of more CP though. They were one of my most favor units, i even started to make some out of Hormagants b.c they look cooler, sorry for bad pic it is a old one.
I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
It seems so. Some people just can't handle being the underdog.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
There are many groups of people who play for different reasons.
And there certainly is a group of players who hop from army to army buying whatever is 'best' at that moment and dumping it for the next hot thing when the meta changes.
Fools and their money! Don't they know that this stuff will be back in stock eventually? But they gotta get it NOW and get those tournament wins in before the nerfs come down. Then all of this will be right back on eBay for dirt cheap. Oh, the hilarity!
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
It seems so. Some people just can't handle being the underdog.
"Underdog" is absolutely not the word to use for armies like Genestealer Cults and Grey Knights but okay.
Then it would mean they made broken rules on purpose. I get it why they may want to do it for factions they don't care about, or which they don't want people to play. But as you said, and I think I said it too. The DE lists that exists right now. Looks and feels as if someone sat down, wrote a list, wrote down what they want the list to do, and then put specific rules on models and add point costs. But that seems very unprofessional to me. Or professional in the sense head of olympic wrestling division writing rules in a such a way, that they greatly favour people from his country.
So now we've moved to "it's all a conspiracy because the guy wrote the Drukhari codex also plays Drukhari and wanted to give himself broken rules"?
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
Yes, some people just want to win, other people just don't want to lose. Back when I was unlucky I started Necrons because they were OP, I liked the aesthetic as well, but I would have continued playing Craftworlds if they were equally strong. I was getting tired of losing with Necrons in 8th as well, the first 18 months of 8th was pretty brutal and 15 months in I started experimenting with Craftworlds and would have switched if CA18 had not been better.
Then it would mean they made broken rules on purpose. I get it why they may want to do it for factions they don't care about, or which they don't want people to play. But as you said, and I think I said it too. The DE lists that exists right now. Looks and feels as if someone sat down, wrote a list, wrote down what they want the list to do, and then put specific rules on models and add point costs. But that seems very unprofessional to me. Or professional in the sense head of olympic wrestling division writing rules in a such a way, that they greatly favour people from his country.
So now we've moved to "it's all a conspiracy because the guy wrote the Drukhari codex also plays Drukhari and wanted to give himself broken rules"?
For feths sake.
Wouldn't be the first time a rules writer gave themselves an advantage.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
There are many groups of people who play for different reasons.
And there certainly is a group of players who hop from army to army buying whatever is 'best' at that moment and dumping it for the next hot thing when the meta changes.
If you sort that eBay list by date Page 26 is about before people knew the details of the book and people were still buying raiders.
5 of them sold on 2/14 and 8 on 3/20. Playtesters?
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Slayer-Fan123 wrote: "Underdog" is absolutely not the word to use for armies like Genestealer Cults and Grey Knights but okay.
GK are capable. GSC - who knows. There does appear to be some GSC player who went 5-3 this past weekend ( edit - same weekend as DAO ). Yes - small sample size etc etc.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
Tons of longtime Comp players still have drukhari armies from back in fifth I guess.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
Rules are a pretty big factor on when to buy things. Collectors usually intend to get everything it is just a question of when.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
There are many groups of people who play for different reasons.
And there certainly is a group of players who hop from army to army buying whatever is 'best' at that moment and dumping it for the next hot thing when the meta changes.
If you sort that eBay list by date Page 26 is about before people knew the details of the book and people were still buying raiders.
5 of them sold on 2/14 and 8 on 3/20. Playtesters?
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Slayer-Fan123 wrote: "Underdog" is absolutely not the word to use for armies like Genestealer Cults and Grey Knights but okay.
GK are capable. GSC - who knows. There does appear to be some GSC player who went 5-3 this past weekend ( edit - same weekend as DAO ). Yes - small sample size etc etc.
RED = Most likely people getting ready for new book, DE was announce months before the book came out.
Also DE lost a lot of events this past weekend, if we keep seeing the decline in winrates and going about a 60% that should be fine after DT, Comp Edge, and Fly-fy are changed.
You guys remeber that one obnoxious guy on here that was saying how he wrecks face with ynnari not because of them Being OP (souburst days) but because people need to learn to play and stop crying. He was saying how he would win with ynnari even if they lost double activation. You guys remember how he put his ynnari army on swap shop as soon as the new ynnari WD dex dropped? I member...
Some people just need to play the most "broken" stuff as a compulsion. I dont really get it. But man meta chasers are silly people. At least it makes getting cheap stuff on ebay when rules change and they drop their armies like its nurgles poop
In case this needs saying.. Lessons learned. . Just buy units you like for army you like and grow your collection organically.
Its frustrating that GW has moved to a wider scope of playtesting then ignores playtesting and feedback. Yet pretend they dont with Hand flailing rapid FAQs. Its such a bizzare paradigm.
Competitive players will generally play whatever gives them the best chance of winning. That's a rational decision when your priority is competition.
GW doesn't do serious playtesting, it's just a perk to offer influencers to get them on side. The program makes sense in that context. The objective isn't creating better rules.
In case this needs saying.. Lessons learned. . Just buy units you like for army you like and grow your collection organicaly.
I'm being asked by the Great Dakka Spirit of the Long-Suffering Eeyore to fill in here for a quick sec so pretend I add in something weird and possibly racist against some extremely niche eastern european subgroup like 'you can always tell a Clovnakh by the smell of their earlobes'
"but but but I got told this by the EVIL casual players and when I bought a 2000 point list of tactical space marine squads with flamers and missile launchers in Land Raiders, Hunter anti-aircraft tanks because my army fluff is a Black Templars anti-aircraft division, vanguard veterans on foot with powerfists and hand-flamers, and shotgun scouts in land speeder storms and now I can't win ANY games against the mean mean eldar players! They laugh at me and spit in my face every time they finish cruelly tabling me with their perfectly tuned competitive lists made up of
*checks watch*
2000 points of just dark technomancer wracks and 3 compedge razorflail succubi and drazar and 40 incubi in 24 dark lance raiders! I know last week when I was making this complaint all my opponents all had competitive harlequin armies but now they have dark eldar armies, oh, woe is me, why won't GW DO anything for the poor trodden-upon players who simply wanted to win, why won't the menace of horrible casual player monsters be stopped!"
yukishiro1 wrote: Competitive players will generally play whatever gives them the best chance of winning. That's a rational decision when your priority is competition.
GW doesn't do serious playtesting, it's just a perk to offer influencers to get them on side. The program makes sense in that context. The objective isn't creating better rules.
Argive wrote: I think issues arise when people claim they are casual players but then just want to curb stomp deep down.
Everyone likes to win a fair contest. It feels good.
It gets weird when people deny this and pretend its not them. Wierd. Maybe Im just too old for this S*&^
If I had a quarter for every time the most flagrant, obnoxious cheater and rule-bender that I've had to frequently talk to and even tell to not come back due to their faked rolls, increasingly unbelievable "misremembered" stats and rules and dubiously added-up army points values was also the person who would the most loudly proclaim that their army was unfairly underpowered but they don't care, they embrace the challenge of playing a weak army and they're not some scum of the earth power gamer....
....well I couldnt' afford any 40k models that's for dang sure but I could probably buy myself a nice fast food breakfast at least.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
Harlequins weren't gutted, and they did and do the same thing as DE, only less point efficient and with fewer unit types. So maybe this is people thinking that GW will not nerf eldar.
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Sterling191 797783 11121491 wrote:
So now we've moved to "it's all a conspiracy because the guy wrote the Drukhari codex also plays Drukhari and wanted to give himself broken rules"?
For feths sake.
I don't think there is a conspiracy behind anything here, or that who ever decided on the final version of the rules wrote them for himself. But you have to say there is a slight difference in how the point costs and units interlock, and how hyper efficient everything is in a DE list. there is no If I take A then I will be left with 60pts I can't spend on anything or if I take what I want the army costs 2025pts.
From what I understand the person who wrote the rules for eldar for years, no longer writes rules for GW. But if something happened in the past, there is always is a non zero chance of it happening int the future. But I don't think that is how it worked. It is more probable that some guy got a spread sheet from the Sales Departament telling him, we want DE players buy this amount of models in money, now get on it.
The design is very different comparing to the marine books where someone was doing a lot of copy paste stuff.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
Tons of longtime Comp players still have drukhari armies from back in fifth I guess.
I have a darklight spam list since 5th ed, that's well suited for 9th.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
Tons of longtime Comp players still have drukhari armies from back in fifth I guess.
I have a darklight spam list since 5th ed, that's well suited for 9th.
I think my brother has one in storage from 3rd edition, lol.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
Yes, some people just want to win, other people just don't want to lose.
The design is very different comparing to the marine books where someone was doing a lot of copy paste stuff.
Couldn't be the fact that space marines have 5,782 choices for every conceivable unit role and at a certain point you just can't figure out a fething interesting datasheet for every single one, no sir.
The design is very different comparing to the marine books where someone was doing a lot of copy paste stuff.
Couldn't be the fact that space marines have 5,782 choices for every conceivable unit role and at a certain point you just can't figure out a fething interesting datasheet for every single one, no sir.
Consolidation of Marine profiles just needs to happen, full stop. No I don't care if Manlet Marines had the same stats as Chad Marines, I want a smaller, cleaner Codex. We don't need separate entries for the same goddamn vehicle just because the Sponsons are fething different.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: We don't need separate entries for the same goddamn vehicle just because the Sponsons are fething different.
Yea that's a weird one. It isn't like people were going to take 4+ predators.
That's probably more of a move by GW to soft-move away from Rule of 3 for non-problematic data sheets than anything else. At least that's what I think was the rationale behind it. Silly either way.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
Yes, some people just want to win, other people just don't want to lose.
Google has 500 million search results on trying to win vs trying not to lose but I'm sure the distinction isn't worth noting, stay ignorant internet-dude.
That's probably more of a move by GW to soft-move away from Rule of 3 for non-problematic data sheets than anything else. At least that's what I think was the rationale behind it. Silly either way.
Fair point. I could see that. I think with my tournament brain too much.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: We don't need separate entries for the same goddamn vehicle just because the Sponsons are fething different.
Yea that's a weird one. It isn't like people were going to take 4+ predators.
That's probably more of a move by GW to soft-move away from Rule of 3 for non-problematic data sheets than anything else. At least that's what I think was the rationale behind it. Silly either way.
For only one unit though? It's goofy.
Anyone want to take bets as to whether the Chaos Predator will be split as well?
TTT did a review of the codex recently on their youtube, where Lawrence stated when they were play testing the codex that the Dark Lance was still D6 at the time... I also got the impression the suggestion they provided to change this - which would then apply to lascannons and other similar weapons was to make them 2D3 rolls for damage.
I got the impression that a fair few changes to provide a but more oomph were made since playtesting also.
I think this shows that whilst play testing in the community by GW is a good thing, the protocol is still flawed. They need to do multiple bouts of testing after significant changes are made, or at least inform the play testers so they can provide further feedback/troubleshoot.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: TTT did a review of the codex recently on their youtube, where Lawrence stated when they were play testing the codex that the Dark Lance was still D6 at the time... I also got the impression the suggestion they provided to change this - which would then apply to lascannons and other similar weapons was to make them 2D3 rolls for damage.
I got the impression that a fair few changes to provide a but more oomph were made since playtesting also.
I think this shows that whilst play testing in the community by GW is a good thing, the protocol is still flawed. They need to do multiple bouts of testing after significant changes are made, or at least inform the play testers so they can provide further feedback/troubleshoot.
Or it could also represent that they had multiple people playtesting different things at different times.
TTT: Dark Lances are too weak! Here's the fix we suggest.
GW: Ok, let's write some variations to see what works. Sends updated profiles to a different group of playtesters to get differing opinions.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: TTT did a review of the codex recently on their youtube, where Lawrence stated when they were play testing the codex that the Dark Lance was still D6 at the time... I also got the impression the suggestion they provided to change this - which would then apply to lascannons and other similar weapons was to make them 2D3 rolls for damage.
I got the impression that a fair few changes to provide a but more oomph were made since playtesting also.
I think this shows that whilst play testing in the community by GW is a good thing, the protocol is still flawed. They need to do multiple bouts of testing after significant changes are made, or at least inform the play testers so they can provide further feedback/troubleshoot.
Or it could also represent that they had multiple people playtesting different things at different times. TTT: Dark Lances are too weak! Here's the fix we suggest. GW: Ok, let's write some variations to see what works. Sends updated profiles to a different group of playtesters to get differing opinions.
It really cannot be that hard to set up a functional playtesting and balancing system.
*Collect problems about the faction and set goals for the rules you will write (fix problems #1, 3 and 7). This should be done all the time for every faction, this is not something you start doing 1 month before a set of rules gets sent to the printers.
*Make outline of required rules (# of relics, WL traits, Stratagems, etc. needed).
*Write a slightly oversized pool of rules, if any alternatives for any of the rules come at you then note them down.
*Post the rules so that playtesters and game designers can see them to make sure nothing silly gets sent to playtesting (Ironstone from a competitive standpoint or Iyanden from a narrative standpoint).
*Get the narrative playtesters to provide feedback on how fun and thematic the rules that did not get cut so far are. Change rules that proved unfun or unthematic in narrative playtesting.
*Get the competitive playtesters to do stress tests by spamming different units and playtest every rule according to RAW ensuring no overpowered or badly written rules and points get published. Collect all the playtests and in a Facebook group and keep tabs on what has and has not been tested, write down how much each unit, relic and Stratagem did in the game.
*At least proofread the points costs.
Why did Word Bearers not get fixed in the second CSM dex? Did nobody have the balls to say that their chapter tactic is gak? Was it so thematic that the designers and playtesters thought "well this is gak but Word Bearers CT are just the most thematic and fun rules we've ever written so we won't change them"? Why did the rules for dark lances get buffed after the competitive playtesters provided feedback? You cannot possibly hope to get a comprehensive test without linking the different playtest teams and doing a systematic review, otherwise, you'll just be firing shotgun blasts in the dark hoping to hit mosquitoes and then five people have each fired a shotgun blast you open up the window to let more mosquitoes in.
The design is very different comparing to the marine books where someone was doing a lot of copy paste stuff.
Couldn't be the fact that space marines have 5,782 choices for every conceivable unit role and at a certain point you just can't figure out a fething interesting datasheet for every single one, no sir.
Consolidation of Marine profiles just needs to happen, full stop. No I don't care if Manlet Marines had the same stats as Chad Marines, I want a smaller, cleaner Codex. We don't need separate entries for the same goddamn vehicle just because the Sponsons are fething different.
Nah, first thing that needs to happen is that we consolidate the accounts of the consolidationists on here so they all have to share an account. I'm sure they won't find that annoying at all...
And, please, cite your example of datasheets within the SM codex where the only difference is sponson options.
The design is very different comparing to the marine books where someone was doing a lot of copy paste stuff.
Couldn't be the fact that space marines have 5,782 choices for every conceivable unit role and at a certain point you just can't figure out a fething interesting datasheet for every single one, no sir.
Consolidation of Marine profiles just needs to happen, full stop. No I don't care if Manlet Marines had the same stats as Chad Marines, I want a smaller, cleaner Codex. We don't need separate entries for the same goddamn vehicle just because the Sponsons are fething different.
Nah, first thing that needs to happen is that we consolidate the accounts of the consolidationists on here so they all have to share an account. I'm sure they won't find that annoying at all...
And, please, cite your example of datasheets within the SM codex where the only difference is sponson options.
While his complain given is technically not quite correct, there are a lot of datasheets that would have been just a long list of wargear in older editions that you could mix & match.
The list of Captain entries for example...
Captain
Captain in Gravis Armour
Captain in Phobos Armour
Captain in Terminator Armour
Captain on Bike
Captain with Master-crafted Heavy Bolt Rifle
Primaris Captain
harlokin wrote: The DL was caught up in GW's addressing of a common complaint (across many armies) that single shot D6 weapons were ineffective.
From a Drukhari perpective, pretty much nobody took DLs in 8th edition, and I can't say I'm unhappy that Dissies have taken more of a back seat.
The effectiveness of DL on Raiders was then ramped up by the stupid re-roll traits given to OR and BH Kabals.
I think the move - if its standardised - for D6 weapons to 3+D3 is evidently sensible. Its a much reduced swing. You can also argue it was always weird how a "multi" melta got one shot. The situation where cheap AP2/AP3 damage 2 shots was the best all-rounder in many factions probably needed to be fixed and doing so by points alone was difficult.
The problem A) these changes should all have come out at the same time rather than years apart and B) it should have come at the same time as a general boost in vehicle/monster wound totals.
The design is very different comparing to the marine books where someone was doing a lot of copy paste stuff.
Couldn't be the fact that space marines have 5,782 choices for every conceivable unit role and at a certain point you just can't figure out a fething interesting datasheet for every single one, no sir.
Consolidation of Marine profiles just needs to happen, full stop. No I don't care if Manlet Marines had the same stats as Chad Marines, I want a smaller, cleaner Codex. We don't need separate entries for the same goddamn vehicle just because the Sponsons are fething different.
Given the Rule of Three this would be a terrible loss of potential sales for GW. They WANT to sell me 3x ______, 3x _______, 3x_______ ..... They would be fools to listen to people like you.
Naw, honestly it doesnt. Marines are fine. Half the armies in the fething game are playing jankass beta mode 9th ed.
Gsc Tau Eldar Guard Csm Tsons GK and Nids NEED codexes before they touch anything marine again.
Carve off the worst gak in drukhari and move the feth on, we know we've got three mostly unneccessary codexes to get thru before theres even a slight chance someone who actually needs one badly gets one.
I think everyone knows that warhammer is not designed to be competitive game.
We have horizontal release schedule, older codexes just can`t keep up with new codexes extra rules and updated units statistics - more wounds, better guns etc....
To make the matters worse we have multiple rules for the some units, the biggest offender ofcourse are the space marines. They have so many chapters that supposed to have different playstyle, but in the end they are preferable shooting(IH, IF, UM...) or melee(BA, BK, WS...).
Space Marines have so many units and times more rules than other factions, so the designer are enforcing more restrictions to balance them, that create rage from SM players who don`t understand that they just have to much.
To make the mission pack unbalanced, instead of making bad secondaries useful, they introduced faction specific secondaries. Faction with easier to score secondary will have advantage, the reason DA are performing better and more consistent than other SM factions.
How faction that can just play super defensive and get easy 15pts for no reason, be on equal footing with the others who don`t have access to such thing and don`t have the kill power and speed to stop the scoring ?
To make the mater even worst we have rules that artificially enforce certain "fluffy" playstyle and rules that unlock others are taking little nerfs, so they are not so good and popular.
The nail of the coffin are the fluffy extra books with rules, that have the main goal is to increase the profits with creating on narrative environment.
How do you balance this ? You simple can`t and this is not video game, not everyone can switch to what is working and drop the things that are not optimal, so we have local mettas that certain things can overperform or underperform just because people use different things and play different.
Even the most tournaments are joke from competative standpoint, you trow bronze and gm players in one pod and wait to see the result. After that you calculate winrate, mix the results together from different tournaments(that could have environment) and hope they are not skew, so you can use the results to balance the game.
So we are not playing competitive game and wanting everything to be between 45-55% is not reasonable and will not happen soon.
Marin wrote: I think everyone knows that warhammer is not designed to be competitive game.
I actually disagree with this as GW has shown clear indication of wanting to monetize the interest in a competitive game environment much like many video games before and that the design team seems to be aiming for competitive play. The problem is that they kinda want to have the cake and eat it too as they don't want to abandon their narrative/casual gamers while still wanting the larger stage that competitive play gives them. Because the success in recent years is very much thanks to competitive play as it creates awareness and clout that results in increased sales. Add on that that they don't have a proper testing team to test their balance suggestions.
People need to keep in mind that a lot of video games didn't start off as competitive avenues, but grew over time to be ones. Warhammer is definitely on that road as competitive play is where the big money lies. At the moment it feels like they are stumbling like any other video game company in seeing how best to approach this.
Storm Speeders - entirely different weapon package for each variant - so not "just the sponsons"
Gladiators - entirely different weapon package for each variant - so not "just the sponsons"
Predators - different turret weapons for each, though with common sponson options
Land Speeders - I'll give you different secondary weapons, with a common primary, though I'd also include the basic Land Speeder here. Technically not sponsons, though
The design is very different comparing to the marine books where someone was doing a lot of copy paste stuff.
Couldn't be the fact that space marines have 5,782 choices for every conceivable unit role and at a certain point you just can't figure out a fething interesting datasheet for every single one, no sir.
Consolidation of Marine profiles just needs to happen, full stop. No I don't care if Manlet Marines had the same stats as Chad Marines, I want a smaller, cleaner Codex. We don't need separate entries for the same goddamn vehicle just because the Sponsons are fething different.
Nah, first thing that needs to happen is that we consolidate the accounts of the consolidationists on here so they all have to share an account. I'm sure they won't find that annoying at all...
And, please, cite your example of datasheets within the SM codex where the only difference is sponson options.
While his complain given is technically not quite correct, there are a lot of datasheets that would have been just a long list of wargear in older editions that you could mix & match.
The list of Captain entries for example...
Captain
Captain in Gravis Armour
Captain in Phobos Armour
Captain in Terminator Armour
Captain on Bike
Captain with Master-crafted Heavy Bolt Rifle
Primaris Captain
I fully agree that there are datasheets that could easily be combined - Gravis and MC HBR being the prime example, where the latter just needs to be weapon swap for the former's Boltstorm Gauntlet. On the other hand, given the current framework, is it cleaner to have different datasheets for loadouts which introduce new special rules and/or keywords, to save confusion? Especially if you're trying to have as many special rules as possible covered on each datasheet, not in an Armory.
Having said that, the point I was making was that Slayer's hyperbole is a, inaccurate; and b, not helping the discussion.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of the DE Codex...
The design is very different comparing to the marine books where someone was doing a lot of copy paste stuff.
Couldn't be the fact that space marines have 5,782 choices for every conceivable unit role and at a certain point you just can't figure out a fething interesting datasheet for every single one, no sir.
Yes, but then it would be easier to build those above avarge builds out of all of the books, and besides WS it is not really happening for them. There is no 60%+ win rate marine army.
Marin wrote: older codexes just can`t keep up with new codexes extra rules and updated units statistics - more wounds, better guns etc....
A large majority can and do.
Those that were initialy writen as good or which ended up good, because of core rules changes. there is also the whole GSC, IG, Knights, GK, Tau camp that is not doing so well since the very start of 9th, and each new book doesn't make the armies play better.
Storm Speeders - entirely different weapon package for each variant - so not "just the sponsons"
Gladiators - entirely different weapon package for each variant - so not "just the sponsons"
Predators - different turret weapons for each, though with common sponson options
Land Speeders - I'll give you different secondary weapons, with a common primary, though I'd also include the basic Land Speeder here. Technically not sponsons, though
The design is very different comparing to the marine books where someone was doing a lot of copy paste stuff.
Couldn't be the fact that space marines have 5,782 choices for every conceivable unit role and at a certain point you just can't figure out a fething interesting datasheet for every single one, no sir.
Consolidation of Marine profiles just needs to happen, full stop. No I don't care if Manlet Marines had the same stats as Chad Marines, I want a smaller, cleaner Codex. We don't need separate entries for the same goddamn vehicle just because the Sponsons are fething different.
Nah, first thing that needs to happen is that we consolidate the accounts of the consolidationists on here so they all have to share an account. I'm sure they won't find that annoying at all...
And, please, cite your example of datasheets within the SM codex where the only difference is sponson options.
While his complain given is technically not quite correct, there are a lot of datasheets that would have been just a long list of wargear in older editions that you could mix & match.
The list of Captain entries for example...
Captain
Captain in Gravis Armour
Captain in Phobos Armour
Captain in Terminator Armour
Captain on Bike
Captain with Master-crafted Heavy Bolt Rifle
Primaris Captain
I fully agree that there are datasheets that could easily be combined - Gravis and MC HBR being the prime example, where the latter just needs to be weapon swap for the former's Boltstorm Gauntlet. On the other hand, given the current framework, is it cleaner to have different datasheets for loadouts which introduce new special rules and/or keywords, to save confusion? Especially if you're trying to have as many special rules as possible covered on each datasheet, not in an Armory.
Having said that, the point I was making was that Slayer's hyperbole is a, inaccurate; and b, not helping the discussion.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of the DE Codex...
Well meme'd milord, you verily have caught your opponent in a quite embarrassing logical fallacy *tips fedora*
How about this: You could cut the number of space marine datasheets by 33% by incorporating various "Different Units" into the same unit with a weapons swap and by eliminating firstborn units that are capable of being easily proxied as a Primaris option.
There's no reason an attack bike needs to have a separate unit entry now. Nor a SM bike squad. Nor Scouts, as they can be used as Infiltrators/Eliminators/Reivers, they've been fully replaced essentially.
How do you balance this ? You simple can`t and this is not video game, not everyone can switch to what is working and drop the things that are not optimal, so we have local mettas that certain things can overperform or underperform just because people use different things and play different.
Even the most tournaments are joke from competative standpoint, you trow bronze and gm players in one pod and wait to see the result. After that you calculate winrate, mix the results together from different tournaments(that could have environment) and hope they are not skew, so you can use the results to balance the game.
So we are not playing competitive game and wanting everything to be between 45-55% is not reasonable and will not happen soon.
there is a difference between not all armie being at 50% win rate. And two or three armies being so way ahead of others that they are a tier of their own.
And by the way, if one excluded the harlequins and now the DE, 9th had a ton of armies sitting around the 45-55% win rate. And the bad armies were bad, because of either being bad in 8th or because they were based around 8th ed core rule sets that no longer exist. GW could fix those in a PDF, but then they would have to give it to some people for "free", because of piracy.
The design is very different comparing to the marine books where someone was doing a lot of copy paste stuff.
Couldn't be the fact that space marines have 5,782 choices for every conceivable unit role and at a certain point you just can't figure out a fething interesting datasheet for every single one, no sir.
Yes, but then it would be easier to build those above avarge builds out of all of the books, and besides WS it is not really happening for them. There is no 60%+ win rate marine army.
Uh....Good? So you're saying Space Marines are achieving the goal of where a faction ought to be in competitive play? Solid but not overwhelming performance with an extremely high playrate in competitive play?
So why do we need to worry about marines again?
(also, incidentally, very very few marine datasheets were actually copy-pasted from 2.0 to 3.0. Almost all saw some form of stat change, outside of extremely recent additions like the stuff from the 9th ed starter book and the few units that mount none of the updated weapons like Las-preds.)
Edit: Yeah no, las-preds got their extremely gakky would never use it under any circumstances smoke launchers replaced with a 1cp -1 to hit stratagem, kinda like the one all eldar had for 2cp that they said was the most broken thing ever had to be deleted completely utterly unfair except that it's 1cp instead.
the_scotsman wrote: kinda like the one all eldar had for 2cp that they said was the most broken thing ever had to be deleted completely utterly unfair except that it's 1cp instead.
To be fair we don't have stacking negatives anymore.
the_scotsman wrote: kinda like the one all eldar had for 2cp that they said was the most broken thing ever had to be deleted completely utterly unfair except that it's 1cp instead.
To be fair we don't have stacking negatives anymore.
Also worth mentioning that Lightning Fast Reactions is now 1CP for DE, works in both melee and against shooting attacks, and isn't just limited to units with the correct keyword, unlike Smokescreen. And negative modifiers should stack, if one or more are coming from self caused sources, IE: moving with heavy weapons, advancing with assault weapons, hitting with a weapon with built-in -1 penalty like power fists and chain fists, etc, etc. You shouldn't be able to dodge penalties you caused yourself.
the_scotsman wrote: kinda like the one all eldar had for 2cp that they said was the most broken thing ever had to be deleted completely utterly unfair except that it's 1cp instead.
To be fair we don't have stacking negatives anymore.
Also worth mentioning that Lightning Fast Reactions is now 1CP for DE, works in both melee and against shooting attacks, and isn't just limited to units with the correct keyword, unlike Smokescreen. And negative modifiers should stack, if one or more are coming from self caused sources, IE: moving with heavy weapons, advancing with assault weapons, hitting with a weapon with built-in -1 penalty like power fists and chain fists, etc, etc. You shouldn't be able to dodge penalties you caused yourself.
TIL Drukhari BIKER, Drukhari VEHICLE, or Drukhari BIKER wtihout the <haemonculus coven> keyword is not keyword-limiting.
I count 15 different units that can use Lightning Fast Reactions from Codex Drukhari that don't already have -1 to hit built-in making it functionally pointless.
There are 25 units in Codex Space Marines with the SMOKESCREEN keyword without getting into any chapter-specific, legends, or forgeworld options.
Automatically Appended Next Post: but again we're getting caught up on claims here. The claim was "waaah, space marine units (getting their third codex since 8th edition a year after their second codex) all got copy-pasted with no changes or redesigns while the xenos armies got full redesigns on all their units!" Which is completely untrue. Almost every entry in space marine 3.0 has had some kind of redo, at least to the same extent as the entries in codex drukhari (many of which were only changed in terms of a redesigned weapon or two that is shared with other units, like the Razorwing Jetfighter, which got the updated dark lances and splinter cannon similar to how many space marine vehicles only got updated via having the new Heavy Bolter or Multi-Melta or whatever on them.)
the_scotsman wrote: kinda like the one all eldar had for 2cp that they said was the most broken thing ever had to be deleted completely utterly unfair except that it's 1cp instead.
To be fair we don't have stacking negatives anymore.
Also worth mentioning that Lightning Fast Reactions is now 1CP for DE, works in both melee and against shooting attacks, and isn't just limited to units with the correct keyword, unlike Smokescreen. And negative modifiers should stack, if one or more are coming from self caused sources, IE: moving with heavy weapons, advancing with assault weapons, hitting with a weapon with built-in -1 penalty like power fists and chain fists, etc, etc. You shouldn't be able to dodge penalties you caused yourself.
TIL Drukhari BIKER, Drukhari VEHICLE, or Drukhari BIKER wtihout the <haemonculus coven> keyword is not keyword-limiting.
I count 15 different units that can use Lightning Fast Reactions from Codex Drukhari that don't already have -1 to hit built-in making it functionally pointless.
There are 25 units in Codex Space Marines with the SMOKESCREEN keyword without getting into any chapter-specific, legends, or forgeworld options.
It doesn't work for INFANTRY? Guess my source on that is wrong. Are you just annoyed that some Space Marine vehicles have a similar strategem to Eldar? Because I'll gladly give it up on mine if they can have T9 back. Have fun shooting those S8 Dark Lances and Heat Lances at that.
Marin wrote: I think everyone knows that warhammer is not designed to be competitive game.
I actually disagree with this as GW has shown clear indication of wanting to monetize the interest in a competitive game environment much like many video games before and that the design team seems to be aiming for competitive play. The problem is that they kinda want to have the cake and eat it too as they don't want to abandon their narrative/casual gamers while still wanting the larger stage that competitive play gives them. Because the success in recent years is very much thanks to competitive play as it creates awareness and clout that results in increased sales. Add on that that they don't have a proper testing team to test their balance suggestions.
People need to keep in mind that a lot of video games didn't start off as competitive avenues, but grew over time to be ones. Warhammer is definitely on that road as competitive play is where the big money lies. At the moment it feels like they are stumbling like any other video game company in seeing how best to approach this.
What you want and what you do are different things. I could want to be on top shape, but what i do is eat junk food and not do sports.
GW want to have competitive scene, because it make the game more popular and people more interested, but yet they are not having payed dedicated balance team and good release schedule.
How do you balance this ? You simple can`t and this is not video game, not everyone can switch to what is working and drop the things that are not optimal, so we have local mettas that certain things can overperform or underperform just because people use different things and play different.
Even the most tournaments are joke from competative standpoint, you trow bronze and gm players in one pod and wait to see the result. After that you calculate winrate, mix the results together from different tournaments(that could have environment) and hope they are not skew, so you can use the results to balance the game.
So we are not playing competitive game and wanting everything to be between 45-55% is not reasonable and will not happen soon.
there is a difference between not all armie being at 50% win rate. And two or three armies being so way ahead of others that they are a tier of their own.
And by the way, if one excluded the harlequins and now the DE, 9th had a ton of armies sitting around the 45-55% win rate. And the bad armies were bad, because of either being bad in 8th or because they were based around 8th ed core rule sets that no longer exist. GW could fix those in a PDF, but then they would have to give it to some people for "free", because of piracy.
hmm, leds see if you are right. Go to 40kstats select only dates 2021 and what i see:
6 armies with over 55% WR 7 armies under 45 % WR
Excluded Titanicus there are 31 armies, so almost 42% of all the armies ARE NOT IN THE 45-55% DREAM ZONE. There is no such thing like only 2-3 factions are ahead, having in mind that it`s easier to be in 45-55% the numbers are showing that the game was never in your perfect state.
The data is also corrupt from the start, simple because new players are playing vs vetterans and full time 40k players. It`s like saying that zerg is unplayable, because in bronze zerg have 30% WR.
Watched clip where John Lennon said, that SM are much better than the numbers are showing, but alot of new players or less experience players are playing SM, so they tank their WR.
For instance WS are considered to be top army by top players, yet they had like 40% WR before drukhari release.
But you could say "you dont have the data to prove that statement is correct " and you will be right, i don`t have it.
Since warhammer is not competitive game players don`t have MMR or other metric that have in mind player skill, we don`t have the data needed to analyze the game.
the_scotsman wrote: kinda like the one all eldar had for 2cp that they said was the most broken thing ever had to be deleted completely utterly unfair except that it's 1cp instead.
To be fair we don't have stacking negatives anymore.
Also worth mentioning that Lightning Fast Reactions is now 1CP for DE, works in both melee and against shooting attacks, and isn't just limited to units with the correct keyword, unlike Smokescreen. And negative modifiers should stack, if one or more are coming from self caused sources, IE: moving with heavy weapons, advancing with assault weapons, hitting with a weapon with built-in -1 penalty like power fists and chain fists, etc, etc. You shouldn't be able to dodge penalties you caused yourself.
TIL Drukhari BIKER, Drukhari VEHICLE, or Drukhari BIKER wtihout the <haemonculus coven> keyword is not keyword-limiting.
I count 15 different units that can use Lightning Fast Reactions from Codex Drukhari that don't already have -1 to hit built-in making it functionally pointless.
There are 25 units in Codex Space Marines with the SMOKESCREEN keyword without getting into any chapter-specific, legends, or forgeworld options.
It doesn't work for INFANTRY? Guess my source on that is wrong. Are you just annoyed that some Space Marine vehicles have a similar strategem to Eldar? Because I'll gladly give it up on mine if they can have T9 back. Have fun shooting those S8 Dark Lances and Heat Lances at that.
It works for infantry. You can pick any infantry, vehicle or biker that is not a Haemonculus Coven unit.
It really cannot be that hard to set up a functional playtesting and balancing system.
It takes money and it takes professional experience, which I don't think truly exists when it comes to the realm of tabletop gaming*, for debatable improvements. Sure professional testing would increase the quality of the game, but increased quality does not necessarily means more profit, and companies think in terms of profit.
*I mean, I googled it and it is all about amateur playtesting, apparently there is no such thing as professional tabletop testing.
the_scotsman wrote: kinda like the one all eldar had for 2cp that they said was the most broken thing ever had to be deleted completely utterly unfair except that it's 1cp instead.
To be fair we don't have stacking negatives anymore.
Also worth mentioning that Lightning Fast Reactions is now 1CP for DE, works in both melee and against shooting attacks, and isn't just limited to units with the correct keyword, unlike Smokescreen. And negative modifiers should stack, if one or more are coming from self caused sources, IE: moving with heavy weapons, advancing with assault weapons, hitting with a weapon with built-in -1 penalty like power fists and chain fists, etc, etc. You shouldn't be able to dodge penalties you caused yourself.
TIL Drukhari BIKER, Drukhari VEHICLE, or Drukhari BIKER wtihout the <haemonculus coven> keyword is not keyword-limiting.
I count 15 different units that can use Lightning Fast Reactions from Codex Drukhari that don't already have -1 to hit built-in making it functionally pointless.
There are 25 units in Codex Space Marines with the SMOKESCREEN keyword without getting into any chapter-specific, legends, or forgeworld options.
It doesn't work for INFANTRY? Guess my source on that is wrong. Are you just annoyed that some Space Marine vehicles have a similar strategem to Eldar? Because I'll gladly give it up on mine if they can have T9 back. Have fun shooting those S8 Dark Lances and Heat Lances at that.
sorry, no, I just typed BIKER twice becuase my brain broke.
I'm not annoyed at all, it's a perfectly fine stratagem for imperial stuff to have. Mostly, I was responding to the claim that 'SMOKESCREEN is keyword limited but LF React is not' by pointing out that you can use Smokescreen on more units than you can use LF reactions on.
And originally, I brought up Smokescreen to point out that no, space marine stuff wasn't just copy-pasted from codex 2.0 to codex 3.0. Almost all units were redesigned in some way, even if that way was pretty subtle like giving predators a 1cp -1 to hit stratagem in place of the utterly useless on them Smoke Launchers rule.
Kind of like how the redesigns on many drukhari units were subtle, like Reaver Jetbikes, which just got their Fixed Strength 4 melee weapon exchanged for Strength User+1 so you can benefit from boosts to Strength. Or Razorwing Jetfighters, which were unchanged except for getting the new Dark Lance and Splinter Cannons.
Watched clip where John Lennon said, that SM are much better than the numbers are showing, but alot of new players or less experience players are playing SM, so they tank their WR.
It really cannot be that hard to set up a functional playtesting and balancing system.
It takes money and it takes professional experience, which I don't think truly exists when it comes to the realm of tabletop gaming*, for debatable improvements. Sure professional testing would increase the quality of the game, but increased quality does not necessarily means more profit, and companies think in terms of profit.
*I mean, I googled it and it is all about amateur playtesting, apparently there is no such thing as professional tabletop testing.
Thorough playtesting would be nigh-on impossible.
You have, what, a ballpark figure of about 25 different factions in 40K - individual codexes plus major supplements that used to be codexes, like wolves, dark angels, blood angels. You really want to test each codex against each faction, probably at least a couple of times to avoid freak results, and at different points levels too. Lets say 3 games at each of the army size levels mentioned in the rule book. So that's 3 x 3 x 25 = 225 or so test games you want to play. Assuming 3 hours per game play-time plus some sort of analysis afterwards, that's 675 hours, or 16.875 UK 40 hour work weeks - for 2 testers at least, as it's probably not ideal to just play against yourself...
But even then you're not necessarily covering every possible unit in that army, or every different sub-faction or combination thereof. Dark Technomancers for instance is probably fine if you have a fluffy Realspace Raid detachment with maybe 1 unit of Wracks and a Talos. It's another matter if you have an entire 2000 points of liquifier Wracks, Liquifier Grots and Liquifier Taloseses.
^ This kind of testing would take a lot of time and yet give you only a very vague idea of the situation.
You need around 60 games from each faction against all other factions to have a better picture.
Plus, after each game you need to compile the results and think about a new list to test. Total time for each game is around 5 hours.
Marine chapters have to be tested as individual factions since they have their owndatasheets, their chapter traits, relics, powers, warlord traits and stratagems. This means that there are 32 factions.
5x60x32 = 9600 hours of 2 testers is the real figure to test ONE codex.
With a team of 20 testers is takes around 8 months to test a single codex (and around 300k dollars)
Spoletta wrote: ^
This kind of testing would take a lot of time and yes give you only a very vague idea of the situation.
You need around 60 games from each faction against all other factions to have a better picture.
Plus, after each game you need to compile the results and think about a new list to test. Total time for each game is around 5 hours.
Marine chapters have to be tested as individual factions since they have their owndatasheets, their chapter traits, relics, powers, warlord traits and stratagems. This means that there are 32 factions.
5x60x32 = 9600 hours of 2 testers is the real figure to test ONE codex.
With a team of 20 testers is takes around 8 months to test a single codex.
Yea 4 to 5 hours a game seems appropriate.
And this is why the community says, "Why couldn't GW see this beforehand?". Because we play more games collectively in one day then they could manage for the time they have to playtest. These community playtesters have other jobs as well.
The process could potentially be made better by allowing the wider community in on it, but given some of the perceptions of posters here I wouldn't bet against some people poisoning the well - either out of spite or misguided opinions.
Testers have access to a lot of sensitive information and you cannot put the wider community under a NDA. I know because I'm a tester and I know I would get my balls legally removed if I disclosed anything of my work.
Tyran wrote: Wider community testing will never happen.
Testers have access to a lot of sensitive information and you cannot put the wider community under a NDA. I know because I'm a tester and I know I would get my balls legally removed if I disclosed anything of my work.
Other companies make public playtesting work fine. The content needed for playtesting is only sensitive as a matter of corporate policy.
The sort of testing that 40K would reasonably require could easily be done. It wouldn't even necessarily require playing any games (it's not necessary to move a model physically, or roll dice, to know how an interaction will take place).
We perform far more complex testing with small teams, under very tight schedules, for safety critical software systems.
Setup would need some time initially, after that it's just iterating.
It really cannot be that hard to set up a functional playtesting and balancing system.
It takes money and it takes professional experience, which I don't think truly exists when it comes to the realm of tabletop gaming*, for debatable improvements. Sure professional testing would increase the quality of the game, but increased quality does not necessarily means more profit, and companies think in terms of profit.
*I mean, I googled it and it is all about amateur playtesting, apparently there is no such thing as professional tabletop testing.
I don't believe it takes money and professional experience, a buddy of mine set up playtesting for his game. Got together people, watched them play and asked them questions about their experience. Playtesting is not freaking rocket science and excusing GW for not doing it properly while saying it is rocket science is anti-consumer gak. GW has had decades to improve, the fact they haven't is proof they don't want to because they don't care about their consumers. The design team is bad, I could do better with a cat for proofreading, a couple of interns for data entry, an indian mathematician hired on Fiverr to check mathematical balance and loaning the Warhammer World janitorial staff on weekends for playtesting.
Crispy78 wrote: Thorough playtesting would be nigh-on impossible.
You have, what, a ballpark figure of about 25 different factions in 40K - individual codexes plus major supplements that used to be codexes, like wolves, dark angels, blood angels. You really want to test each codex against each faction, probably at least a couple of times to avoid freak results, and at different points levels too. Lets say 3 games at each of the army size levels mentioned in the rule book. So that's 3 x 3 x 25 = 225 or so test games you want to play. Assuming 3 hours per game play-time plus some sort of analysis afterwards, that's 675 hours, or 16.875 UK 40 hour work weeks - for 2 testers at least, as it's probably not ideal to just play against yourself...
But even then you're not necessarily covering every possible unit in that army, or every different sub-faction or combination thereof. Dark Technomancers for instance is probably fine if you have a fluffy Realspace Raid detachment with maybe 1 unit of Wracks and a Talos. It's another matter if you have an entire 2000 points of liquifier Wracks, Liquifier Grots and Liquifier Taloseses.
How far down the rabbit hole do you go?
400 army lists, that's 200 games. 10 playtesters playtesting 5 games every week, that's 40 weeks. I assume the janitorial staff at Warhammer World must be at least 10, so even accounting for Christmas vacation I just need them to come in on Saturdays and play a game of 40k.
You don't need to playtest liquifier spam against every army to find out it is busted.
Crispy78 wrote: Thorough playtesting would be nigh-on impossible.
You have, what, a ballpark figure of about 25 different factions in 40K - individual codexes plus major supplements that used to be codexes, like wolves, dark angels, blood angels. You really want to test each codex against each faction, probably at least a couple of times to avoid freak results, and at different points levels too. Lets say 3 games at each of the army size levels mentioned in the rule book. So that's 3 x 3 x 25 = 225 or so test games you want to play. Assuming 3 hours per game play-time plus some sort of analysis afterwards, that's 675 hours, or 16.875 UK 40 hour work weeks - for 2 testers at least, as it's probably not ideal to just play against yourself...
But even then you're not necessarily covering every possible unit in that army, or every different sub-faction or combination thereof. Dark Technomancers for instance is probably fine if you have a fluffy Realspace Raid detachment with maybe 1 unit of Wracks and a Talos. It's another matter if you have an entire 2000 points of liquifier Wracks, Liquifier Grots and Liquifier Taloseses.
How far down the rabbit hole do you go?
This isn't how testing works. It may be how the playtesting team is trying to go about things, but it's not remotely how you approach targeted testing.
If you're testing a video game for example, you invariably aren't playing it. One member of test might perform a playthrough if there is time for the sake of sanity, near a projects conclusion, but it isn't necessary.
Exhaustive testing is never even attempted for almost any software, as it's considered a practical impossibility from the get go.
I don't believe it takes money and professional experience, a buddy of mine set up playtesting for his game. Got together people, watched them play and asked them questions about their experience. Playtesting is not freaking rocket science and excusing GW for not doing it properly while saying it is rocket science is anti-consumer gak. GW has had decades to improve, the fact they haven't is proof they don't want to because they don't care about their consumers. The design team is bad, I could do better with a cat for proofreading, a couple of interns for data entry, an indian mathematician hired on Fiverr to check mathematical balance and loaning the Warhammer World janitorial staff on weekends for playtesting.
Testing may not be rocket science, but it is a professionally researched field.
The rest is irrelevant, no company runs on caring, that's why the videogame industry is full of lootboxes and gacha games that make 40k look consumer friendly.
It really cannot be that hard to set up a functional playtesting and balancing system.
It takes money and it takes professional experience, which I don't think truly exists when it comes to the realm of tabletop gaming*, for debatable improvements. Sure professional testing would increase the quality of the game, but increased quality does not necessarily means more profit, and companies think in terms of profit.
*I mean, I googled it and it is all about amateur playtesting, apparently there is no such thing as professional tabletop testing.
I think it's pretty obvious GW us making enough money to do more than they're doing right now, regardless. The real question is are they motivated to do it? The answer appears to be "no".
It really cannot be that hard to set up a functional playtesting and balancing system.
It takes money and it takes professional experience, which I don't think truly exists when it comes to the realm of tabletop gaming*, for debatable improvements. Sure professional testing would increase the quality of the game, but increased quality does not necessarily means more profit, and companies think in terms of profit.
*I mean, I googled it and it is all about amateur playtesting, apparently there is no such thing as professional tabletop testing.
Thorough playtesting would be nigh-on impossible.
You have, what, a ballpark figure of about 25 different factions in 40K - individual codexes plus major supplements that used to be codexes, like wolves, dark angels, blood angels. You really want to test each codex against each faction, probably at least a couple of times to avoid freak results, and at different points levels too. Lets say 3 games at each of the army size levels mentioned in the rule book. So that's 3 x 3 x 25 = 225 or so test games you want to play. Assuming 3 hours per game play-time plus some sort of analysis afterwards, that's 675 hours, or 16.875 UK 40 hour work weeks - for 2 testers at least, as it's probably not ideal to just play against yourself...
But even then you're not necessarily covering every possible unit in that army, or every different sub-faction or combination thereof. Dark Technomancers for instance is probably fine if you have a fluffy Realspace Raid detachment with maybe 1 unit of Wracks and a Talos. It's another matter if you have an entire 2000 points of liquifier Wracks, Liquifier Grots and Liquifier Taloseses.
How far down the rabbit hole do you go?
I don't want to be offensive but you have no idea of playtesting if you really believe thats how it is done in... any kind of testing facility for whatever it is: videogames, products, software, etc...
Now I'll say that I doubt GW can, even if they want, make a really profesional playtesting facility for their rules. But they can improve a TON, without that much great of an inversion. They just dont need to do it.
It really cannot be that hard to set up a functional playtesting and balancing system.
It takes money and it takes professional experience, which I don't think truly exists when it comes to the realm of tabletop gaming*, for debatable improvements. Sure professional testing would increase the quality of the game, but increased quality does not necessarily means more profit, and companies think in terms of profit.
*I mean, I googled it and it is all about amateur playtesting, apparently there is no such thing as professional tabletop testing.
I don't believe it takes money and professional experience, a buddy of mine set up playtesting for his game. Got together people, watched them play and asked them questions about their experience. Playtesting is not freaking rocket science and excusing GW for not doing it properly while saying it is rocket science is anti-consumer gak. GW has had decades to improve, the fact they haven't is proof they don't want to because they don't care about their consumers. The design team is bad, I could do better with a cat for proofreading, a couple of interns for data entry, an indian mathematician hired on Fiverr to check mathematical balance and loaning the Warhammer World janitorial staff on weekends for playtesting.
Crispy78 wrote: Thorough playtesting would be nigh-on impossible.
You have, what, a ballpark figure of about 25 different factions in 40K - individual codexes plus major supplements that used to be codexes, like wolves, dark angels, blood angels. You really want to test each codex against each faction, probably at least a couple of times to avoid freak results, and at different points levels too. Lets say 3 games at each of the army size levels mentioned in the rule book. So that's 3 x 3 x 25 = 225 or so test games you want to play. Assuming 3 hours per game play-time plus some sort of analysis afterwards, that's 675 hours, or 16.875 UK 40 hour work weeks - for 2 testers at least, as it's probably not ideal to just play against yourself...
But even then you're not necessarily covering every possible unit in that army, or every different sub-faction or combination thereof. Dark Technomancers for instance is probably fine if you have a fluffy Realspace Raid detachment with maybe 1 unit of Wracks and a Talos. It's another matter if you have an entire 2000 points of liquifier Wracks, Liquifier Grots and Liquifier Taloseses.
How far down the rabbit hole do you go?
400 army lists, that's 200 games. 10 playtesters playtesting 5 games every week, that's 40 weeks. I assume the janitorial staff at Warhammer World must be at least 10, so even accounting for Christmas vacation I just need them to come in on Saturdays and play a game of 40k.
You don't need to playtest liquifier spam against every army to find out it is busted.
Problems:
1) Owning the models
2) Be competent enough to understand the difference between a listbuilding and a player loss.
3) Have enough variety in playtesting opponents so that you don't play hard counters ( e.g. DG vs DE w/ DT )
Not all DE wins are blow outs. They DO have a harder time winning against many opponents. Such outcomes may not warrant slamming the panic button in playtesting.
Also that isn't enough iterations to tackle most matchups and I can't tell if your '40 weeks' comment is sarcasm or not, because it highlights the issue.
I don't want to be offensive but you have no idea of playtesting if you really believe thats how it is done in... any kind of testing facility for whatever it is: videogames, products, software, etc...
Now I'll say that I doubt GW can, even if they want, make a really profesional playtesting facility for their rules. But they can improve a TON, without that much great of an inversion. They just dont need to do it.
Yep. They could absolutely do it, they just don't want to because there's no need. More balanced rules don't sell better, and they like their current amateur playtesting program as a carrot they can dangle in front of influencers, and it costs them literally nothing. So why make any changes?
I would assume you'd do what the community does when the codex leaks come out:
-theorycraft to try and find a few powerful combos (e.g. liquifier wracks in dark tech, Obrose Kabalite warriors with 30" range rapid fire poison, Black Heart or Obrose 5-man blaster squads, test of skill hellions, CoS razor succubus
-Test those models in a skew list and in a tac list against some common competitive builds, and provide some feedback.
you don't have to test every option on every unit in every subfaction. the strong combos are generally fairly clear from the get.
Tyran wrote: Wider community testing will never happen.
Testers have access to a lot of sensitive information and you cannot put the wider community under a NDA. I know because I'm a tester and I know I would get my balls legally removed if I disclosed anything of my work.
What are beta rules? Wide community testing, woah!
Testing may not be rocket science, but it is a professionally researched field.
So is the making of ice cream, making ice cream isn't rocket science either.
The rest is irrelevant, no company runs on caring, that's why the videogame industry is full of lootboxes and gacha games that make 40k look consumer friendly.
The second you stop caring about the consumer is the second you start going downhill. Gambling is not inherently unfriendly to consumers assuming the data on the mechanics of the gamble is available and people are given warnings not to spend more than they can afford. I am in no way advocating for GW to sacrifice profits, I am saying that the silly designers need to sacrifice their pride and put in a tiny bit of directed effort to make a more balanced and profitable game.
It really cannot be that hard to set up a functional playtesting and balancing system.
It takes money and it takes professional experience, which I don't think truly exists when it comes to the realm of tabletop gaming*, for debatable improvements. Sure professional testing would increase the quality of the game, but increased quality does not necessarily means more profit, and companies think in terms of profit.
*I mean, I googled it and it is all about amateur playtesting, apparently there is no such thing as professional tabletop testing.
I don't believe it takes money and professional experience, a buddy of mine set up playtesting for his game. Got together people, watched them play and asked them questions about their experience. Playtesting is not freaking rocket science and excusing GW for not doing it properly while saying it is rocket science is anti-consumer gak. GW has had decades to improve, the fact they haven't is proof they don't want to because they don't care about their consumers. The design team is bad, I could do better with a cat for proofreading, a couple of interns for data entry, an indian mathematician hired on Fiverr to check mathematical balance and loaning the Warhammer World janitorial staff on weekends for playtesting.
Crispy78 wrote: Thorough playtesting would be nigh-on impossible.
You have, what, a ballpark figure of about 25 different factions in 40K - individual codexes plus major supplements that used to be codexes, like wolves, dark angels, blood angels. You really want to test each codex against each faction, probably at least a couple of times to avoid freak results, and at different points levels too. Lets say 3 games at each of the army size levels mentioned in the rule book. So that's 3 x 3 x 25 = 225 or so test games you want to play. Assuming 3 hours per game play-time plus some sort of analysis afterwards, that's 675 hours, or 16.875 UK 40 hour work weeks - for 2 testers at least, as it's probably not ideal to just play against yourself...
But even then you're not necessarily covering every possible unit in that army, or every different sub-faction or combination thereof. Dark Technomancers for instance is probably fine if you have a fluffy Realspace Raid detachment with maybe 1 unit of Wracks and a Talos. It's another matter if you have an entire 2000 points of liquifier Wracks, Liquifier Grots and Liquifier Taloseses.
How far down the rabbit hole do you go?
400 army lists, that's 200 games. 10 playtesters playtesting 5 games every week, that's 40 weeks. I assume the janitorial staff at Warhammer World must be at least 10, so even accounting for Christmas vacation I just need them to come in on Saturdays and play a game of 40k.
You don't need to playtest liquifier spam against every army to find out it is busted.
Problems:
1) Owning the models 2) Be competent enough to understand the difference between a listbuilding and a player loss. 3) Have enough variety in playtesting opponents so that you don't play hard counters ( e.g. DG vs DE w/ DT )
Not all DE wins are blow outs. They DO have a harder time winning against many opponents. Such outcomes may not warrant slamming the panic button in playtesting.
Also that isn't enough iterations to tackle most matchups and I can't tell if your '40 weeks' comment is sarcasm or not, because it highlights the issue.
1) Proxy, that's how it's done in card games. LOL it's how people do it when they playtest a unit at home to figure out whether it's worth buying. 2) I figure my janitors will be able to tell after a year or two of playing a game a week with a focus on providing feedback and determining this. "Pro" 40k players should be able to get this from day 7. 3) I figured the janitors would borrow the Eavy Metal display armies to playtest, that should give access to every army. The current lot of playtesters have access to at least 6 armies per team.
I am fully serious about the 40 weeks comment. That would be for playtesting the entire edition. As Scotsman said you would of course be directed with list-builds and not tell people specifically to avoid building skew lists (as GW has done in the past). As others have pointed out you often don't even need to roll dice sometimes, which is where my Fiverr Indian comes in.
the_scotsman wrote: I would assume you'd do what the community does when the codex leaks come out:
-theorycraft to try and find a few powerful combos (e.g. liquifier wracks in dark tech, Obrose Kabalite warriors with 30" range rapid fire poison, Black Heart or Obrose 5-man blaster squads, test of skill hellions, CoS razor succubus
-Test those models in a skew list and in a tac list against some common competitive builds, and provide some feedback.
you don't have to test every option on every unit in every subfaction. the strong combos are generally fairly clear from the get.
This is pretty much what I'd expect what we'd call 'exploratory testing' to look like in 40K. That's testing outside of a script, using experience of a product, environment, engine, game, whatever to find issues in a more unstructured manner. It's not great in terms of making sure you've covered everything, but it's useful for finding 'defects' that might otherwise be missed or are unusual interactions.
It's what I'd hope the playtesting group are doing, as I can't see them having any real structure or organisation.
StrayIight wrote: It's what I'd hope the playtesting group are doing, as I can't see them having any real structure or organisation.
Yep. "Here's the book. Play it a few times and let us know what you think."
Yeah. Nail, head, and direct hit I fear.
Because it's free. More than that it's with the same people who basically do free advertising for GW, so for GW it's free playtesting and free increased product awareness and advertising. It's an aweaome deal for corperate.
What are beta rules? Wide community testing, woah!
Beta testing is mostly done for performance and scalability, which are not really are relevant parameters on tabletop gaming, but are fundamental ones on videogames, specially multiplayer ones.
Also wide community beta rules is more of a marketing ploy than actual testing.
So is the making of ice cream, making ice cream isn't rocket science either.
The point is that it is something that requires professionals.
The second you stop caring about the consumer is the second you start going downhill. Gambling is not inherently unfriendly to consumers assuming the data on the mechanics of the gamble is available and people are given warnings not to spend more than they can afford. I am in no way advocating for GW to sacrifice profits, I am saying that the silly designers need to sacrifice their pride and put in a tiny bit of directed effort to make a more balanced and profitable game.
Gambling is inherently anti-consumer, as it is actually messes with our brains. So is marketing BTW.
That's absolutely how it works, based on the statements of people who have been involved in it. There's nothing remotely systematic or organized about it. It's really just an incentive program for whoever they want to flatter, the free labor they get in return isn't the important part.
Uh....Good? So you're saying Space Marines are achieving the goal of where a faction ought to be in competitive play? Solid but not overwhelming performance with an extremely high playrate in competitive play?
So why do we need to worry about marines again?
All I am saying is that DE seem to have been given a style of design distinct from marines. Marines design in 8th and 9th seem to be driven by one factor. Here is a classic marine unit, let us replace it with a primaris unit. Now this doesn't mean the primaris option are or have to be bad . But it does end up, and I know people don't like it when I do this, but this is like a bunch of countries decide to skim a pool of 1000 youths to get some good wrestlers each year. And they get some better and some worse ones. And then there is Dagestan, Kirgistan etc where there are wrestler clans and families that are known to have been wrestlers in the court of Timur, and when you see those wrestler fight you see the difference in optimisation. Marine good seems mostly not planed. The way GW was suprised that salamander armies can run on almost just aggresors. GW doesn't like to be suprised, so they nerfed it very fast. On the other hand they want stuff like harlis or DE works in a specific way, and there is nothing wrong in it, but their lists feel as if someone first build a list and give rules to units, and later assigned costs etc.
ah and I don't think that pre DE anyone worried about marines, if the played to win their games with proper armies. Aside for that very short lived time of salamanders being good. As far as core rules in 8th armies like SoB for example did much better and were more of a threat, most of the time. And just like with harlequins one have to remember that SoB, were good in 9th without a 9th update and a 9th codex. I think people worried more about them, or what certain soups are going to do to the playfield. Because clearly GW is not thinking much about that kind of a play in 9th.
If GW really want to balance their game they should provide their app for free, including a way to report results (providing a reason to do so) and then grind the data...
Nowadays it's easy and essentially cheap.
Really, the idea that the entire process should be internally managed or done with internal resources is pretty obsolete.
Of course that would require a radical change in their overall products strategy.
To go back to the topic, I'll try next week a game against Drukhari. I'll bring a Dark Angel DW/RW army. Should be an heavyweight match, I'll let you in know how it goes
the_scotsman wrote: I would assume you'd do what the community does when the codex leaks come out:
-theorycraft to try and find a few powerful combos (e.g. liquifier wracks in dark tech, Obrose Kabalite warriors with 30" range rapid fire poison, Black Heart or Obrose 5-man blaster squads, test of skill hellions, CoS razor succubus
-Test those models in a skew list and in a tac list against some common competitive builds, and provide some feedback.
you don't have to test every option on every unit in every subfaction. the strong combos are generally fairly clear from the get.
This is pretty much what I'd expect what we'd call 'exploratory testing' to look like in 40K. That's testing outside of a script, using experience of a product, environment, engine, game, whatever to find issues in a more unstructured manner. It's not great in terms of making sure you've covered everything, but it's useful for finding 'defects' that might otherwise be missed or are unusual interactions.
It's what I'd hope the playtesting group are doing, as I can't see them having any real structure or organisation.
True, its also not like any of these books are being released in a vacuum. They're revisions. You don't necessarily need to do extensive testing on drukhari beasts, or reavers, or scourges, or razorwing jetfighters or any other unit that's barely changing at all, just run some quick mathhammer to make sure those things are performing within the same range as other units near the same price point from other codexes. It's interactions with new rules and traits you really have to target, and it's clear that they do a lot of general, holistic, full-army tests and not any kind of focused problem-hunting.
Yep. "Here's the book. Play it a few times and let us know what you think."
And then we change the rules of the stuff you have been playtesting. And because we hid the names of the people who are in the design, now the playtesters can sparkle with their eyes and smile to the public, catching all the backlash.
Cybtroll wrote: If GW really want to balance their game they should provide their app for free, including a way to report results (providing a reason to do so) and then grind the data...
And that is how you get a lot of useless data because there is no way to assure its value and people will abuse such feature.
the_scotsman wrote: [
True, its also not like any of these books are being released in a vacuum. They're revisions. You don't necessarily need to do extensive testing on drukhari beasts, or reavers, or scourges, or razorwing jetfighters or any other unit that's barely changing at all, just run some quick mathhammer to make sure those things are performing within the same range as other units near the same price point from other codexes. It's interactions with new rules and traits you really have to target, and it's clear that they do a lot of general, holistic, full-army tests and not any kind of focused problem-hunting.
That is very true. But still if I in my backwater place of living can get info 6 months back, that raiders are very good and kind of a undercosted. Then I assume that the testers and GW sees it too.
Although I was told by mr CCS, that the knowladge doesn't mean GW is interested in doing any changes. And hearing some historical evidance of undercosted stuff, this seems to hold a large chunk of truth.
Cybtroll wrote: If GW really want to balance their game they should provide their app for free, including a way to report results (providing a reason to do so) and then grind the data...
Nowadays it's easy and essentially cheap.
Really, the idea that the entire process should be internally managed or done with internal resources is pretty obsolete.
Of course that would require a radical change in their overall products strategy.
To go back to the topic, I'll try next week a game against Drukhari. I'll bring a Dark Angel DW/RW army. Should be an heavyweight match, I'll let you in know how it goes
There are so many malcontents I would be wary of trusting public data. There would be no way to separate the noise. Maybe an invite program where the results you post are anonymous so you don't fear getting punted.
Cybtroll wrote: If GW really want to balance their game they should provide their app for free, including a way to report results (providing a reason to do so) and then grind the data...
And that is how you get a lot of useless data because there is no way to assure its value and people will abuse such feature.
Not in a tournament setting, because the number of people who are willing to pay for a hotel and supply a wack list is rather small.
GW even without an app, should see that DE armies are running tax raiders, 3 units of wracks, drazh, styfe succubus and even specific weapon load outs. Now what they do with the info is another thing. Who knows maybe GW thinks that starting a DE army with 3 patrol boxs, is enough of a monetary entice for them to leave it like so for some time. \\\
But the most fun part what the playtester say is about the comming army that will reign the DE in. Which of course is nice. for that one army players. For everyone else it better not mean that we just get DE dropped to 68% win rates and a new army sitting at 70% plus.
It really cannot be that hard to set up a functional playtesting and balancing system.
It takes money and it takes professional experience, which I don't think truly exists when it comes to the realm of tabletop gaming*, for debatable improvements. Sure professional testing would increase the quality of the game, but increased quality does not necessarily means more profit, and companies think in terms of profit.
*I mean, I googled it and it is all about amateur playtesting, apparently there is no such thing as professional tabletop testing.
I think it's pretty obvious GW us making enough money to do more than they're doing right now, regardless. The real question is are they motivated to do it? The answer appears to be "no".
and that's the answer, there is no reason for them to do anything, some squeeky wheels on the intertubes mean nowt so long as the spi...money flows
Tyran wrote: ... Also wide community beta rules is more of a marketing ploy than actual testing.
Not really no, beta rules have been changed to improve balance based on testing done by the community, take Custodes FW units. They dominated tournaments which led to them getting stat and points changes.
So is the making of ice cream, making ice cream isn't rocket science either.
The point is that it is something that requires professionals.
You can make ice cream at home, didn't go so well last time I tried it and now I'm on a diet but there are Youtube videos on how to do it. So often when consumer advocates ask for rough balance you guys let perfection be the enemy of the good. I just want ice cream, it doesn't need to be made by scientists. 70+% win rate is not ice cream, it's just room temperature cream, 58% win rate is home made ice cream, 52% is factory ice cream.
Gambling is inherently anti-consumer, as it is actually messes with our brains. So is marketing BTW.
Hahaha, everything messes with your brain dude. Watch out for GMOs, they contain chemical compounds and atoms... Like everything else.
Turnip Jedi wrote: and that's the answer, there is no reason for them to do anything, some squeeky wheels on the intertubes mean nowt so long as the spi...money flows
Not in a tournament setting, because the number of people who are willing to pay for a hotel and supply a wack list is rather small.
GW even without an app, should see that DE armies are running tax raiders, 3 units of wracks, drazh, styfe succubus and even specific weapon load outs. Now what they do with the info is another thing. Who knows maybe GW thinks that starting a DE army with 3 patrol boxs, is enough of a monetary entice for them to leave it like so for some time. \\\
But the most fun part what the playtester say is about the comming army that will reign the DE in. Which of course is nice. for that one army players. For everyone else it better not mean that we just get DE dropped to 68% win rates and a new army sitting at 70% plus.
Tournaments already kinda document this, and you still don't want to leave it to the individual player, because that DE player that just bought a lot of Wracks and Raiders really has an incentive of not reporting their wins.
Uh....Good? So you're saying Space Marines are achieving the goal of where a faction ought to be in competitive play? Solid but not overwhelming performance with an extremely high playrate in competitive play?
So why do we need to worry about marines again?
All I am saying is that DE seem to have been given a style of design distinct from marines. Marines design in 8th and 9th seem to be driven by one factor. Here is a classic marine unit, let us replace it with a primaris unit. Now this doesn't mean the primaris option are or have to be bad . But it does end up, and I know people don't like it when I do this, but this is like a bunch of countries decide to skim a pool of 1000 youths to get some good wrestlers each year. And they get some better and some worse ones. And then there is Dagestan, Kirgistan etc where there are wrestler clans and families that are known to have been wrestlers in the court of Timur, and when you see those wrestler fight you see the difference in optimisation. Marine good seems mostly not planed. The way GW was suprised that salamander armies can run on almost just aggresors. GW doesn't like to be suprised, so they nerfed it very fast. On the other hand they want stuff like harlis or DE works in a specific way, and there is nothing wrong in it, but their lists feel as if someone first build a list and give rules to units, and later assigned costs etc.
ah and I don't think that pre DE anyone worried about marines, if the played to win their games with proper armies. Aside for that very short lived time of salamanders being good. As far as core rules in 8th armies like SoB for example did much better and were more of a threat, most of the time. And just like with harlequins one have to remember that SoB, were good in 9th without a 9th update and a 9th codex. I think people worried more about them, or what certain soups are going to do to the playfield. Because clearly GW is not thinking much about that kind of a play in 9th.
Yeah, obviously primaris units are often intended to soft-squat existing firstborn options, and obviously the marine range is so sprawling that there's very little in terms of a coherent design philosophy for how they're supposed to play.
Drukhari have 3 general styles, and so they're able to design the rules more holistically with the full codex in mind. They know if they put an upgrade on a Raider to allow Rapid Fire weapons to fire out to full range, that the sole unit you're going to use that on is Kabalite Warriors (slash trueborn) and they know that firing at full range will put you out of range for all the available special weapon options, but not out of the range of the heavy weapon options.
Space marines with their 15 overlapping options for every single conceivable role, not so much. So the approach is more scattershot. It has to be, if marine players enjoy having a billion options for everything. Which they seem to, seeing as there's the massive unwillingness to even give up such distinct, unique unit choices as...let's see...Space Marine Bikers, instead of just running them as the new Space Marine Primaris tm Outriders tm armed with the COMPLETELY DIFFERENT twin bolt RIFLES instead of just regular old twin bolt GUNS.
Its like....how can I best explain this? let's say its like wrestling. Lets say theres a wrestler named Rock The Dwayne Johnson who is the most peoples' favorite wrestleman, and he's so much everyone's favorite that the wrestleboss mandates in everyone's contract that every other match they fight has to be against The Dwayne, but to keep it fresh and fun and interesting The Dwayne gets to have 16 different costumes and characters where sometimes he's a face, sometimes he's a heel, sometimes he's the tooth fairy, sometimes he's trying to warn the city of los angeles that there's a big earthquake coming but he has to fight this other wrestler first, sometimes hes a jungle explorer trapped in a board game, etc. Odds are good that The Dwayne is not going to be quite as good at any of his 16 different bits as the lesser known heel wrestler whose only bit is forcing his opponent to smell his stinky sock to knock him out as his signature finishing move. But because the wrestleboss said half the matches must be against The Dwayne, everyone will take his half-hearted tooth fairy bit over him just having the one character and personality trait of being a big strong oily man who does a thing with his eyebrow.
Unless the policy changes, and The Dwayne is not shoved down everyone's throat as The Mandatory Wrestler Everyone Must Always Fight and All Fans Must Consume, then he's never going to be able to particularly good at any one given thing. it's just the nature of the beast.
Let's be honest, a lot of GWs playtesting could be done with computer simulation against simulated targets. While the game does have a lot of unique units, it has relatively few offensive and defensive profiles, so you could pick a few of those and plot out how effective a set of attacks is against a good selection of defensive profiles. Then you fire specific weapons at that same unit and see if it's meeting expectations defensively. This, combined with proper on-table testing to make sure that the simulations match reality could make a better game.
I still hold that you can't perfectly test a game with as many moving pieces and intentional synergies as 40k has. It's just too much raw math, but it shouldn't be impossible to get close enough to avoid massive imbalances at release that get fixed via quarterly points updates as play data reaches the design team.
Not really no, beta rules have been changed to improve balance based on testing done by the community, take Custodes FW units. They dominated tournaments which led to them getting stat and points changes.
If something is dominating tournaments then it isn't really beta testing is it? but published rules falsely advertised as beta rules.
You can make ice cream at home, didn't go so well last time I tried it and now I'm on a diet but there are Youtube videos on how to do it. So often when consumer advocates ask for rough balance you guys let perfection be the enemy of the good. I just want ice cream, it doesn't need to be made by scientists. 70+% win rate is not ice cream, it's just room temperature cream, 58% win rate is home made ice cream, 52% is factory ice cream.
And how is your home made ice cream any different from the already quite lax standards of GW using competitive players for testing?
Hahaha, everything messes with your brain dude. Watch out for GMOs, they contain chemical compounds and atoms... Like everything else.
But with different degrees, gambling does it to the point there is a reason minors are not allowed in casinos in most of the world.
When it comes to game balance. The "professionals" that have the best grasp on balance are the actual players. There is no degree you could have which would give you a better grasp on the game balance than someone with 20 years of experience within that game itself. A lot of the balancing is just basic statistics too.
PPD
PPW
This is very simple stuff. Any disparities in these areas are obvious red flags. Any playtesting mechanic which lets flaws like that through on the PPW/PPD area basically proves that no effective testing is actually taking place.
Yeah, obviously primaris units are often intended to soft-squat existing firstborn options, and obviously the marine range is so sprawling that there's very little in terms of a coherent design philosophy for how they're supposed to play.
Drukhari have 3 general styles, and so they're able to design the rules more holistically with the full codex in mind. They know if they put an upgrade on a Raider to allow Rapid Fire weapons to fire out to full range, that the sole unit you're going to use that on is Kabalite Warriors (slash trueborn) and they know that firing at full range will put you out of range for all the available special weapon options, but not out of the range of the heavy weapon options.
yes I understand that, but again the difference between marines and something like DE right now is that. SM stuff, when it is actually broken vide salamander aggresor lists, they are that way unintentionaly. GW doesn't seem to be in favour of people building their entire army out of 9 boxs of ETB aggresors. And as I said this doesn't mean that primaris units, or even classic marine units can't be good or even very good.
It is the combinations of stuff with DE that are so striking, and which is also the core of the problem of fixing them with points changes. There is just too many things happening at once for it to not have been designed and put there on purpose. Maybe the whole DT thing is, again maybe, something that GW forgot about their own rules. Maybe the all patrols giving CP is that too. But raiders being undercosted, units in raiders being under costed, combination of non interaction, but with full efficiency between powerful units and being in open topped transports. The design/lore paradigma of glass cannon breaking apart on the reality of +5invs, with high T, or at least T that requires multi shot higher strenght weapons, when it comes to implementation.
Again just like with SM I was against nerfs, I do not wish for DE. I think that their armies should be fleets of venoms and raiders. That makes sense lore wise, and I think a large chunk of DE players like that way of playing. But there problem how efficient GW made skimmers and fly in 9th. I did not like being shot off the table in 8th, because someone saw a banner on my dude. I like the LoS blocking terrain rule. But clearly someone has not thought it over with transport that fly in mind. And it shows in the results of armies that have access to them too. The fact that raiders are over costed, and that their main weapon is probably over costed too is just a bonus, that brings them up from what harlequin did all 9th ed, to the place they are in right now.
But who knows, maybe when GW fixs psychic secondaries GK are going to become broken too and I am going to be defending their right to max out secondaries by turn 3. In the end it boils down to GW wanting or not wanting to do changes to DE. If they don't, then we will have a DE warping meta. There were metas like that in the past. If they do change something about DE, I hope the changes are big enough to bring them down to other armies level and doesn't turn out to be a WD codex Inari.
Xenomancers wrote: When it comes to game balance. The "professionals" that have the best grasp on balance are the actual players. There is no degree you could have which would give you a better grasp on the game balance than someone with 20 years of experience within that game itself. A lot of the balancing is just basic statistics too.
PPD
PPW
This is very simple stuff. Any disparities in these areas are obvious red flags. Any playtesting mechanic which lets flaws like that through on the PPW/PPD area basically proves that no effective testing is actually taking place.
This just plain isn't true. Players are the last people you should ask because they're heavily financially and emotionally invested into the hobby and will have very clear biases. They might be able to spot flaws or irregularities but that's a very different beast to balancing entire factions.
Xenomancers wrote: When it comes to game balance. The "professionals" that have the best grasp on balance are the actual players. There is no degree you could have which would give you a better grasp on the game balance than someone with 20 years of experience within that game itself. A lot of the balancing is just basic statistics too.
PPD
PPW
This is very simple stuff. Any disparities in these areas are obvious red flags. Any playtesting mechanic which lets flaws like that through on the PPW/PPD area basically proves that no effective testing is actually taking place.
PPW and PPD are absolutely not the issue.
They are quite fine in the DE dex. Everything wrong about that dex comes from synergies and interactions.
Taken in a vacuum no single datasheet of DE is really that good. It is always due to a stratagem, a relic, a trait.
The only thing you could potentially catch in the DE dex is the court. And the court is not the best unit at its role, so we don't know for which standard the GW is gunning on those type of models.
I don't know mr S, raiders with the gun they have at 85 pts, breaking the barrier of just being efficient. The fact that they can ignore transport rules, fly etc is just a bonus. If orks had a 85pts trukk that is as efficient as raiders, ork armies would be a swarm of vehicles too.
Sam with Drazhar. If a person who plays the army, and is the armies playtesters, says that he would run him at 25 more points, then mistakes were made durning rules writing or cost determination.
Xenomancers wrote: When it comes to game balance. The "professionals" that have the best grasp on balance are the actual players. There is no degree you could have which would give you a better grasp on the game balance than someone with 20 years of experience within that game itself. A lot of the balancing is just basic statistics too.
PPD
PPW
This is very simple stuff. Any disparities in these areas are obvious red flags. Any playtesting mechanic which lets flaws like that through on the PPW/PPD area basically proves that no effective testing is actually taking place.
*Looks at ALL the balance related discussion of various units and factions in the past on Dakka*
This just plain isn't true. Players are the last people you should ask because they're heavily financially and emotionally invested into the hobby and will have very clear biases. They might be able to spot flaws or irregularities but that's a very different beast to balancing entire factions.
But that can be said about any statistic taken from human being, yet there are mechanisms that can compansate for the bias.
For example. As a designer you check how many wreck patrols have an actual homonculus as a leader and not drazhar. If the data says it is the majority of cases in and outside of tournaments, and you designed, we assume here, the rules for DT to be a homonculus coven, then this means something is working not as intended. If all raiders are run with the same type of weapon, and with same numbers, then the designers has to ask a question, if that is what he wanted. If it is what GW wanted, then it is cool. But it would be nice to some Designer to come out after the first two weeks of the DE codex, and say yes the DE codex is fine, works as intended, we will monitor if stuff doesn't work not as intended and if it does we will fix it. The both DE and non DE playing people would know what to expect in the next few months.
It is the combinations of stuff with DE that are so striking, and which is also the core of the problem of fixing them with points changes. There is just too many things happening at once for it to not have been designed and put there on purpose.
I mean, I don't know what to say to this other than....no? I really don't think so?
Nothing about the entire Haemonculus Covens third of the book is broken without Dark Technomancers' interaction with one single, specific weapon option. We know from the TTT playtesters that at least one major weapon change (dark lances) was a late addition that the playtesters didnt get to test. DT worked VERY similarly to how it does now previously and was not nearly as much of a problem because back then, Liquifiers were S3, APd3, 8" range. It is INCREDIBLY easy to imagine DT liquifiers happening by this happening:
-playtesters get book
-Liquifiers are not S4 AP-2 12" range, maybe they're just S3 ApD3 12", and they're not nearly as powerful with DT.
-Some playtesters not playing DT tell GW "liquifiers feel a little weak at Strength 3 for 10 points - that's as much as a heavy flamer, and they're only a little bit better than a normal flamer.
-GW changes liquifiers to what they are now, DT liquifiers now wreck face.
Similiarly, the craziest stuff in the wych cults third of the book hinges almost entirely on stratagems from the Book of Rust - Competitive Edge, 1CP no overwatch strat, 4++ invuln strat, Fight Again strat comboing with the Book of Rust Reroll Wounds strat, No Fall Back Whip relic, Grave Lotus relic.
Did the playtesters who got the codex also get Book of Rust? If not, how would they have caught any of these interactions? Without Compedge+Razorflails, the succubus is maybe a little bit undercosted with particular combos, but not NEARLY as bonkers as she is with the relic+trait from BoR.
I'm sorry that a secret conspiracy by evil business monsters is easier for you to imagine than the kind of basic miscommunications that come up literally every day in my job in an R+D field.
Again just like with SM I was against nerfs, I do not wish for DE. I think that their armies should be fleets of venoms and raiders. That makes sense lore wise, and I think a large chunk of DE players like that way of playing. But there problem how efficient GW made skimmers and fly in 9th. I did not like being shot off the table in 8th, because someone saw a banner on my dude. I like the LoS blocking terrain rule. But clearly someone has not thought it over with transport that fly in mind. And it shows in the results of armies that have access to them too. The fact that raiders are over costed, and that their main weapon is probably over costed too is just a bonus, that brings them up from what harlequin did all 9th ed, to the place they are in right now.
you keep saying this, but I still do not really understand how fly is any crazier in 9th ed than it was in 8th ed ITC (which remember, was most of the 8th ed tournament scene that kept up stats). In 9th ed models with Fly lost fall back and charge, and if the model is taking advantage of the Obscuring terrain feature...then they didn't fly over it. They just rolled up behind it, then the models inside moved thru it to make their charge.
That's literally exactly the same as what they could do in 8th with ITC magic box terrain. In fact, it's less good, because the model with fly now can't fall back and charge, and it has to be behind the Obscuring terrain and not just sitting in the magic box of can't shoot me.
Being able to move over terain without penalty is occasionally nice, but generally speaking I think if you took Fly away from DE transports for some reason it'd be a less substantial nerf than a 15pt points nerf. I've played 3 games with my drukhari so far since the codex, and several more since 9th dropped, and I really don't recall many situations where being able to move over terrain with no penalty has been a particularly amazing benefit - mostly it's just nice how fast they are. you could and I do the exact same play pattern with a Goliath truck as with a Raider full of kabalites - the raider is better because a Dark Lance is better than a BS4+ twin autocannon and a heavy stubber, because raiders get actual chapter tactics instead of GSC which is stuck in the Codex 1.0 8th ed stone age, and because the unit that goes inside Raiders is way better than the unit that goes inside Goliaths.
In a perfect world, GW would be using external professional testers, not their own designers and much less actual players. That's because while everyone has bias, external testers are the less biased while designers and players are the most biased.
Karol wrote: I don't know mr S, raiders with the gun they have at 85 pts, breaking the barrier of just being efficient. The fact that they can ignore transport rules, fly etc is just a bonus. If orks had a 85pts trukk that is as efficient as raiders, ork armies would be a swarm of vehicles too.
Sam with Drazhar. If a person who plays the army, and is the armies playtesters, says that he would run him at 25 more points, then mistakes were made durning rules writing or cost determination.
^yeah this is my exact point. Fly is just a very occasional bonus to the Raider, it's not some key core thing that makes it good, there are a gak ton of transports with Fly that are way worse than Raiders.
GSC basically do have a transport that's a very slightly worse raider for 85pts, and it pretty much is what competitive GSC armies are made up of. The problem is, it's got several things that it does worse than a raider (no chapter tactics, 6+ shrug instead of 5+ invuln, slightly worse guns) but the main problem with it is compared to Wyches and Kabalites and Wracks, Acolytes and Neophytes and Aberrants are a bad joke.
Xenomancers wrote: When it comes to game balance. The "professionals" that have the best grasp on balance are the actual players. There is no degree you could have which would give you a better grasp on the game balance than someone with 20 years of experience within that game itself. A lot of the balancing is just basic statistics too.
PPD
PPW
This is very simple stuff. Any disparities in these areas are obvious red flags. Any playtesting mechanic which lets flaws like that through on the PPW/PPD area basically proves that no effective testing is actually taking place.
PPW and PPD are absolutely not the issue.
They are quite fine in the DE dex. Everything wrong about that dex comes from synergies and interactions.
Taken in a vacuum no single datasheet of DE is really that good. It is always due to a stratagem, a relic, a trait.
The only thing you could potentially catch in the DE dex is the court. And the court is not the best unit at its role, so we don't know for which standard the GW is gunning on those type of models.
Uhh..It is exactly the problem and there is no arguing against it. It is plain and simple.
Why is the succubus and issue? Because it hits like a 250 point model and its 60 points. Relics being free damage - free PPD is an issue. Relics and WL traits not being balanced against each other...its an issue.
Why is the raider an issue? Cause its more durable than most transports that cost 20-30 points more...plus it has real firepower to boot. Points issue.
These are points issues. The issue with DT is also a points issue realistically. If every unit in the DE codex costed 20% more that could take DT...it would be more fair. Everything else would suck though. It all comes down to points...
You are proving my point.
Succubus is an issue? No. A certain combination of traits and relics on a subbus is.
Liquifiers are an issue? No, a certain combination is again responsible for the issue.
Are raiders op on datasheet? They are extremely good due to what they can bring. Without carrying capacity it would be a bad model. Transport capabilities is not something that PPW PPD analysis would take in consideration.
Karol wrote: I don't know mr S, raiders with the gun they have at 85 pts, breaking the barrier of just being efficient. The fact that they can ignore transport rules, fly etc is just a bonus. If orks had a 85pts trukk that is as efficient as raiders, ork armies would be a swarm of vehicles too.
Sam with Drazhar. If a person who plays the army, and is the armies playtesters, says that he would run him at 25 more points, then mistakes were made durning rules writing or cost determination.
^yeah this is my exact point. Fly is just a very occasional bonus to the Raider, it's not some key core thing that makes it good, there are a gak ton of transports with Fly that are way worse than Raiders.
GSC basically do have a transport that's a very slightly worse raider for 85pts, and it pretty much is what competitive GSC armies are made up of. The problem is, it's got several things that it does worse than a raider (no chapter tactics, 6+ shrug instead of 5+ invuln, slightly worse guns) but the main problem with it is compared to Wyches and Kabalites and Wracks, Acolytes and Neophytes and Aberrants are a bad joke.
I promises you...if the devilfish or waveserpant were open topped they would be spammed too.
Open topped the main issue. It is a free bonus essnetially...no where do I see open topped transports paying more than their hard topped counterparts...when in fact - it makes the unit much more capable.
Do we know for sure the game designers don't really playtest this?
I mean, I work in IT and with just simple spreadsheets I can build scenarios to test unit by units. Assuming attacker is in range of defender, how much damage based on avg dice rolls would the defender incurs?
I'd try to make it as general agnostic as possible and just test the RULES.
IE, take a DT wrack liquifier unit and compare to SoB troop unit. Just shooting at 18" and work out the SoB saves when the wracks shoots first.
Then, take a DL Raider + DT wrack liquifier unit and compare to SoB troops unit and work out the avg results.
Basically take every combination and permutations at unit-by-unit with unit/army rules interaction and obvious combos (ie, wracks in raiders)..
No scenery.
No Strategems.
Nothing that is really a GENERAL driven activity. Just the facts ma'am to compare the units.
What this'll do is create a baseline set of data to ascertain if the new rules/interacts is something they intended. And it wouldn't take someone untold hours to playtest to weed these things out.
Spoletta wrote: You are proving my point.
Succubus is an issue? No. A certain combination of traits and relics on a subbus is.
Liquifiers are an issue? No, a certain combination is again responsible for the issue.
Are raiders op on datasheet? They are extremely good due to what they can bring. Without carrying capacity it would be a bad model. Transport capabilities is not something that PPW PPD analysis would take in consideration.
You have to compare comparable situations.
A raider with open topped compared to a devilfish without it.
Put a unit in each and calculate PPD. Realistically though - it is very easy to figure that the unit with open topped allows a unit to shoot where the hard topped unit doesn't...which unit should cost more? The raider ofc right? Nope...The devilfish costs a lot more and is a lot worse to boot.
The issue with the succubus. Is more of an issue of its relics being to strong. Heck...even the triarch whip with the mortal wounds on 6's WL trait is way too strong. Yeah you can nerf the relic and WL trait the end problem though is an issue of too much value for too little points.
Spoletta wrote: You are proving my point.
Succubus is an issue? No. A certain combination of traits and relics on a subbus is.
Liquifiers are an issue? No, a certain combination is again responsible for the issue.
Are raiders op on datasheet? They are extremely good due to what they can bring. Without carrying capacity it would be a bad model. Transport capabilities is not something that PPW PPD analysis would take in consideration.
You have to compare comparable situations.
A raider with open topped compared to a devilfish without it.
Put a unit in each and calculate PPD. Realistically though - it is very easy to figure that the unit with open topped allows a unit to shoot where the hard topped unit doesn't...which unit should cost more? The raider ofc right? Nope...The devilfish costs a lot more and is a lot worse to boot.
I'm not saying that it isn't easy to catch how lowcosted the raider is.
I'm only arguing against a PPW PPD analysis being enough.
whembly wrote: Do we know for sure the game designers don't really playtest this?
No idea, but beyond simple sanity stuff, they shouldn't be. A developer should never be formally testing their own work. Independent testing is hugely important for any product, because you simply can't eliminate bias and cultivate a sufficient level of self-criticism.
You need that fresh pair of eyes. It's incredibly hard to see the wood for the trees when you've been working on something for a period of time.
Hell, perhaps a large portion of internal testing is the designers looking at their own work and that's why things are being missed.
We don't know what GW does internally to test. We do have a pretty good idea of their playtesting program from people who are ex-playtesters who have spoken about it, and it really is as bare-bones as just "here's some rules, play some games with them and give us feedback."
Spoletta wrote: You are proving my point.
Succubus is an issue? No. A certain combination of traits and relics on a subbus is.
Liquifiers are an issue? No, a certain combination is again responsible for the issue.
Are raiders op on datasheet? They are extremely good due to what they can bring. Without carrying capacity it would be a bad model. Transport capabilities is not something that PPW PPD analysis would take in consideration.
You have to compare comparable situations.
A raider with open topped compared to a devilfish without it.
Put a unit in each and calculate PPD. Realistically though - it is very easy to figure that the unit with open topped allows a unit to shoot where the hard topped unit doesn't...which unit should cost more? The raider ofc right? Nope...The devilfish costs a lot more and is a lot worse to boot.
I'm not saying that it isn't easy to catch how lowcosted the raider is.
I'm only arguing against a PPW PPD analysis being enough.
I don't disagree with that. You have to look a interactions too. There is a very easy way to identify issues though. Compare cost and capability. If anything is off there you have a giant red flag. How you fix the problem is up to the imagination of the writer.
The part that is silly is this isn't even play testing we are discussing. This is drawing bored stuff. You should remove all red flags before you send it to a "playtester" - they don't do any of these things though. Or they do it for some parts and not others. I can't figure out what they do because...sometimes they will make a rule that seems to consider possible interactions like the +1 damage to melee weapons warlord trait that has "excluding relics" but the mortal wounds on 6's warlord trait doesn't? I just dont get that.
yukishiro1 wrote: We don't know what GW does internally to test. We do have a pretty good idea of their playtesting program from people who are ex-playtesters who have spoken about it, and it really is as bare-bones as just "here's some rules, play some games with them and give us feedback."
I can believe it Yuki. It absolutely comes through in the released product doesn't it?
The members I'm aware of are all prominent youtubers, reviewers, competitive players. They're thrown a reward (play tester status), and then likely feel they can't say anything very negative in content they put out, for fear of having the 'reward' taken away.
It still irks me that we're ok with top competitive players having access to new content potentially months before everyone else - that's not a level playing field, however large or small an advantage it might convey.
It might be cynical, but I'm not sure it isn't accurate to call it a marketing ploy, labelled as 'testing'. (The games industry does much the same thing with some of it's open 'beta tests'. It's often just a way to generate hype).
Unless the policy changes, and The Dwayne is not shoved down everyone's throat as The Mandatory Wrestler Everyone Must Always Fight and All Fans Must Consume, then he's never going to be able to particularly good at any one given thing. it's just the nature of the beast.
I couldn't care less about his wrestling career, but as far as his movies? I don't watch them because I'm forced to (there's plenty of other stuff to watch), I watch them because he's consistently entertained me. Now & then there's a dud or there's something I'll just pass on, but overall I'm reasonably sure his stuff will entertain.
He doesn't need to be perfect to accomplish that (though he's better at it than many making similar fair).
Maybe HE'd like an Oscar & a truck full of $$$. (I'm pretty sure he's received the latter ) Me? All I ask for is a reasonably entertaining action flick every so often. He delivers, so I'll very likely buy another ticket.... I'll be sad when he eventually ages out of the action movie category.
My relationship with GW is similar.
I don't demand - or expect - perfection from them. Just great models and games that are fun & entertaining
GAMES: They've done e decent job of selling me games that I find fun & entertaining (primarily WHFB/40k/AoS, but a fair # of their specialist games as well). When they make something I'm not interested in (like Blood Bowl)? I just ignore it. When I find a dud? Like for example 40k 6e & 7e? Then I'll stop playing that edition or just skip it outright, checking back next time. And in the meantime nothing stops me & my friends from playing previous editions we know we like.
MODELS: They have ALWAYS sold me models I like. They've been doing this since the early/mid 80's before I even knew they made games themselves. It's where most of my GW related spending is focused regardless of wether I'm playing their games or not at any given moment. People rant about "Stop supporting GW! They make awful games!!!" Well why the hell should I stop buying models I like? If an edition sucks I don't HAVE to play it to enjoy, or even get use out of, the models.... Of course GW just sees the $, they don't know if or how I'm playing...
the_scotsman wrote: Well meme'd milord, you verily have caught your opponent in a quite embarrassing logical fallacy *tips fedora*
How about this: You could cut the number of space marine datasheets by 33% by incorporating various "Different Units" into the same unit with a weapons swap and by eliminating firstborn units that are capable of being easily proxied as a Primaris option.
Thank ye kindly, sir.
I agree that you could reduce the number of datasheets by some % by merging them together, though I'm not going to speculate as to what that % would be off-hand - I would like to understand the design process that led to there being a number of instances where things are divided up in ways that seem... odd, too.
I firmly disagree with eliminating Firstborn units in favour of the Steroid Boyz, just because some people get their knickers in a twist about the number of datasheets in the book.
Insectum7 wrote:^The only difference between the Predator Annihilator and the Predator Destructor is the turret weapon.
So, contrary to Slayer's claim, not just the sponson?
Gonna hang your hat on that? . . . Well I look forward to your upcoming IG codex with separate datasheets for each Leman Russ turret weapon.
I mean, I'm not the one that claimed there were datasheets in the SM 'dex where the only difference is the sponsons - remember, after all, the point that is being debunked here:
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: We don't need separate entries for the same goddamn vehicle just because the Sponsons are fething different.
As I said above, I've got no issue with merging datasheets where it makes sense, and the Predator is a good example of where I think it would. I would like to understand the reasoning that led to them being laid out like this - is it to allow you to field 6 Predators (or 9 in a BA army) instead of 3, assuming enough HS slots? Is it just so you can advertise the two different variants, despite them being the same kit? I can't answer that question, but I would be interested in knowing the why.
Equally, I'm intrigued as to how the Whirlwind got away with staying as one vehicle, despite the two different munitions it can field - that would've seemed another one they could split if they were trying to maximise datasheets.
Anyway, this is mostly outside the scope of this thread, so back to the DE discussion...
Karol wrote: I don't know mr S, raiders with the gun they have at 85 pts, breaking the barrier of just being efficient. The fact that they can ignore transport rules, fly etc is just a bonus. If orks had a 85pts trukk that is as efficient as raiders, ork armies would be a swarm of vehicles too.
Sam with Drazhar. If a person who plays the army, and is the armies playtesters, says that he would run him at 25 more points, then mistakes were made durning rules writing or cost determination.
^yeah this is my exact point. Fly is just a very occasional bonus to the Raider, it's not some key core thing that makes it good, there are a gak ton of transports with Fly that are way worse than Raiders.
GSC basically do have a transport that's a very slightly worse raider for 85pts, and it pretty much is what competitive GSC armies are made up of. The problem is, it's got several things that it does worse than a raider (no chapter tactics, 6+ shrug instead of 5+ invuln, slightly worse guns) but the main problem with it is compared to Wyches and Kabalites and Wracks, Acolytes and Neophytes and Aberrants are a bad joke.
Fly is big in letting you hide Raiders behind terrain without losing movement. That is not a small occasional bonus.
Combined with open-topped so you can hide, move across terrain and then shoot is big.
Just found this comment from Mike Brandt, on how GW's play testing 'works'...
"Codexes go through several steps; they are obviously written by the Book & Box Game Studio. First, they go to several playtesting cells to review their words / basic feel / the way all the units work / etc. Feedback is then provided, which is consolidated and implemented, leading to a final feedback stage on all of the written words of the rules and units. Thereafter, it moves to a stage where a broader # of cells builds lists and plays with them to identify points ("numbers") issues, broken combos, patterns of units being taken at the exclusion of all others, etc. Finally, it proceeds to a final numbers phase, where only numerical values are changeable (think: translation timelines).
There's another set of playtesters who focus on FAQ/Errata when and as needed, many of whom were selected for their particular skillsets or passion in this area. The main playtester cells include players from a wide variety of interest points, and do include both "everyday" and top tier players, so feedback has a good balance to it.
It's a constantly evolving process that continues to get better and better. But obviously nothing is perfect, as we occasionally find, and lead times for production are real. I'm particularly excited about the codexes coming out over the next year, and how well they are balanced internally and against each other ... should be great for the game. Ultimately, the playtestes are merely providing feedback; nothing more, nothing less. But the relationship between playtesters and designers improves with every successive codex."
Insectum7 wrote:^The only difference between the Predator Annihilator and the Predator Destructor is the turret weapon.
So, contrary to Slayer's claim, not just the sponson?
Gonna hang your hat on that? . . . Well I look forward to your upcoming IG codex with separate datasheets for each Leman Russ turret weapon.
I mean, I'm not the one that claimed there were datasheets in the SM 'dex where the only difference is the sponsons - remember, after all, the point that is being debunked here:
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: We don't need separate entries for the same goddamn vehicle just because the Sponsons are fething different.
As I said above, I've got no issue with merging datasheets where it makes sense, and the Predator is a good example of where I think it would. . .
Option 1: Roll with the point being made, a point you agree with even
Option 2: Be pedantic
StrayIight wrote: Just found this comment from Mike Brandt, on how GW's play testing 'works'...
"Codexes go through several steps; they are obviously written by the Book & Box Game Studio. First, they go to several playtesting cells to review their words / basic feel / the way all the units work / etc. Feedback is then provided, which is consolidated and implemented, leading to a final feedback stage on all of the written words of the rules and units. Thereafter, it moves to a stage where a broader # of cells builds lists and plays with them to identify points ("numbers") issues, broken combos, patterns of units being taken at the exclusion of all others, etc. Finally, it proceeds to a final numbers phase, where only numerical values are changeable (think: translation timelines).
There's another set of playtesters who focus on FAQ/Errata when and as needed, many of whom were selected for their particular skillsets or passion in this area. The main playtester cells include players from a wide variety of interest points, and do include both "everyday" and top tier players, so feedback has a good balance to it.
It's a constantly evolving process that continues to get better and better. But obviously nothing is perfect, as we occasionally find, and lead times for production are real. I'm particularly excited about the codexes coming out over the next year, and how well they are balanced internally and against each other ... should be great for the game. Ultimately, the playtestes are merely providing feedback; nothing more, nothing less. But the relationship between playtesters and designers improves with every successive codex."
That is gold man thanks ! Perhaps all this was done for DE and then they changed stuff to give it more spice ? « This Drukari codex is balanced but boring, let’s give it more special sauce » and that is how things went wrong ?
Else the dude is just plain lying, which is totally possible, or at the least Highly Exaggerating
StrayIight wrote: Just found this comment from Mike Brandt, on how GW's play testing 'works'...
"Codexes go through several steps; they are obviously written by the Book & Box Game Studio. First, they go to several playtesting cells to review their words / basic feel / the way all the units work / etc. Feedback is then provided, which is consolidated and implemented, leading to a final feedback stage on all of the written words of the rules and units. Thereafter, it moves to a stage where a broader # of cells builds lists and plays with them to identify points ("numbers") issues, broken combos, patterns of units being taken at the exclusion of all others, etc. Finally, it proceeds to a final numbers phase, where only numerical values are changeable (think: translation timelines).
There's another set of playtesters who focus on FAQ/Errata when and as needed, many of whom were selected for their particular skillsets or passion in this area. The main playtester cells include players from a wide variety of interest points, and do include both "everyday" and top tier players, so feedback has a good balance to it.
It's a constantly evolving process that continues to get better and better. But obviously nothing is perfect, as we occasionally find, and lead times for production are real. I'm particularly excited about the codexes coming out over the next year, and how well they are balanced internally and against each other ... should be great for the game. Ultimately, the playtestes are merely providing feedback; nothing more, nothing less. But the relationship between playtesters and designers improves with every successive codex."
That is gold man thanks ! Perhaps all this was done for DE and then they changed stuff to give it more spice ? « This Drukari codex is balanced but boring, let’s give it more special sauce » and that is how things went wrong ?
Else the dude is just plain lying, which is totally possible, or at the least Highly Exaggerating
It's interesting isn't it?
I've no intention of bad mouthing Mike here, I don't know him and it wouldn't be fair even if I did. I know he works for GW these days, and that comment is three weeks old. So post DE codex...
I mean, as an employee, he's not going to say anything negative about the way things are done. Plus, he's part of this testing process so has a certain amount of investment in it.
Perhaps he believes everything that he's written. I think all of us can see some serious flaws here if this is literally the entire process though. It implies that these play testers have a certain level of agency too - he specifically talks about feedback being implemented - so what level of the issues that we're seeing is the fault of the play test team?
Broken combos? Well balanced codexes? I mean, stuff is getting missed. Pretty obviously at this point.
I promises you...if the devilfish or waveserpant were open topped they would be spammed too.
Open topped the main issue. It is a free bonus essnetially...no where do I see open topped transports paying more than their hard topped counterparts...when in fact - it makes the unit much more capable.
Imagine if an impulsor was open topped could take 10 hellblasters inside and was open topped. Even without a mega gun, it would be spamed like hell.
^yeah this is my exact point. Fly is just a very occasional bonus to the Raider, it's not some key core thing that makes it good, there are a gak ton of transports with Fly that are way worse than Raiders
That has to be a strange definition of the word occasional. Games of w40k without extensive LoS terrain would end turn one. Being able to deliver the stuff they want where they want, hide stuff when ever they want, and because of cost, be able to spam cheap and resilient transports is not something I would describe as occasional, unless occasional also includes all or almost all games too.
I have heard from a guy with a bit more inside information about the playtesting and the FAQ/Errata stuff and he says they are very frustrated. Like they send in a few pages fully formatted and with well written questions/answers as well as balance changes and then they wait and see if anything gets published. Sometimes almost nothing gets answered or released in the final document on the website. Like almost every issue the community finds in the first few days after something gets spoiled or released have already been found, an adequate fix been written and sent to GW hoping it gets noticed.
So GW for sure have the feedback and it wouldn't take much effort at all for them to fix issues. They just have to publish what their playtesters give back to them.
The way GW does things need to improve. They have tons of people putting in a lot of unpaid time testing and improving their product and they squander most of that effort.
Almost everytime I meet that guy he is face palming and ranting about how GW does things. They could be so much better without much if any extra real cost for them if they just did things right. I think I might have heard that name Mike Brandt dropped a few times last time.
It is a shame that so much passion for the game is wasted like that.
Well that can be a problem for some testers and designers too. The just don't worry army X will counter argument is also a doubled edged one. Harlis were too good for a year, now we have an army which has positive win ratings vs harlis and everything else. But the game doesn't seem better becauses of it, neither did the harlis become a bad army. they are only bad if they play vs DE.
Klickor wrote: I have heard from a guy with a bit more inside information about the playtesting and the FAQ/Errata stuff and he says they are very frustrated. Like they send in a few pages fully formatted and with well written questions/answers as well as balance changes and then they wait and see if anything gets published. Sometimes almost nothing gets answered or released in the final document on the website. Like almost every issue the community finds in the first few days after something gets spoiled or released have already been found, an adequate fix been written and sent to GW hoping it gets noticed.
Having worked in videogame QA and then in an actual development studio, all too often feedback is ignored or not acted upon.
This can be for multiple reasons and depends on if the issue is design related or bug related. The former could just be the designers being up their own asses and not understanding criticism whereas the latter could just be a time constraint with the bugfix itself needing to severely overhaul and change gigantic swathes of the game to properly address the problem.
From statements GW playtesters have made repeatedly, the designers are very good about not taking feedback on-board or having really bizarre and backward views on how the game is actually played.
Recent statements from TTTactics videos highlight this pretty well, especially with regards to D6 damage weapons. A few interesting things to take away from them:
1) During their playtesting of the Drukhari codex, Dark Lances were damage D6 and were seemingly changed to D3+3 after the playtesting period without any subsequent testing done before the Codex went to print.
2) They repeatedly brought up the mass-proliferation of D6 damage and random shot shooting in the Necron codex and how bad such a mechanic was. Not only were no changes made to address that, but they were told "that's what the command re-roll stratagem is for." This is probably one of the most eye-boggling statements that could be made for a rules writer for the game honestly and it shows a complete lack of understanding or appreciation for the game itself. Randomness is an inherent part of the game, sure. But things like DDA's are not "competitively" viable but they are not fun either because of that ultra-randomness. Such a design fails on all levels and ways of play.
3) The feedback was obviously taken on board for the Drukhari dex though, which shows that while 9th has generally been a lot more coherent and consistent across books, the existence of different teams working on different books and having different ideas on what the game/faction should be still unfortunately exists. The problem isn't as bad as in AOS thankfully, but it's not a problem that should be happening at all.
Having worked in videogame QA and then in an actual development studio, all too often feedback is ignored or not acted upon.
True story.
- Did you find and report the defects? 'Yes'. - Were they fixed? 'Sometimes'. - Were you thrown under the bus when the end users found the issues that weren't? 'I'm still wearing the tyre tread imprint'.
Having worked in videogame QA and then in an actual development studio, all too often feedback is ignored or not acted upon.
True story.
- Did you find and report the defects? 'Yes'. - Were they fixed? 'Sometimes'. - Were you thrown under the bus when the end users found the issues that weren't? 'I'm still wearing the tyre tread imprint'.
Brandt's a newly hired guy who was hired to be a global events manager at a time with no global events, he's not going to say anything that might get him in trouble with the brass. I mean like that "answer" was in response to someone asking how the SM 2.0 fiasco happened, and is a complete non-answer in that context in that it doesn't even acknowledge the fiasco, much less provide any explanation for why it happened. I like him as a person, and I think his heart is in the right place, but his only on the record stand since becoming a GW employee was defending the 9th edition missions as not having a first-turn advantage in the face of reams of data showing the contrary, right up until the point that GW did a 180 and admitted the issue and made big changes to address it. I'm not sure he's someone to really defer to on whether GW's internal balance process works.
- Did you find and report the defects? 'Yes'. - Were they fixed? 'Sometimes'. - Were you thrown under the bus when the end users found the issues that weren't? 'I'm still wearing the tyre tread imprint'.
Literally the story of Games Industry QA.
Even in more "serious" industry, if the bug does not affect something important, fixing the bug is up to the developers' discretion.
Sure, we are talking about very minor bugs and errors, but it still annoying when the developers decide to just ignore the specifications.
whembly wrote: Do we know for sure the game designers don't really playtest this?
I mean, I work in IT and with just simple spreadsheets I can build scenarios to test unit by units. Assuming attacker is in range of defender, how much damage based on avg dice rolls would the defender incurs?
I'd try to make it as general agnostic as possible and just test the RULES.
IE, take a DT wrack liquifier unit and compare to SoB troop unit. Just shooting at 18" and work out the SoB saves when the wracks shoots first.
Then, take a DL Raider + DT wrack liquifier unit and compare to SoB troops unit and work out the avg results.
Basically take every combination and permutations at unit-by-unit with unit/army rules interaction and obvious combos (ie, wracks in raiders)..
No scenery.
No Strategems.
Nothing that is really a GENERAL driven activity. Just the facts ma'am to compare the units.
What this'll do is create a baseline set of data to ascertain if the new rules/interacts is something they intended. And it wouldn't take someone untold hours to playtest to weed these things out.
Pure mathhammer is an absolutely terrible way to discern balance, because that is not how the game works on the table.
Daedalus81 wrote: [Pure mathhammer is an absolutely terrible way to discern balance, because that is not how the game works on the table.
Nobody is saying to only do the math. We're saying that doing the math first and then testing and adjusting from what looks good on paper to something that plays well would be better than what GW currently does?
And I just took my old Dark eldar army (from 2006) out to repaint and get back to the game after quitting in 5ed... I will be that guy For that reason I do hope they'll be rebalanced.
Daedalus81 wrote: [Pure mathhammer is an absolutely terrible way to discern balance, because that is not how the game works on the table.
Nobody is saying to only do the math. We're saying that doing the math first and then testing and adjusting from what looks good on paper to something that plays well would be better than what GW currently does?
True, but "better than what GW currently does" is not exactly a high bar to clear.
CEO Kasen wrote: True, but "better than what GW currently does" is not exactly a high bar to clear.
Also true, but at least raw mechanical balance gives a solid place to build from. One of GW's biggest issues is that the game was never really designed for what it is now. They had a skirmish game that got big to a degree they never could have expected and it has cludged along since getting more bits mashed onto it with each passing edition. 8th was an attempt at giving the game a solid foundation but it just shows that GW doesn't have the chops to manage a clean slate rebuild of 40k either due to fear that changing things too much will shrink their market share or simply because that just isn't their skillset.
In either case, I think it's worth considering a completely clean slate boring math-based rework of the entire system, and then carefully adding special rules on top and testing them to ensure that they don't tilt the balance too much either way.
whembly wrote: Do we know for sure the game designers don't really playtest this?
I mean, I work in IT and with just simple spreadsheets I can build scenarios to test unit by units. Assuming attacker is in range of defender, how much damage based on avg dice rolls would the defender incurs?
I'd try to make it as general agnostic as possible and just test the RULES.
IE, take a DT wrack liquifier unit and compare to SoB troop unit. Just shooting at 18" and work out the SoB saves when the wracks shoots first.
Then, take a DL Raider + DT wrack liquifier unit and compare to SoB troops unit and work out the avg results.
Basically take every combination and permutations at unit-by-unit with unit/army rules interaction and obvious combos (ie, wracks in raiders)..
No scenery.
No Strategems.
Nothing that is really a GENERAL driven activity. Just the facts ma'am to compare the units.
What this'll do is create a baseline set of data to ascertain if the new rules/interacts is something they intended. And it wouldn't take someone untold hours to playtest to weed these things out.
What you're describing is basically very rudimentary statistical analysis- and the answer is no, GW doesn't do this. Think about things like Battle Cannons vs Vanquishers, where if you have a high school math education you can work out that the ostensibly anti-tank weapon is massively outclassed by the generalist gun in about thirty seconds.
Their designers have always been terrible at stats and probability; it's the sort of design issue that you can catch with playtesting given enough iterations, but when there's just so much content to review things are bound to slip through. Designers with an understanding of stats will establish ground rules for the relationships between units (eg anti-tank units should be around three times better at anti-tank than comparable anti-infantry units), and then playtesting reveals needed tweaks, unintended consequences, or unclear interactions; but generally speaking things will function like they should. Instead we get units that can't perform their intended role at all, or are better at ones they weren't intended for, or have damage output far too low or too high for what they're supposed to do.
I'd love to see a more stats-focused approach to design but it doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon.
That is gold man thanks ! Perhaps all this was done for DE and then they changed stuff to give it more spice ? « This Drukari codex is balanced but boring, let’s give it more special sauce » and that is how things went wrong ?
Else the dude is just plain lying, which is totally possible, or at the least Highly Exaggerating
Or perhaps things are more balanced than you all think because you just aren't privy to the details of what's coming throughout the year....
That is gold man thanks ! Perhaps all this was done for DE and then they changed stuff to give it more spice ? « This Drukari codex is balanced but boring, let’s give it more special sauce » and that is how things went wrong ?
Else the dude is just plain lying, which is totally possible, or at the least Highly Exaggerating
Or perhaps things are more balanced than you all think because you just aren't privy to the details of what's coming throughout the year....
Throwing unbalance on top of unbalance doesn't balance things. We don't need to Wait And See (TM) to know that the DE codex is not balanced with the codexes that have been released so far; if future codexes are also similarly overpowered, that doesn't create a balanced environment, it just further perpetuates the disparities that already exist.
harlokin wrote: I really don't get all the hopping on the Drukhari bandwagon. Rules are great right now (and will likely get gutted in a GW overreaction), but who the feth cares, are the rules that much of a motivating factor for people?
Yes, some people just want to win, other people just don't want to lose.
Google has 500 million search results on trying to win vs trying not to lose but I'm sure the distinction isn't worth noting, stay ignorant internet-dude.
That is gold man thanks ! Perhaps all this was done for DE and then they changed stuff to give it more spice ? « This Drukari codex is balanced but boring, let’s give it more special sauce » and that is how things went wrong ?
Else the dude is just plain lying, which is totally possible, or at the least Highly Exaggerating
Or perhaps things are more balanced than you all think because you just aren't privy to the details of what's coming throughout the year....
Throwing unbalance on top of unbalance doesn't balance things. We don't need to Wait And See (TM) to know that the DE codex is not balanced with the codexes that have been released so far; if future codexes are also similarly overpowered, that doesn't create a balanced environment, it just further perpetuates the disparities that already exist.
I disagree for three reasons.
1.) GW has a vision for how each edition plays, when a new edition comes if the old codexes are valid- they are what GW thought would be good for that edition. If a new edition has a different vision for how armies should play the game, the codexes as they come out should each be unbalanced in terms of being better in that current edition than codexes from the prior edition. In order to move into a new edition GW has to throw unbalance ontop of unbalance.
2.) The players have some agency in this issue. Meta matters, in every edition in competitive play most of the top table players were anti-meta armies. One of the few notable exceptions was the end of 8th and space marines which were meta, and still were so good that they could outplay most of the meta armies, or possibly so many people were playing space marines that anti meta armies were a non factor. That aside, every 9th codex that has come out has counters for the drukhari- that you cannot built an army that is the optimal build for every come, as a opposed to an army which has some middle of the road abilities to allow it to cover more fronts is a player issue. 9th is not an alpha strike edition, and people keep playing it like it is. Strategic reserves and various other rules exist for reasons. Things that shoot out of line of sight went up in cost for reasons, that no one takes them because they are not optimal for how play began at the end of 8th and the start of 9th is a player issue not a GW rules issue. Most of the 9th codexes are likely done by now, GW has worked towards internal balance based on the core rules for most of the codexes and we have not seen that result yet. Most players will likely assume the result was bad, but that is neither here nor there
3.) Having unbalance is grimdark for the players in a social way. There are a lot of people who honestly engage in the hobby in a salty way, whenever there is unbalance in the game it is a strange point of comraderie among the players. Although all logic should point to it being bad for the game and hobby, as long as it is not over the top(6th/7th edition formations and ally system) it appears to be good for the game and the hobby in the sense that it causes engagement and discussion between players, armchair players, and bored indivuduals that have a fleeting interest in this hobby.
side point- book of rust succubus should not be able to generate bonus attacks off of bonus attacks.
yukishiro1 wrote: Brandt's... I'm not sure he's someone to really defer to on whether GW's internal balance process works.
It does not have the desired effect, the question is whether it is true. Perhabs they have too many rounds of testing and TTT were involved too early. The question is whether d3+3 got playtested by anyone. Someone in the Drukhari tactics thread analyzed Wrack melee options and those are also a mess. Brandt might just be full of gak, that's where things are pointing.
blaktoof wrote: side point- book of rust succubus should not be able to generate bonus attacks off of bonus attacks.
It creates camaraderie between Necrons and SM when she one-shots Guilliman or a Monolith, working as intended. /s
yukishiro1 wrote: Brandt's... I'm not sure he's someone to really defer to on whether GW's internal balance process works.
It does not have the desired effect, the question is whether it is true. Perhabs they have too many rounds of testing and TTT were involved too early. The question is whether d3+3 got playtested by anyone. Someone in the Drukhari tactics thread analyzed Wrack melee options and those are also a mess. Brandt might just be full of gak, that's where things are pointing.
blaktoof wrote: side point- book of rust succubus should not be able to generate bonus attacks off of bonus attacks.
It creates camaraderie between Necrons and SM when she one-shots Guilliman or a Monolith, working as intended. /s
I look forward to the game where a succubus chooses to go after my Monolith.
I feel pure mathhammer is the best way to pick out obvious imbalances in units at the list building stage. I.E. an hour with an excel spreadsheet can usually very quickly identify units across a codex that are just "better" (faster, stronger, tougher) than other comparable choices for the points. It won't tell you how that faction plays on the table necesarilly - but it will usually explain why people take unit X rather than unit Y. Or weapon option X over weapon option Y etc.
To be fair though, some problems can't be fixed. For instance there are 6 Wrack Weapons. Its very hard to think of 6 identifiable stat lines you'd want to hit such that each weapon has a niche - especially if 4 of them are to be poisoned weapons. It is objectively stupid/imbalanced for instance that Scissorhands lets you make 5 poisoned 4+ AP-2 attacks for 10 points, while an EC whip lets you make 6 poisoned 4+ AP-2 attacks for 5 points. But even if Scissorhands was 5 points the EC whip would still be strictly superior. In a similar way even if the venom blade was AP-2 rather than AP-1, its obvious that 6*4+=3, while 3*2+=2.5. So the EC whip would again be superior (and with the point of AP, even more so.)
But this is potentially only an issue if you want things balanced to perfection. Arguably you can say if you want your Wrack leader armed with a poison blade or a mindphase gauntlet etc, that's a fluffy choice for more casual/narrative players. So long as its not *that bad* it doesn't matter. And in truth, its not like competitive players are taking EC whips even if they appear the best choice, because realistically you don't want your wracks in combat, you want them abusing DT liquifiers from inside transports. So you might as well save the points entirely.
A similar unit might be Tyranid Warriors. You have 4 melee options and 3 ranged options (5 including the heavier choices). Realistically though I feel none of these are so different as to meaningfully change how the unit works - beyond ditching guns entirely - so it inevitably turns into number crunching. Whether a scything claws/devourer warrior is worth 2 points less than a scything claws/deathspitter warrior is after all a mathematical question.
Tyel wrote: an hour with an excel spreadsheet can usually very quickly identify units across a codex that are just "better"...
Nah, it takes way longer than that.
Whether a scything claws/devourer warrior is worth 2 points less than a scything claws/deathspitter warrior is after all a mathematical question.
Only in the sense that everything is a mathematical question. If one weapon is S5 and the other is S4 and they cost the same S5 is superior, if S5 costs 100 points per model then S4 is always superior, but even if S4 v S5 is a relatively small difference then there are points levels at which one is better against T3 and the other is better against T5. Even if in competitive events S4 is all you need because of the meta, Timmy can still enjoy his S5 because it is still good in some matchups and maybe that's the matchup he plays the most is one of those.
Ideally, this overlaps with the fluff, so if Timmy faces Ork hordes a lot he can go and read the fluff of his weapons and read that the S4 gun is supposed to be good against them so he puts S4 guns on all his dudes and GW can ensure through stats and points that those S4 guns are actually better against Orks than the S5 guns which are better against T5 and T8 units. Right now you basically need to do the math yourself to find out which weapon is right for each situation. You might imagine that AP-1 D2 heavy bolters is overkill on Orks and that the blast on missile launchers will blow Ork hordes away, but GW hasn't done the math so Timmy has to do it on his own.
There is also the question of when a unit becomes a glass cannon or a tank, if your unit gets destroyed turn 1 every game then there isn't much point in giving them the best guns unless the upgrade cost is low enough that you only need to shoot 0,5 or 1 time per game to recoup the cost.
Or perhaps things are more balanced than you all think because you just aren't privy to the details of what's coming throughout the year....
I don't know if it is very fun to hear that, DE won't be a problem as long as you play this or that faction that comes out after it. Because what it does in the end , it just drives the DE win rates a bit lower, and for everyone else there is now 2 ,or 3 if one counts harlequins as above avarge, that dunk on them. And it gets even worse for faction that were bad since 9th started. A GSC playing hearing that he just waited a year, for DE to arrive, and now he gets to wait another 6months to a year, so maybe other armies get better vs DE, is not a encourging thing to be told about.
1.) GW has a vision for how each edition plays, when a new edition comes if the old codexes are valid- they are what GW thought would be good for that edition. If a new edition has a different vision for how armies should play the game, the codexes as they come out should each be unbalanced in terms of being better in that current edition than codexes from the prior edition. In order to move into a new edition GW has to throw unbalance ontop of unbalance
This doesn't explain how GW is able and willing to write new books for the current edition. Specially if they stay bad for its entire run, and then are still bad in the next edition. Unless we assume that GW plays the really long game and their plans for a bad faction, are to keep it bad for 3-4 editions to later make it good, for what ever reason. Plus if it was to be true, it would be really bad expiriance for all the people that played durning those 3-4 bad editions, but never got to play in the good one.
Pure mathhammer is an absolutely terrible way to discern balance, because that is not how the game works on the table.
But is always the case? If we look at a succbubs that avarges around 30+ attacks per round of fighting, then I think that even with pure math hammer we can say that something is wrong.
Same way we don't have to do a lot of testing, if we see a unit balanced around the idea of high damage, but weak to incoming damge, and then see the balanced broken, because the unit is put in to a cheap open topped, and powerful on itself, transport. With added cross cabal synergies etc. How many games does one have to playtesst to know that 6 raiders and stuff like DT liquifires is too good. And that is before one adds stuff, like the practical removal of LoS shoting and adding a ton of LoS blocking to the game, having a super high synergy with flying transports. Or the always present goes first has a higher chance of winning.
It is clear that we don't have the full picture and that the dexes were indeed meant for a scenario where all factions are updated to 9th.
Just look at the effects the DE had on the meta. Sure, they are winning left and right because they need some adjustments, but try looking past that.
The game benefitted immensely from the DE dex. It crated a better balance between the other factions and many builds that were bad in a meta with only heavy targets, are now being used even at competitive levels.
Weirdly, the presence of a huge contender like that has increased the spectrum of competitive builds and factions.
Well that is, forgive my language, shity way to design a game. If you have 3 years of an edition, and the design team gets to enjoy playing it for that time, but your codex gets somewhat updated 3-4 months before edition ends, then your expiriance and that of designers or playtesters is going to be drasticly different. And may I say very unfun.
DE created no new balance. The game was already balanced with most armies, aside for harlequins, having similar win rates. DE beat everything, they don't just beat one or two armies. And most of the armies that exist don't have a way to adapt to them. The whole adapt to new +70% win rate army thing doesn't work anyway. People tried to adapt to Inari, or the castellan soup armies, or the end 2.0 marines. And how did it end? The armies were winning anyway. The mid tier stuff got worse, in some cases, like vehicles that weren't flyers had them invalideted for large chunks of an edition, and the under avarge armies got dunked on really hard, because to face off against the top tier lists everyone had to buy in to A game models, making the chance of a less powerful army being spoted to play against even lower then normal.
So no the spectrum of competitive builds or factions did not go up.
It creates camaraderie between Necrons and SM when she one-shots Guilliman or a Monolith, working as intended. /s
Oh come the feth on.
She does 4 wounds to a monolith. Then it fething eats her instantaneously with its 6 autohitting damage 3 melee attacks, and heals 1 of those 4 wounds on its next turn.
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Karol wrote: Well that is, forgive my language, shity way to design a game. If you have 3 years of an edition, and the design team gets to enjoy playing it for that time, but your codex gets somewhat updated 3-4 months before edition ends, then your expiriance and that of designers or playtesters is going to be drasticly different. And may I say very unfun.
DE created no new balance. The game was already balanced with most armies, aside for harlequins, having similar win rates. DE beat everything, they don't just beat one or two armies. And most of the armies that exist don't have a way to adapt to them. The whole adapt to new +70% win rate army thing doesn't work anyway. People tried to adapt to Inari, or the castellan soup armies, or the end 2.0 marines. And how did it end? The armies were winning anyway. The mid tier stuff got worse, in some cases, like vehicles that weren't flyers had them invalideted for large chunks of an edition, and the under avarge armies got dunked on really hard, because to face off against the top tier lists everyone had to buy in to A game models, making the chance of a less powerful army being spoted to play against even lower then normal.
So no the spectrum of competitive builds or factions did not go up.
Uh huh believe me it sucked ASS in 8th - at least in 9th the only thing you're fighting against with an 8th army vs a 9th army is the dumb little army-wide whatever rule they get for not having allies. In 8th it was fething ALL STRATAGEMS, ALL RELICS, warlord traits from the BRB vs good warlord traits, half the psychic powers and gakky broken index datasheets.
It sucked ass, i got to have fun with my GSC for all of 3 months before they got put into the dumpster and space marine 2.0 broke the game for a year and a half.
Of course many factions are still using those gakky broken index datasheets with no or few changes, but hey, pobodys nerfect, can't fix gak like every nid monster being dumb as feth for 5 years gotta put out 3 space marine codexes and 12 supplements!
So let me get is straight, people should be happy, because GW could have and did worse stuff in the past? How does that even matter, specially for people who started playing in 9th.
Because it feels a lot like people telling me that I should not want GK to be good, because in 5th, they were too OP,even by todays standards having an under 60% win rate seem laughably low for a broken army.
Also many factions are using bad books from 8th, but others use the same book from 8th, but are doing great. The custodes, harlequins, orks or SoB were not considered top tier armies under 8th ed rule set. Neither were demons, yet in 9th they very much are.
And I ain't going to comment on the space marine stuff. In 9th, aside for the short time salamander rise up, most marine armies were around 50% win rate or lower. The supposed broken DA are sitting at just above 50%, and I have my doubts if they are going to rise up any higher after DE came out.
Freaking eldar soups seem to be doing better then majority of marine armies, as top 16 and higher placment goes. But who knows maybe this is just some wierd US and Poland only thing, and all across the world marines are dominating.
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Spoletta wrote: I think that you didn't read what I wrote, or at the very least didn't understand what I meant.
No I do not understand what you mean by what you wrote. If someone at the end of 8th suggested, that the fact that finaly mono sm armies are going to open up the meta, and that we have to look past how good 2.0 IH are, because with adjustment and people learning how to play against them, there are going to be more armies played, they would be lynched on this forum.
An army which has no bad sides, has a positive above 50% win rate against EVERY army existing in the game right now, does not promote new lists. It just lowers the win rates of the entire field and that is all.
Plus I don't know what you understand as balance. The fact that a mid tier DE piloted army has a positive chance to table or at least bring to any marine army to unable to win level, by turn two, after no turn 1 interaction, somehow brings balance. Also no one is going to shift to hard DE counter(if they existed), if those counters also doesn't beat the most popular and most played type of army in the game, which is marines. The fact that in 8th there were armies who could outswarm and hard counter castellan lists, didn't mean that somehow the playfield got better or more diverse, because the same armies were losing hard to Inari and Eldar, and couldn't deal with tau. Ah and this is for tournaments only. Where we assume people do try to play the most optimised lists. Outside of tournaments, even if it were somehow true, it changes nothing. Because telling someone, that their 30% win rate army is going to stay bad or get even worse with DE around, but a different army in a few months will come out and will beat DE, doesn't help to make the game more fun or balanced. Specially if the new army beats the DE and the entire field. Same way the fact that that DE beat the best up till now Harlis, doesn't balance the game at all.
The idea we need to wait and see before judging what is currently OP is ridiculous. We've had SM, Necrons, DG and DE Codexes so far, with a bunch of SM supplements as well. It's not exactly controversial at this point to say DE are by far the best of those books. Sure, minor shifts in the meta as the result of other books coming out may shift the balance slightly, but if BA are getting stomped by DE now they'll still be getting stomped by them in a couple of months because the problem isn't adjusting to the meta, it's that DE are broken.
The playtesting discussion is interesting. While it's true that testing is a professional skill it's also true that you don't need that many people with those skills to effectively test. The main skills you need are gathering the right data and interpreting that data effectively, along with the ability to remove bias from the process. The latter point is learned behaviour but also something that you can guard against by not having the designers run the testing. The first two skills don't require a large number of people and in many cases only need 1. Once you have these things in place you need a pool of testers. These people do not need to be professional testers. In the case of 40k they just need to know the rules well enough to play the game. The idea that this process is somehow too complex for GW is absurd.
Another problem GW has, is that it has no effective templating or game direction. 40k doesn't really seem to have a set of underlying design paradigms like every other game on the planet. To take a fairly recent example of a redesigned game, when FFG did the second edition of X-Wing they clearly had certain design rules they followed: no more than one bonus attack per ship; no unconditional free mods, for example. These aren't things that are explicitly pointed out to players but if you pay attention you notice them. GW are infamous for mid-edition changes of direction such as the change to how re-rolls worked halfway through 8th with newer re-roll auras allowing re-rolling all hits rather than just failed hits, or the sudden inclusion of formations in 7th. The lack of Universal Special Rules is another good example. Because they have no proper design direction they don't have even the most basic of protections against making things overpowered. Most of these kind of restrictions are applied because the designers are aware they are problematic so they come up with a basic rule to prevent them straying into that territory when they create new units. Then you have simple cases of just not doing even the most basic checking, like with the Battlecannon/Vanquisher example above.
....We need to wait and see because that's all we can do.
What can we do at this point? Multiple large social media influencers have called for and suggested nerfs, 95% of people in this thread are calling for and suggesting nerfs, but none of us is James Q Workshop, sole proprietor of warhammer tm 40 tm 000 tm.
Slipspace wrote: We've had SM, Necrons, DG and DE Codexes so far, with a bunch of SM supplements as well. It's not exactly controversial at this point to say DE are by far the best of those books. Sure, minor shifts in the meta as the result of other books coming out may shift the balance slightly, but if BA are getting stomped by DE now they'll still be getting stomped by them in a couple of months because the problem isn't adjusting to the meta, it's that DE are broken.
It's not controversial, it's simply wrong. SM and DG are definitely not very far from drukhari.
I'd also like to see those BA lists that are getting stomped by drukhari, are they still tailored against other SM/custodes/other heavy elite oriented armies? Do you really think that knowing in advance that the game is drukhari vs BA and with all the combinations available for both players (like in a simulator) there's no competition between the two factions?
Spoletta wrote: I think that you didn't read what I wrote, or at the very least didn't understand what I meant.
No I do not understand what you mean by what you wrote. If someone at the end of 8th suggested, that the fact that finaly mono sm armies are going to open up the meta, and that we have to look past how good 2.0 IH are, because with adjustment and people learning how to play against them, there are going to be more armies played, they would be lynched on this forum.
An army which has no bad sides, has a positive above 50% win rate against EVERY army existing in the game right now, does not promote new lists. It just lowers the win rates of the entire field and that is all.
Plus I don't know what you understand as balance. The fact that a mid tier DE piloted army has a positive chance to table or at least bring to any marine army to unable to win level, by turn two, after no turn 1 interaction, somehow brings balance. Also no one is going to shift to hard DE counter(if they existed), if those counters also doesn't beat the most popular and most played type of army in the game, which is marines. The fact that in 8th there were armies who could outswarm and hard counter castellan lists, didn't mean that somehow the playfield got better or more diverse, because the same armies were losing hard to Inari and Eldar, and couldn't deal with tau. Ah and this is for tournaments only. Where we assume people do try to play the most optimised lists. Outside of tournaments, even if it were somehow true, it changes nothing. Because telling someone, that their 30% win rate army is going to stay bad or get even worse with DE around, but a different army in a few months will come out and will beat DE, doesn't help to make the game more fun or balanced. Specially if the new army beats the DE and the entire field. Same way the fact that that DE beat the best up till now Harlis, doesn't balance the game at all.
Ok, I'll try to express in few lines why I'm very confused by your answer.
Me: "Drukhari are clearly OP, but if you look past their numbers, you can see that the variance of lists and factions on the competitive scene has increased."
the_scotsman wrote: ....We need to wait and see because that's all we can do.
What can we do at this point? Multiple large social media influencers have called for and suggested nerfs, 95% of people in this thread are calling for and suggesting nerfs, but none of us is James Q Workshop, sole proprietor of warhammer tm 40 tm 000 tm.
We have to see what James does.
That's not the point I was making or responding to. The specific point I was refuting is the idea that everything will be fine once all the Codexes are out. That just doesn't match up with reality or experience of how GW operates so it's a foolish hope to hang your hat on. There is no master plan here where all will become clear once we have the full picture. It's just the usual GW inability to balance their game.
Slipspace wrote: We've had SM, Necrons, DG and DE Codexes so far, with a bunch of SM supplements as well. It's not exactly controversial at this point to say DE are by far the best of those books. Sure, minor shifts in the meta as the result of other books coming out may shift the balance slightly, but if BA are getting stomped by DE now they'll still be getting stomped by them in a couple of months because the problem isn't adjusting to the meta, it's that DE are broken.
It's not controversial, it's simply wrong. SM and DG are definitely not very far from drukhari.
I'd also like to see those BA lists that are getting stomped by drukhari, are they still tailored against other SM/custodes/other heavy elite oriented armies? Do you really think that knowing in advance that the game is drukhari vs BA and with all the combinations available for both players (like in a simulator) there's no competition between the two factions?
Why would playing in a simulator grant increased foreknowledge of what faction your opponent is bringing? I have experience playing both in real life and in a simulator and it strikes me that I knew down to 1-2 armies what people were bringing IRL and had no idea what I was playing in simulated games.
If you want to prove that BA losing against Drukhari is list dependent then that is your hypothesis to prove. BA losing to Drukhari is a fact.
Slipspace wrote: That's not the point I was making or responding to. The specific point I was refuting is the idea that everything will be fine once all the Codexes are out. That just doesn't match up with reality or experience of how GW operates so it's a foolish hope to hang your hat on. There is no master plan here where all will become clear once we have the full picture. It's just the usual GW inability to balance their game.
We will have gotten through multiple Chapter Approved once all the Codexes are out, I would be very surprised if the DE hasn't been fixed (or nerfed to oblivion as GW is known to sometimes do) by then.
Even if I agree that mathammering is generally a very narrow and skew way to look at things, that doesn't mean that data and math should not be used to evaluate the game. Those are literally the foundation of modern society and science.
We can literally predict who someone will vote based on the meme they share on a social network.... Do you really believe there is no way to generate and feed data to have some proper analysis? How much snowflake do you think wargaming is?
From my point of view, it's not a matter of impossibility, but simply the long lasting legacy of the bean counter in chief (Kirby) and the last poisoned fruits of a corporate vision that is build upon how a snowflake GW (as a company) is. They feel they're special, and that special rules apply only to them.
To go back on topic: I'm really curious of AdMech and how they will impact the meta, and I'm even more curious about when we will reach the breaking point in terms of lethality (I think before the end of 9th codex cycle).
In my opinion, a game that requires hours and hours of work to field a model, only to remove it as soon as an enemy look at it the wrong way isn't susteinable indefinitely.
There is a trade off to have miniatures rather than token: but 40k will more and more benefit from the use of token... It's a clear indicator that something is slowly broking.
Didn't they preview a gun that their regular troops get that causes flat 3 damage to vehicles?
That's a pretty hard counter to raiders, theoretically.
Just wait 'til you hear about this crazy gun that regular troops get that causes 2+D6 damage to vehicles.
No, Arc rifles aren't particularly scary to drukhari vehicles. The basic Plasma Caliver (slightly rejiggered plasma gun) that admech already have would be a more effective counter to drukhari vehicles. The arc rifle critically is strength 6 with a special rule that makes it always wound vehicles on a 4+....that's wasted vs drukhari since they would already wound them on 4+.
The main thing that makes admech look like a good counter to drukhari would be:
1) powerfully buffed ironstrider balistarii is both a very awkward profile for drukhari to attack defensively (for the same reason that drukhari are an awkward profile for most armies to attack) and has a 6-shot autocannon weapon.
2) 2-damage kastelan robot phosphor blasters have the potential to be both good vs marines and good vs drukhari, leading to those being a good TAC piece
3) arc weaponry , taser goads etc getting 1 point of AP makes them ideal offensively to attack drukhari defensive profiles.
Other than that, we do not know that much atm. I perosnally do not think Sending a Spider to Swallow the Fly is a particularly good method of balancing drukhari, and I also believe we will see the top stuff that's been discussed to death already in this thread bonked before too long.
Cybtroll wrote: Even if I agree that mathammering is generally a very narrow and skew way to look at things, that doesn't mean that data and math should not be used to evaluate the game. Those are literally the foundation of modern society and science. We can literally predict who someone will vote based on the meme they share on a social network.... Do you really believe there is no way to generate and feed data to have some proper analysis? How much snowflake do you think wargaming is?
From my point of view, it's not a matter of impossibility, but simply the long lasting legacy of the bean counter in chief (Kirby) and the last poisoned fruits of a corporate vision that is build upon how a snowflake GW (as a company) is. They feel they're special, and that special rules apply only to them.
To go back on topic: I'm really curious of AdMech and how they will impact the meta, and I'm even more curious about when we will reach the breaking point in terms of lethality (I think before the end of 9th codex cycle).
In my opinion, a game that requires hours and hours of work to field a model, only to remove it as soon as an enemy look at it the wrong way isn't susteinable indefinitely. There is a trade off to have miniatures rather than token: but 40k will more and more benefit from the use of token... It's a clear indicator that something is slowly broking.
I'm not that sure about lethality increasing.
I too had that impression, but then I thought about what we faced in older editions.
There was this time where we were scared of dreadnaughts firing 4 S8 AP4 shots, which is laughable firepower now. Then I thought about old rules, and noticed that those 4 shots had not so bad chances of scrapping 2 rhinos. From very far away. I can't think of many non-LoW models today that could do that. Not even 3 assault bikes with multimelta do it that well. And obviously I'm not considering the whole of 7th edition, were things were just dumb.
Are we sure that lethality has increased compared to old editions?
Cybtroll wrote: Even if I agree that mathammering is generally a very narrow and skew way to look at things, that doesn't mean that data and math should not be used to evaluate the game. Those are literally the foundation of modern society and science.
We can literally predict who someone will vote based on the meme they share on a social network.... Do you really believe there is no way to generate and feed data to have some proper analysis? How much snowflake do you think wargaming is?
From my point of view, it's not a matter of impossibility, but simply the long lasting legacy of the bean counter in chief (Kirby) and the last poisoned fruits of a corporate vision that is build upon how a snowflake GW (as a company) is. They feel they're special, and that special rules apply only to them.
To go back on topic: I'm really curious of AdMech and how they will impact the meta, and I'm even more curious about when we will reach the breaking point in terms of lethality (I think before the end of 9th codex cycle).
In my opinion, a game that requires hours and hours of work to field a model, only to remove it as soon as an enemy look at it the wrong way isn't susteinable indefinitely.
There is a trade off to have miniatures rather than token: but 40k will more and more benefit from the use of token... It's a clear indicator that something is slowly broking.
I'm not that sure about lethality increasing.
I too had that impression, but then I thought about what we faced in older editions.
There was this time where we were scared of dreadnaughts firing 4 S8 AP4 shots, which is laughable firepower now. Then I thought about old rules, and noticed that those 4 shots had not so bad chances of scrapping 2 rhinos. From very far away.
I can't think of many non-LoW models today that could do that. Not even 3 assault bikes with multimelta do it that well.
And obviously I'm not considering the whole of 7th edition, were things were just dumb.
Are we sure that lethality has increased compared to old editions?
IMO a large amount of the reason why older editions felt less deadly was because GW pushed really super hard for a really really long time that for every squad you bought, you'd be insane not to buy a transport for that squad because they were super super cheap (like, 35pts for a trukk to protect your 80pt boyz squad). That meant that by default, every army that could was running a highly mechanized list with a lot of generally not terribly offensively threatning transports like Rhinos, Devilfish, Trukks, Chimeras and the factions that had transports that could also fight well (razorbacks, waveserpents, venoms) were very powerful.
in terms of 'i've got my las-predator and im gonna shoot it at your las-predator' or 'i've got my tactical squad and im gonna shoot it at your squad of guardsmen' 9th is actually usually less deadly than say 5th.
If you had the proper weapon, it was very damn easy to kill something. But if you didn't, there were many things that were practically impossible to kill.
The worst example being that if you lacked enough AT and run into a mechanized list, you were fethed. And of course the different death star mechanics that were meant to abuse different rules to get the most absurdly durable units (from the Paladin star in 5th to the Screamer star in 7th).
If you had the proper weapon, it was very damn easy to kill something. But if you didn't, there were many things that were practically impossible to kill.
The worst example being that if you lacked enough AT and run into a mechanized list, you were fethed. And of course the different death star mechanics that were meant to abuse different rules to get the most absurdly durable units (from the Paladin star in 5th to the Screamer star in 7th).
^THATS true, durability-skew death stars are very much less of a thing in 8th/9th than they were in previous editions. You no longer commonly have units that their whole thing is 'they literally cannot be killed by anything, you would take like 20 turns of continuous fire to kill this thing you just have to play around it as best you can', mostly because of the removal of attaching characters to units to gain special abiliites.
If you had the proper weapon, it was very damn easy to kill something. But if you didn't, there were many things that were practically impossible to kill.
The worst example being that if you lacked enough AT and run into a mechanized list, you were fethed. And of course the different death star mechanics that were meant to abuse different rules to get the most absurdly durable units (from the Paladin star in 5th to the Screamer star in 7th).
But that is the same situation we have right now. The problem is that most armies do not have a way to destroy multiple transports with inv saves, when they hide out of LoS. And it is even visible in how the win ratios were shaped over the course of 9th ed. All armies had a similar 45-55% win rates, besides one who was clearly a lot better, and now got an even better version of the same over achiving army, and non wide spread options to counter either.
SM and DG are definitely not very far from drukhari.
Show me the multiple events where DA or DG took most of top 8, and were being souped in to other armies that reached top 8. Or when were DG at 78% win rate.
Cybtroll wrote: Even if I agree that mathammering is generally a very narrow and skew way to look at things, that doesn't mean that data and math should not be used to evaluate the game. Those are literally the foundation of modern society and science.
We can literally predict who someone will vote based on the meme they share on a social network.... Do you really believe there is no way to generate and feed data to have some proper analysis? How much snowflake do you think wargaming is?
From my point of view, it's not a matter of impossibility, but simply the long lasting legacy of the bean counter in chief (Kirby) and the last poisoned fruits of a corporate vision that is build upon how a snowflake GW (as a company) is. They feel they're special, and that special rules apply only to them.
To go back on topic: I'm really curious of AdMech and how they will impact the meta, and I'm even more curious about when we will reach the breaking point in terms of lethality (I think before the end of 9th codex cycle).
In my opinion, a game that requires hours and hours of work to field a model, only to remove it as soon as an enemy look at it the wrong way isn't susteinable indefinitely.
There is a trade off to have miniatures rather than token: but 40k will more and more benefit from the use of token... It's a clear indicator that something is slowly broking.
I'm not that sure about lethality increasing.
I too had that impression, but then I thought about what we faced in older editions.
There was this time where we were scared of dreadnaughts firing 4 S8 AP4 shots, which is laughable firepower now. Then I thought about old rules, and noticed that those 4 shots had not so bad chances of scrapping 2 rhinos. From very far away.
I can't think of many non-LoW models today that could do that. Not even 3 assault bikes with multimelta do it that well.
And obviously I'm not considering the whole of 7th edition, were things were just dumb.
Are we sure that lethality has increased compared to old editions?
What's interesting about the Gun Dread you bring up is a few things:
1. Like the present if near a Captain, a Ven Dread is very unlikely to miss with those shots, which equates reliability of mass shots
2. The Psybolts increasing the Autocannon to S8 meant Instant Death on a swath of new targets. That's ideal even if you don't get anywhere with the AP4 because models were paying more of a premium for extra wounds
3. Immobile vehicles might as well be dead. Glancing to death was absolutely comparable to knocking a monster/vehicle to the next wound profile
If you had the proper weapon, it was very damn easy to kill something. But if you didn't, there were many things that were practically impossible to kill.
The worst example being that if you lacked enough AT and run into a mechanized list, you were fethed. And of course the different death star mechanics that were meant to abuse different rules to get the most absurdly durable units (from the Paladin star in 5th to the Screamer star in 7th).
But that is the same situation we have right now. The problem is that most armies do not have a way to destroy multiple transports with inv saves, when they hide out of LoS. And it is even visible in how the win ratios were shaped over the course of 9th ed. All armies had a similar 45-55% win rates, besides one who was clearly a lot better, and now got an even better version of the same over achiving army, and non wide spread options to counter either.
SM and DG are definitely not very far from drukhari.
Show me the multiple events where DA or DG took most of top 8, and were being souped in to other armies that reached top 8. Or when were DG at 78% win rate.
If you had the proper weapon, it was very damn easy to kill something. But if you didn't, there were many things that were practically impossible to kill.
The worst example being that if you lacked enough AT and run into a mechanized list, you were fethed. And of course the different death star mechanics that were meant to abuse different rules to get the most absurdly durable units (from the Paladin star in 5th to the Screamer star in 7th).
But that is the same situation we have right now. The problem is that most armies do not have a way to destroy multiple transports with inv saves, when they hide out of LoS. And it is even visible in how the win ratios were shaped over the course of 9th ed. All armies had a similar 45-55% win rates, besides one who was clearly a lot better, and now got an even better version of the same over achiving army, and non wide spread options to counter either.
SM and DG are definitely not very far from drukhari.
Show me the multiple events where DA or DG took most of top 8, and were being souped in to other armies that reached top 8. Or when were DG at 78% win rate.
Really show me one faction that can`t do that ?
Necrons can't take out multiple Raiders out of line of sight.
If you had the proper weapon, it was very damn easy to kill something. But if you didn't, there were many things that were practically impossible to kill.
The worst example being that if you lacked enough AT and run into a mechanized list, you were fethed. And of course the different death star mechanics that were meant to abuse different rules to get the most absurdly durable units (from the Paladin star in 5th to the Screamer star in 7th).
But that is the same situation we have right now. The problem is that most armies do not have a way to destroy multiple transports with inv saves, when they hide out of LoS. And it is even visible in how the win ratios were shaped over the course of 9th ed. All armies had a similar 45-55% win rates, besides one who was clearly a lot better, and now got an even better version of the same over achiving army, and non wide spread options to counter either.
SM and DG are definitely not very far from drukhari.
Show me the multiple events where DA or DG took most of top 8, and were being souped in to other armies that reached top 8. Or when were DG at 78% win rate.
Really show me one faction that can`t do that ?
Necrons can't take out multiple Raiders out of line of sight.
Well then it just becomes a question of how to bring them intoLoS, now doesn't it?
If you had the proper weapon, it was very damn easy to kill something. But if you didn't, there were many things that were practically impossible to kill.
The worst example being that if you lacked enough AT and run into a mechanized list, you were fethed. And of course the different death star mechanics that were meant to abuse different rules to get the most absurdly durable units (from the Paladin star in 5th to the Screamer star in 7th).
But that is the same situation we have right now. The problem is that most armies do not have a way to destroy multiple transports with inv saves, when they hide out of LoS. And it is even visible in how the win ratios were shaped over the course of 9th ed. All armies had a similar 45-55% win rates, besides one who was clearly a lot better, and now got an even better version of the same over achiving army, and non wide spread options to counter either.
SM and DG are definitely not very far from drukhari.
Show me the multiple events where DA or DG took most of top 8, and were being souped in to other armies that reached top 8. Or when were DG at 78% win rate.
After watching events and playing some TTS with their pre-set tables, I think it seems like people play way too much LoS blocking, I know I have said it once already in this thread but when I play games I do not play with so much you can hide 6 raiders, i play against GSC, BA, UM, IF, DA, SoB, DG, Custodes, Tau, etc.. i play against a lot of armies on the average and most can kill 1-2 Raiders a turn if they focus them, this includes turn 1.
Karol wrote: But that is the same situation we have right now. The problem is that most armies do not have a way to destroy multiple transports with inv saves, when they hide out of LoS. And it is even visible in how the win ratios were shaped over the course of 9th ed. All armies had a similar 45-55% win rates, besides one who was clearly a lot better, and now got an even better version of the same over achiving army, and non wide spread options to counter either.
It is a fundamentally different problem. Death Stars of old, specially the ones during 6th and 7th, were mathematically impossible to kill even if they were sitting in the middle of the board, in the open, for the 7 turns a game may last.
Raiders are extremely point efficient, but if the DE player tries that you get a very death DE army. The problem isn't that Raiders are unkillable, but rather that they are too damn efficient. Death Stars of old were outright unkillable.
Cybtroll wrote: Even if I agree that mathammering is generally a very narrow and skew way to look at things, that doesn't mean that data and math should not be used to evaluate the game. Those are literally the foundation of modern society and science.
We can literally predict who someone will vote based on the meme they share on a social network.... Do you really believe there is no way to generate and feed data to have some proper analysis? How much snowflake do you think wargaming is?
From my point of view, it's not a matter of impossibility, but simply the long lasting legacy of the bean counter in chief (Kirby) and the last poisoned fruits of a corporate vision that is build upon how a snowflake GW (as a company) is. They feel they're special, and that special rules apply only to them.
To go back on topic: I'm really curious of AdMech and how they will impact the meta, and I'm even more curious about when we will reach the breaking point in terms of lethality (I think before the end of 9th codex cycle).
In my opinion, a game that requires hours and hours of work to field a model, only to remove it as soon as an enemy look at it the wrong way isn't susteinable indefinitely.
There is a trade off to have miniatures rather than token: but 40k will more and more benefit from the use of token... It's a clear indicator that something is slowly broking.
I'm not that sure about lethality increasing.
I too had that impression, but then I thought about what we faced in older editions.
There was this time where we were scared of dreadnaughts firing 4 S8 AP4 shots, which is laughable firepower now. Then I thought about old rules, and noticed that those 4 shots had not so bad chances of scrapping 2 rhinos. From very far away.
I can't think of many non-LoW models today that could do that. Not even 3 assault bikes with multimelta do it that well.
And obviously I'm not considering the whole of 7th edition, were things were just dumb.
Are we sure that lethality has increased compared to old editions?
I've been thinking a lot about this recently. The places where lethality exists shifts around, making "increased lethality" a difficult thing to pin down. However, the example you chose was from 5th edition, which had a dramatic increase in lethality of that of 4th edition by way of unit options and the removal/changing of area terrain in favor of a more literal TLOS model, which increased firing opporunities. (Sternguard being my go-to example, but many of the codexes of that era bumped up various attack numbers.)
But one thing we can look at that that I think paints a VERY clear picture is looking at the "baseline" unit of the Tactical Squad, armed against another MEQ target (which for better or worse are incredibly popular and likely to face). In these examples I'm going to keep MEQ at 1W since that was their profile through 8th, and most other infantry is 1W. I'm keeping the Damage math out for now.
In 3rd and 4th edition, at 24" range a well armed Tactical Squad (Lascannon, Plasmagun, 8 Bolter guys) did 1.99 wounds to another MEQ unit. (2x.666x.83)+(8x.666x.5x.333)
If they MOVED, they couldn't reach beyond 12" with their weapons, and couldn't fire their Lascannon at all. In 4th they could fire twice with their boltguns, a step up from 3rd where they couldn't.
In 8th ed, at 24" range the same squad did 1.7 (.666x.666x.83+(.666x.83x.83)+(8x.666x.5x.333)) pretty good?
Except that's not the full story. . .
Tactical Squads now got the Grav Cannon, which was superior against nearly every target over the Lascannon.
Combi-weapons are now not one-shot-per-game, making them a second Plasmagun in effect
REROLLS - As soon as their codex hit I was taking a Chapter Master in every battle, in addition to the Lt.
So by that point, in 8th my "baseline" Tac Squad is getting 4.4 Standing still at 24" (.888x.96x.83x2+(.888x.777x.83x4)+(.888x.6x.333x7))
That's not even counting Doctrines, Super Doctrines and Bolter Discipline In 8.5, playing UM My Tactical Squads were routinely getting 7.7 ON THE MOVE. (2x.888x.96+(4x.888x.777x.83x4)+(14x.888x.6x.5) at 24"
So my troops unit could nearly one shot another 10-man Marine unit at a 30" threat range. (within RF Plasma Range it goes to 9.4, hello Rhinos and Drop Pods)
Not to mention, in 8th edition models can now Charge after firing RF and Heavy Weapons when in 3rd-7th they could not. So my UM could combine their 9.4 with whatever they're going to do in assault. (21x.666x.5x.333)=2.3 without rerolls, 3.7 with rerolls totaling 13.1
Now, there's a really important bit about assaulting in prior editions in the sense that you could wipe out opposing units with morale, etc. An that was potentially extremely lethal. But it did actually require you to close the distance and engage with the opposing models in CC. With the math above I'm looking at about a 5X lethality increase during firefights at long ranges. It has a huuge effect on how the game feels.
If you had the proper weapon, it was very damn easy to kill something. But if you didn't, there were many things that were practically impossible to kill.
The worst example being that if you lacked enough AT and run into a mechanized list, you were fethed. And of course the different death star mechanics that were meant to abuse different rules to get the most absurdly durable units (from the Paladin star in 5th to the Screamer star in 7th).
But that is the same situation we have right now. The problem is that most armies do not have a way to destroy multiple transports with inv saves, when they hide out of LoS. And it is even visible in how the win ratios were shaped over the course of 9th ed. All armies had a similar 45-55% win rates, besides one who was clearly a lot better, and now got an even better version of the same over achiving army, and non wide spread options to counter either.
SM and DG are definitely not very far from drukhari.
Show me the multiple events where DA or DG took most of top 8, and were being souped in to other armies that reached top 8. Or when were DG at 78% win rate.
Really show me one faction that can`t do that ?
Necrons can't take out multiple Raiders out of line of sight.
Necrons have doomsctyhe and ghostark that are fast enough to get the angles and do alot of decent damage.
Is that point efficient ? Probably not, but they certainly can do that.
Also necrons have very interesting codex, Siegler almost beat that winning Dallas GT list with crons, playing some strange board army list. He could have probably have higher chance to win, if drukhari list was 100-200 pts more.
Led`s not fall to Karols level, who seem to think that you should be able to kill 6 raiders for one turn to have a chance to win the game.
Imagine thinking that empty transport is the most broken thing in the game, when playing factions with 100% WR vs new drukhari.
Karol wrote: But that is the same situation we have right now. The problem is that most armies do not have a way to destroy multiple transports with inv saves, when they hide out of LoS. And it is even visible in how the win ratios were shaped over the course of 9th ed. All armies had a similar 45-55% win rates, besides one who was clearly a lot better, and now got an even better version of the same over achiving army, and non wide spread options to counter either.
It is a fundamentally different problem. Death Stars of old, specially the ones during 6th and 7th, were mathematically impossible to kill even if they were sitting in the middle of the board, in the open, for the 7 turns a game may last.
Raiders are extremely point efficient, but if the DE player tries that you get a very death DE army. The problem isn't that Raiders are unkillable, but rather that they are too damn efficient. Death Stars of old were outright unkillable.
D-weapons destroyed old Deathstars, some formations were banned b.c how stupidly strong D-weapons can get (I mean there was a Formation to shoot Massive Blast (7" blast) D-weapon for crying out loud) You also had Auto hitting attack to ignore Invisibility with HoW, there were units to get 30-40 HoW hits (Quins Troupes could, DE Reavers, and many others) granted the 3++ re-roll saves some units had sucked but a 80pt unit could 1 shot Celestine and then another could (now she is no longer part of the unit) then kill a bike or 2. So you "could" deal with them, its just if you had the tools to or not. I played Corsairs in 7th and had 2 units with D-weapons so they were not that huge of a problem for me unless Celestine lived b.c then it was like I did nothing at all (If she lived she could tank well over 20 wounds).
I get what you mean, but like Raiders and DS's you needed the tools and I pay people with the tools, they don't have problems killing Raiders in 9th.
Karol wrote: But that is the same situation we have right now. The problem is that most armies do not have a way to destroy multiple transports with inv saves, when they hide out of LoS. And it is even visible in how the win ratios were shaped over the course of 9th ed. All armies had a similar 45-55% win rates, besides one who was clearly a lot better, and now got an even better version of the same over achiving army, and non wide spread options to counter either.
It is a fundamentally different problem. Death Stars of old, specially the ones during 6th and 7th, were mathematically impossible to kill even if they were sitting in the middle of the board, in the open, for the 7 turns a game may last.
Raiders are extremely point efficient, but if the DE player tries that you get a very death DE army. The problem isn't that Raiders are unkillable, but rather that they are too damn efficient. Death Stars of old were outright unkillable.
Yeah, this is something a lot of people don't realize about older rules in older editions: when people say something is 'broken' today, usually what they mean is 'efficient enough that it can cause a lot of points of damage for its cost, or survive very long compared to other things of its cost.' Very rarely is something 'broken' in 8th/9th like stuff was 'broken' in older editions.
I'd point to..the current razorflail succubus build, the armies in super early 8th that would spam a gak ton of culexus assassins back before they fixed character rules, the super early iron hands 2.0 build where you could make a dreadnought harder to kill than a warlord titan, as the few examples of stuff I'd consider to be 'broken' in the same way old stuff was.
As an example, in fifth ed, demon armies HAD to deep strike, and GK had a psychic power that would prevent deep strike within a large area of the unit. It was very possible to prevent a demon opponent from even putting any models down on the board if you had GKs.
In 7th ed, Invisibility and some re-rollable 2++ invuln save abilities made it possible to have a single death star unit that could simply not be harmed meaningfully by an opposing army for the entirety of the game. That was a normal thing that many different factions had access to - functional invulnerability, provided you could roll randomly and get the correct psychic power.
it was also far more normal for the 3-4 competitive armies to completely and utterly remove almost all other armies from the meta. The single tournament datapoint that people have started bringing up of "GK in fifth werent even that broken, fifty eight percent winrate lololololol" fails to account for the fact that at that particular tournament that data comes from, the faction breakdown looked like this:
GK - 40% of players
Dark Eldar - 30% of players
Space Marines - 20% of players
Every other army combined in the entire game - 10% of players.
^that kind of breakdown with about 9 in 10 players bringing the most popular 3-4 armies was the norm that I recall from all throughout fifth, sixth, and most of seventh edition, and generally speaking, those lists would most frequently be spamming like 3-4 units. It'd be like "a farseer on a bike, plus six wave serpents all with the same gun full of dire avengers" or "eight las-plas razorbacks" or "ten venoms with 5-man wych squads inside". The meta moved EXTREMELY slowly compared to now, which meant every competitive player would quickly 'solve' the meta and theyd all have time to get one of the three functional lists made.
While true, no one ran tactical squads in the open back then (because that was just asking a battle cannon to one shot the entire squad).
The game was almost divided between death stars that were borderline impossible to kill and weapons that were very good at killing everyone else.
Amishprn86 wrote: D-weapons destroyed old Deathstars, some formations were banned b.c how stupidly strong D-weapons can get (I mean there was a Formation to shoot Massive Blast (7" blast) D-weapon for crying out loud) You also had Auto hitting attack to ignore Invisibility with HoW, there were units to get 30-40 HoW hits (Quins Troupes could, DE Reavers, and many others) granted the 3++ re-roll saves some units had sucked but a 80pt unit could 1 shot Celestine and then another could (now she is no longer part of the unit) then kill a bike or 2. So you "could" deal with them, its just if you had the tools to or not. I played Corsairs in 7th and had 2 units with D-weapons so they were not that huge of a problem for me unless Celestine lived b.c then it was like I did nothing at all (If she lived she could tank well over 20 wounds).
I get what you mean, but like Raiders and DS's you needed the tools and I pay people with the tools, they don't have problems killing Raiders in 9th.
D-Weapons were poorly distributed, my Tyranids never got one as an example, same issue with HoW shenanigans for Invisibility. Also the 3++ re-roll was the easy mode, some death stars like the Screamer Star had a 2++ re-roll and are the reason all current rules that improve the invulnerable save are capped at either 3+ or 4+.
While true, no one ran tactical squads in the open back then (because that was just asking a battle cannon to one shot the entire squad).
Uhhh. . . untrue. I ran them all the time.
The Battle Cannon and weapons like it (Ordinance) is another important part of the picture. A Battle Cannon could only be fired from a stationary vehicle, and it precluded the firing of any other weapons. It could also miss wildly.
It was also limited to three, as the FOC was much stricter back then.
Karol wrote: But that is the same situation we have right now. The problem is that most armies do not have a way to destroy multiple transports with inv saves, when they hide out of LoS. And it is even visible in how the win ratios were shaped over the course of 9th ed. All armies had a similar 45-55% win rates, besides one who was clearly a lot better, and now got an even better version of the same over achiving army, and non wide spread options to counter either.
It is a fundamentally different problem. Death Stars of old, specially the ones during 6th and 7th, were mathematically impossible to kill even if they were sitting in the middle of the board, in the open, for the 7 turns a game may last.
Raiders are extremely point efficient, but if the DE player tries that you get a very death DE army. The problem isn't that Raiders are unkillable, but rather that they are too damn efficient. Death Stars of old were outright unkillable.
D-weapons destroyed old Deathstars, some formations were banned b.c how stupidly strong D-weapons can get (I mean there was a Formation to shoot Massive Blast (7" blast) D-weapon for crying out loud) You also had Auto hitting attack to ignore Invisibility with HoW, there were units to get 30-40 HoW hits (Quins Troupes could, DE Reavers, and many others) granted the 3++ re-roll saves some units had sucked but a 80pt unit could 1 shot Celestine and then another could (now she is no longer part of the unit) then kill a bike or 2. So you "could" deal with them, its just if you had the tools to or not. I played Corsairs in 7th and had 2 units with D-weapons so they were not that huge of a problem for me unless Celestine lived b.c then it was like I did nothing at all (If she lived she could tank well over 20 wounds).
I get what you mean, but like Raiders and DS's you needed the tools and I pay people with the tools, they don't have problems killing Raiders in 9th.
LoL yeah they nerfed the d weapons that could deal with deathstars but not the OP spells and abilities sharing that made D weapons necessary. Competitive games in this period have 0 value imo. Just some local TO making decisions about what armies were going to win. D weapons were not the problem in any case. IMO they should be brought back with modified rules. They should just ignore all saves like belakors new sword or the night bringer. They should be pretty rare though.
The Battle Cannon and weapons like it (Ordinance) is another important part of the picture. A Battle Cannon could only be fired from a stationary vehicle, and it precluded the firing of any other weapons. It could also miss wildly.
It was also limited to three, as the FOC was much stricter back then.
In 4th? I don't think so.
I'm thinking 5th edition, which is when the tank squadrons were introduced and the Paladin star dominated.
The Battle Cannon and weapons like it (Ordinance) is another important part of the picture. A Battle Cannon could only be fired from a stationary vehicle, and it precluded the firing of any other weapons. It could also miss wildly.
It was also limited to three, as the FOC was much stricter back then.
In 4th? I don't think so.
I'm thinking 5th edition, which is when the tank squadrons were introduced and the Paladin star dominated.
Right, well that's part of my point about the difference between 4th and 5th ed. 5th got a lot looser with their "codex writing safeguards" or whatever. Chaplain Dreadnoughts, Special weapon spam, Draigo nonsense, 3++ Storm Shields, etc.
Karol wrote: But is always the case? If we look at a succbubs that avarges around 30+ attacks per round of fighting, then I think that even with pure math hammer we can say that something is wrong.
Same way we don't have to do a lot of testing, if we see a unit balanced around the idea of high damage, but weak to incoming damge, and then see the balanced broken, because the unit is put in to a cheap open topped, and powerful on itself, transport. With added cross cabal synergies etc. How many games does one have to playtesst to know that 6 raiders and stuff like DT liquifires is too good. And that is before one adds stuff, like the practical removal of LoS shoting and adding a ton of LoS blocking to the game, having a super high synergy with flying transports. Or the always present goes first has a higher chance of winning.
Some succubi are egregious, but not all of them.
How many permutations of them are there? Quite a few I'd imagine.
But put that 60 point succubus on a table from something with a gun. It dies. So it needs to ride a boat. How much of the boat is part of her cost? She also needs buddies incase she rolls a 1 when the transport goes. How much do the buddies contribute to the cost?
The Battle Cannon and weapons like it (Ordinance) is another important part of the picture. A Battle Cannon could only be fired from a stationary vehicle, and it precluded the firing of any other weapons. It could also miss wildly.
It was also limited to three, as the FOC was much stricter back then.
In 4th? I don't think so.
I'm thinking 5th edition, which is when the tank squadrons were introduced and the Paladin star dominated.
Right, well that's part of my point about the difference between 4th and 5th ed. 5th got a lot looser with their "codex writing safeguards" or whatever. Chaplain Dreadnoughts, Special weapon spam, Draigo nonsense, 3++ Storm Shields, etc.
I have no idea about 4th, I wasn't playing back then, so I can only compare to 5th 6th and 7th. Compared to those, I don't think that lethality has actually become that higher.
How many permutations of them are there? Quite a few I'd imagine.
But put that 60 point succubus on a table from something with a gun. It dies. So it needs to ride a boat. How much of the boat is part of her cost? She also needs buddies incase she rolls a 1 when the transport goes. How much do the buddies contribute to the cost?
So let me get this straight, because there is a theoretical possibility that somewhere in the world someone plays a bad build succubus with an army with no raiders, no DT wrecks or with wrecks but without liquifires, no drazh etc the DE stuff should not be changed?
also if the succubus is out of the she is in melee killing stuff, then here unit of bodyguard witchs has to be kill, which is not super hard, because of how aggresivly they are costed for what both of those units can do, the return is easy. Before that she is sitting in one of the 6 raiders, and it is a RR if the raider you somehow got LoS to is actually carrying her and her bodyguard of witchs. Ah and if they happen to be on an objective you have to kill all 3, which is suprisingly not easy for a supposed glass type of unit thanks to the raider being rather resilient with an inv save, higher toughness and multiple wounds.
It is a fundamentally different problem. Death Stars of old, specially the ones during 6th and 7th, were mathematically impossible to kill even if they were sitting in the middle of the board, in the open, for the 7 turns a game may last.
Raiders are extremely point efficient, but if the DE player tries that you get a very death DE army. The problem isn't that Raiders are unkillable, but rather that they are too damn efficient. Death Stars of old were outright unkillable.
It is impossible for most armies to kill 6 raiders sitting behind cover in turn 1-2 too. Heck for some armies it is just impossible to kill even one raider when they all are out LoS, because that is how 9th ed tables look like.
How many permutations of them are there? Quite a few I'd imagine.
But put that 60 point succubus on a table from something with a gun. It dies. So it needs to ride a boat. How much of the boat is part of her cost? She also needs buddies incase she rolls a 1 when the transport goes. How much do the buddies contribute to the cost?
So let me get this straight, because there is a theoretical possibility that somewhere in the world someone plays a bad build succubus with an army with no raiders, no DT wrecks or with wrecks but without liquifires, no drazh etc the DE stuff should not be changed?
also if the succubus is out of the she is in melee killing stuff, then here unit of bodyguard witchs has to be kill, which is not super hard, because of how aggresivly they are costed for what both of those units can do, the return is easy. Before that she is sitting in one of the 6 raiders, and it is a RR if the raider you somehow got LoS to is actually carrying her and her bodyguard of witchs. Ah and if they happen to be on an objective you have to kill all 3, which is suprisingly not easy for a supposed glass type of unit thanks to the raider being rather resilient with an inv save, higher toughness and multiple wounds.
It is a fundamentally different problem. Death Stars of old, specially the ones during 6th and 7th, were mathematically impossible to kill even if they were sitting in the middle of the board, in the open, for the 7 turns a game may last.
Raiders are extremely point efficient, but if the DE player tries that you get a very death DE army. The problem isn't that Raiders are unkillable, but rather that they are too damn efficient. Death Stars of old were outright unkillable.
It is impossible for most armies to kill 6 raiders sitting behind cover in turn 1-2 too. Heck for some armies it is just impossible to kill even one raider when they all are out LoS, because that is how 9th ed tables look like.
You should have LoS to 1-2 raiders no matter what, if you do not then your tables terrain is bad.
The DE and all players for that matter should not be able to hide 90%+ of their army, you should have to make a choice. DO I want to hide my Raiders but leave out my Court/Hellions or leave out 2 raiders to hide my Court? I can not understand the tables some of you must be playing on to fully hide 6 raiders for 2 turns.
Also, all armies can kill a raider or two a turn, now did you take a TAC list, well thats up to your list but no army literally can't.
Necrons have doomsctyhe and ghostark that are fast enough to get the angles and do alot of decent damage.
Is that point efficient ? Probably not, but they certainly can do that.
Also necrons have very interesting codex, Siegler almost beat that winning Dallas GT list with crons, playing some strange board army list. He could have probably have higher chance to win, if drukhari list was 100-200 pts more.
Led`s not fall to Karols level, who seem to think that you should be able to kill 6 raiders for one turn to have a chance to win the game.
Imagine thinking that empty transport is the most broken thing in the game, when playing factions with 100% WR vs new drukhari.
But if you don't kill at least 3 of the raiders or worse kill 1 or less, then on turn two you get slammed by the entire DE army and you can say the game goodbye on turn 2. Specially if you play a non horde army.
And the comment about the necron list possibly winning actually made my day. Because we have a joke about fly saying that, if it only had more training, it would reap its elephant enemy in half. The necron army lost, and the DE army cost what it costs right now.
You should have LoS to 1-2 raiders no matter what, if you do not then your tables terrain is bad.
The DE and all players for that matter should not be able to hide 90%+ of their army, you should have to make a choice. DO I want to hide my Raiders but leave out my Court/Hellions or leave out 2 raiders to hide my Court? I can not understand the tables some of you must be playing on to fully hide 6 raiders for 2 turns.
Also, all armies can kill a raider or two a turn, now did you take a TAC list, well thats up to your list but no army literally can't.
And I don't understand how you could be playing on different tables. Although that does maybe explain why some people think that marine shoting is too good. Without LoS blocking terrain they probably blast other armies while camping objectives.
The Battle Cannon and weapons like it (Ordinance) is another important part of the picture. A Battle Cannon could only be fired from a stationary vehicle, and it precluded the firing of any other weapons. It could also miss wildly.
It was also limited to three, as the FOC was much stricter back then.
In 4th? I don't think so.
I'm thinking 5th edition, which is when the tank squadrons were introduced and the Paladin star dominated.
Right, well that's part of my point about the difference between 4th and 5th ed. 5th got a lot looser with their "codex writing safeguards" or whatever. Chaplain Dreadnoughts, Special weapon spam, Draigo nonsense, 3++ Storm Shields, etc.
I have no idea about 4th, I wasn't playing back then, so I can only compare to 5th 6th and 7th. Compared to those, I don't think that lethality has actually become that higher.
I think lethality has been spread out more.
In prior editions high levels of lethality were more concentrated in fewer units. Currently it's easier to have high levels of lethality "accidentally" even if you're taking more fluffy options. Twin Linked weapons now actually fire double the shots. Leman Russes can fire their Battle Cannon twice along with all the Heavy Bolters, and common mid-tier weapons like Heavy Bolters actually modify saves now. Given the fact that a lot of people play armies with either Power Armor or similar armor of some sort, the fact that these mid range weapons are now depleting saves and firing more, it makes sense that things could feel more lethal. Also, the rerolls did a lot.
A TL Heavy Bolter killed .56 a Marine in 5-7th
The same weapon does 1.33 in 8th+
With CM and Lt rerolls, plus Devastator Doctrine you get 2.75
9th is cutting back on the rerolls again, but hopefully you get my point. Without necessarily optimizing builds, it's easier for common "casual, mid-tier" units to kill more stuff.
Having my dudes run with 1 or 2 wounds each, at the points costs they have, with a +4 or +5 sv with all the multi shot and 2D weapons being thrown around, the game feels very deadly.
But this is just my army expiriance, I have no idea how playing something else feels.
Karol wrote: Having my dudes run with 1 or 2 wounds each, at the points costs they have, with a +4 or +5 sv with all the multi shot and 2D weapons being thrown around, the game feels very deadly.
But this is just my army expiriance, I have no idea how playing something else feels.
Literally one unit in the Grey Knights codex has a 4+ armor save. That would be Servitors. Nothing has a 5+ save.
How many permutations of them are there? Quite a few I'd imagine.
But put that 60 point succubus on a table from something with a gun. It dies. So it needs to ride a boat. How much of the boat is part of her cost? She also needs buddies incase she rolls a 1 when the transport goes. How much do the buddies contribute to the cost?
So let me get this straight, because there is a theoretical possibility that somewhere in the world someone plays a bad build succubus with an army with no raiders, no DT wrecks or with wrecks but without liquifires, no drazh etc the DE stuff should not be changed?
also if the succubus is out of the she is in melee killing stuff, then here unit of bodyguard witchs has to be kill, which is not super hard, because of how aggresivly they are costed for what both of those units can do, the return is easy. Before that she is sitting in one of the 6 raiders, and it is a RR if the raider you somehow got LoS to is actually carrying her and her bodyguard of witchs. Ah and if they happen to be on an objective you have to kill all 3, which is suprisingly not easy for a supposed glass type of unit thanks to the raider being rather resilient with an inv save, higher toughness and multiple wounds.
It is a fundamentally different problem. Death Stars of old, specially the ones during 6th and 7th, were mathematically impossible to kill even if they were sitting in the middle of the board, in the open, for the 7 turns a game may last.
Raiders are extremely point efficient, but if the DE player tries that you get a very death DE army. The problem isn't that Raiders are unkillable, but rather that they are too damn efficient. Death Stars of old were outright unkillable.
It is impossible for most armies to kill 6 raiders sitting behind cover in turn 1-2 too. Heck for some armies it is just impossible to kill even one raider when they all are out LoS, because that is how 9th ed tables look like.
You should have LoS to 1-2 raiders no matter what, if you do not then your tables terrain is bad.
The DE and all players for that matter should not be able to hide 90%+ of their army, you should have to make a choice. DO I want to hide my Raiders but leave out my Court/Hellions or leave out 2 raiders to hide my Court? I can not understand the tables some of you must be playing on to fully hide 6 raiders for 2 turns.
Also, all armies can kill a raider or two a turn, now did you take a TAC list, well thats up to your list but no army literally can't.
The most popular youtube streamers right now. Have a moto for setting up the table. That you should not be able to draw LOS at any point on the edge of the table to the other side of the table. Most tournmanets I see have a little bit less terrain - but only really play with 1 type....5" ruins - everywhere. maybe a few craters...maybe a few forests.
All they have really done with this change is make melee superior to shooting. LOL. Which is actually worse than shooting being dominant. .
How many permutations of them are there? Quite a few I'd imagine.
But put that 60 point succubus on a table from something with a gun. It dies. So it needs to ride a boat. How much of the boat is part of her cost? She also needs buddies incase she rolls a 1 when the transport goes. How much do the buddies contribute to the cost?
So let me get this straight, because there is a theoretical possibility that somewhere in the world someone plays a bad build succubus with an army with no raiders, no DT wrecks or with wrecks but without liquifires, no drazh etc the DE stuff should not be changed?
also if the succubus is out of the she is in melee killing stuff, then here unit of bodyguard witchs has to be kill, which is not super hard, because of how aggresivly they are costed for what both of those units can do, the return is easy. Before that she is sitting in one of the 6 raiders, and it is a RR if the raider you somehow got LoS to is actually carrying her and her bodyguard of witchs. Ah and if they happen to be on an objective you have to kill all 3, which is suprisingly not easy for a supposed glass type of unit thanks to the raider being rather resilient with an inv save, higher toughness and multiple wounds.
It is a fundamentally different problem. Death Stars of old, specially the ones during 6th and 7th, were mathematically impossible to kill even if they were sitting in the middle of the board, in the open, for the 7 turns a game may last.
Raiders are extremely point efficient, but if the DE player tries that you get a very death DE army. The problem isn't that Raiders are unkillable, but rather that they are too damn efficient. Death Stars of old were outright unkillable.
It is impossible for most armies to kill 6 raiders sitting behind cover in turn 1-2 too. Heck for some armies it is just impossible to kill even one raider when they all are out LoS, because that is how 9th ed tables look like.
You should have LoS to 1-2 raiders no matter what, if you do not then your tables terrain is bad.
The DE and all players for that matter should not be able to hide 90%+ of their army, you should have to make a choice. DO I want to hide my Raiders but leave out my Court/Hellions or leave out 2 raiders to hide my Court? I can not understand the tables some of you must be playing on to fully hide 6 raiders for 2 turns.
Also, all armies can kill a raider or two a turn, now did you take a TAC list, well thats up to your list but no army literally can't.
The most popular youtube streamers right now. Have a moto for setting up the table. That you should not be able to draw LOS at any point on the edge of the table to the other side of the table. Most tournmanets I see have a little bit less terrain - but only really play with 1 type....5" ruins - everywhere. maybe a few craters...maybe a few forests.
All they have really done with this change is make melee superior to shooting. LOL. Which is actually worse than shooting being dominant. .
Which is probably why my meta area doesn't have a big problem with DE, yeah DE is still harder to beat but nothing like you see on the forums. If you look at the examples from GW it is for sure not like that. I also love Barricades which i don't see very much of them (Some tables I see none) as they add a lot to the game (especially for MEQ units).
We try to give each side 1 larger and 1 smaller Obscuring with 1 in the no mans zone, then a few Barricades, some pipes, ruined walls, forests, crates, etc.. we normally have 2-3 pieces with difficult ground too and it really does change things, you can't just be 6" away and expect to get the charge, -2" is a bigger deal than it looks. Having lots of -1 to hit around the table also helps armies hold points a bit more, sure it doesn't stack well with DE's lightning fast, but kabals being out, or Marines, heck even Custodes likes it, just sucks some units can't get (lol like Tau suits, main they need a new book).
Necrons have doomsctyhe and ghostark that are fast enough to get the angles and do alot of decent damage.
Is that point efficient ? Probably not, but they certainly can do that.
Also necrons have very interesting codex, Siegler almost beat that winning Dallas GT list with crons, playing some strange board army list. He could have probably have higher chance to win, if drukhari list was 100-200 pts more.
Led`s not fall to Karols level, who seem to think that you should be able to kill 6 raiders for one turn to have a chance to win the game.
Imagine thinking that empty transport is the most broken thing in the game, when playing factions with 100% WR vs new drukhari.
But if you don't kill at least 3 of the raiders or worse kill 1 or less, then on turn two you get slammed by the entire DE army and you can say the game goodbye on turn 2. Specially if you play a non horde army.
And the comment about the necron list possibly winning actually made my day. Because we have a joke about fly saying that, if it only had more training, it would reap its elephant enemy in half. The necron army lost, and the DE army cost what it costs right now.
That has to make more sense in the original Polish....
You should have LoS to 1-2 raiders no matter what, if you do not then your tables terrain is bad.
The DE and all players for that matter should not be able to hide 90%+ of their army, you should have to make a choice. DO I want to hide my Raiders but leave out my Court/Hellions or leave out 2 raiders to hide my Court? I can not understand the tables some of you must be playing on to fully hide 6 raiders for 2 turns.
Also, all armies can kill a raider or two a turn, now did you take a TAC list, well thats up to your list but no army literally can't.
And I don't understand how you could be playing on different tables. Although that does maybe explain why some people think that marine shoting is too good. Without LoS blocking terrain they probably blast other armies while camping objectives.
We play on all sorts of tables. A lot of the time we alternate setting up x amount of stuff. Or random amounts of stuff. Sometimes though it's a themed table, so whatever makes sense for the theme.
But if you do manage to build a LoS blocking wall? You'd better hope you win the roll to pick your side.
In prior editions high levels of lethality were more concentrated in fewer units. Currently it's easier to have high levels of lethality "accidentally" even if you're taking more fluffy options. Twin Linked weapons now actually fire double the shots. Leman Russes can fire their Battle Cannon twice along with all the Heavy Bolters, and common mid-tier weapons like Heavy Bolters actually modify saves now. Given the fact that a lot of people play armies with either Power Armor or similar armor of some sort, the fact that these mid range weapons are now depleting saves and firing more, it makes sense that things could feel more lethal. Also, the rerolls did a lot.
A TL Heavy Bolter killed .56 a Marine in 5-7th The same weapon does 1.33 in 8th+ With CM and Lt rerolls, plus Devastator Doctrine you get 2.75 9th is cutting back on the rerolls again, but hopefully you get my point. Without necessarily optimizing builds, it's easier for common "casual, mid-tier" units to kill more stuff.
Although you have to consider that GEQ and WEQ are more survivable now, as AP 4 or 5 is no longer just ignoring their armor. I mean, as a non-Marine player I vastly prefer AP modifiers.
Xenomancers wrote: The most popular youtube streamers right now. Have a moto for setting up the table. That you should not be able to draw LOS at any point on the edge of the table to the other side of the table. Most tournmanets I see have a little bit less terrain - but only really play with 1 type....5" ruins - everywhere. maybe a few craters...maybe a few forests.
All they have really done with this change is make melee superior to shooting. LOL. Which is actually worse than shooting being dominant. .
I massively disagree, shooting being dominant means two gunlines firing at each other from one side of the table to the other, usually winning whoever went first. It is unbelievably boring. Not to say melee armies don't benefit from going first, but at least there is far more positioning involved. Also charging is inherently more fun IMHO.
Plus the poster guys have chainswords, kinda ridiculous that they would never get to use it.
Necrons have doomsctyhe and ghostark that are fast enough to get the angles and do alot of decent damage.
Is that point efficient ? Probably not, but they certainly can do that.
Also necrons have very interesting codex, Siegler almost beat that winning Dallas GT list with crons, playing some strange board army list. He could have probably have higher chance to win, if drukhari list was 100-200 pts more.
Led`s not fall to Karols level, who seem to think that you should be able to kill 6 raiders for one turn to have a chance to win the game.
Imagine thinking that empty transport is the most broken thing in the game, when playing factions with 100% WR vs new drukhari.
But if you don't kill at least 3 of the raiders or worse kill 1 or less, then on turn two you get slammed by the entire DE army and you can say the game goodbye on turn 2. Specially if you play a non horde army.
And the comment about the necron list possibly winning actually made my day. Because we have a joke about fly saying that, if it only had more training, it would reap its elephant enemy in half. The necron army lost, and the DE army cost what it costs right now.
That has to make more sense in the original Polish....
You should have LoS to 1-2 raiders no matter what, if you do not then your tables terrain is bad.
The DE and all players for that matter should not be able to hide 90%+ of their army, you should have to make a choice. DO I want to hide my Raiders but leave out my Court/Hellions or leave out 2 raiders to hide my Court? I can not understand the tables some of you must be playing on to fully hide 6 raiders for 2 turns.
Also, all armies can kill a raider or two a turn, now did you take a TAC list, well thats up to your list but no army literally can't.
And I don't understand how you could be playing on different tables. Although that does maybe explain why some people think that marine shoting is too good. Without LoS blocking terrain they probably blast other armies while camping objectives.
We play on all sorts of tables. A lot of the time we alternate setting up x amount of stuff. Or random amounts of stuff. Sometimes though it's a themed table, so whatever makes sense for the theme.
But if you do manage to build a LoS blocking wall? You'd better hope you win the roll to pick your side.
A lot of the tables i'm seeing are like this, huge LoS blocking terrain and not much else, that DG player went into a losing match b.c of that terrain, even if it was Marines with 30 Vanguard vets (the top SM player there had that) he still would had no chance b.c its like 20" on all sides of Obscuring with even more behind that.
Yup, looks like a tourney table. gak for terrain.
i've never been impressed by the terrain used in tournies. It tends to be sparse & cheap. And I get it, you have to dress dozens - maybe hundreds of tables.... You can't possibly build what we can at home (unless your actually GW).
The very worst I ever played (in 3rd/4th?)on was a largely empty board with a small hill on the far right, about 18" of split rail fence running in a broken line down the center line, & 3 trees.
My mechanized DA 3rd Co. faced off across this pasture vs.... An Imperial Guard Armoured Company from the WD pages. :(
I won. But that's because I wasn't adverse to running my rhinos/razorbacks out & using their burning wrecks as the cover I so desperately needed.
Meanwhile my lone jump assault squad deepstruck on the far flank of the tank line, used the fact that only 1 sponson + turret of the Russ could target me, charged, & blew up it with meltabombs.
While the tac & dev squads + any surviving Las/plas razors took a beating out front that jump squad leapt over each tank, blowing them up one at a time....
I was the only person that Armour player lost a game to.
Karol wrote: Having my dudes run with 1 or 2 wounds each, at the points costs they have, with a +4 or +5 sv with all the multi shot and 2D weapons being thrown around, the game feels very deadly.
But this is just my army expiriance, I have no idea how playing something else feels.
Literally one unit in the Grey Knights codex has a 4+ armor save. That would be Servitors. Nothing has a 5+ save.
He was clearly referring to AP modifiers if you learned how to read for context clues. No gak nothing in the codex has a 5+ save, we're all aware.
Necrons have doomsctyhe and ghostark that are fast enough to get the angles and do alot of decent damage.
Is that point efficient ? Probably not, but they certainly can do that.
Also necrons have very interesting codex, Siegler almost beat that winning Dallas GT list with crons, playing some strange board army list. He could have probably have higher chance to win, if drukhari list was 100-200 pts more.
Led`s not fall to Karols level, who seem to think that you should be able to kill 6 raiders for one turn to have a chance to win the game.
Imagine thinking that empty transport is the most broken thing in the game, when playing factions with 100% WR vs new drukhari.
But if you don't kill at least 3 of the raiders or worse kill 1 or less, then on turn two you get slammed by the entire DE army and you can say the game goodbye on turn 2. Specially if you play a non horde army.
And the comment about the necron list possibly winning actually made my day. Because we have a joke about fly saying that, if it only had more training, it would reap its elephant enemy in half. The necron army lost, and the DE army cost what it costs right now.
That has to make more sense in the original Polish....
You should have LoS to 1-2 raiders no matter what, if you do not then your tables terrain is bad.
The DE and all players for that matter should not be able to hide 90%+ of their army, you should have to make a choice. DO I want to hide my Raiders but leave out my Court/Hellions or leave out 2 raiders to hide my Court? I can not understand the tables some of you must be playing on to fully hide 6 raiders for 2 turns.
Also, all armies can kill a raider or two a turn, now did you take a TAC list, well thats up to your list but no army literally can't.
And I don't understand how you could be playing on different tables. Although that does maybe explain why some people think that marine shoting is too good. Without LoS blocking terrain they probably blast other armies while camping objectives.
We play on all sorts of tables. A lot of the time we alternate setting up x amount of stuff. Or random amounts of stuff. Sometimes though it's a themed table, so whatever makes sense for the theme.
But if you do manage to build a LoS blocking wall? You'd better hope you win the roll to pick your side.
A lot of the tables i'm seeing are like this, huge LoS blocking terrain and not much else, that DG player went into a losing match b.c of that terrain, even if it was Marines with 30 Vanguard vets (the top SM player there had that) he still would had no chance b.c its like 20" on all sides of Obscuring with even more behind that.
Considering that table picture showed up before and was widely ridiculed, No that is not what most people consider a good table setup.
So let me get this straight, because there is a theoretical possibility that somewhere in the world someone plays a bad build succubus with an army with no raiders, no DT wrecks or with wrecks but without liquifires, no drazh etc the DE stuff should not be changed?
also if the succubus is out of the she is in melee killing stuff, then here unit of bodyguard witchs has to be kill, which is not super hard, because of how aggresivly they are costed for what both of those units can do, the return is easy. Before that she is sitting in one of the 6 raiders, and it is a RR if the raider you somehow got LoS to is actually carrying her and her bodyguard of witchs. Ah and if they happen to be on an objective you have to kill all 3, which is suprisingly not easy for a supposed glass type of unit thanks to the raider being rather resilient with an inv save, higher toughness and multiple wounds.
No that's not what I'm saying. There's a multi-factor equation that makes succubi as good as they are - it doesn't come down to just the solitary model.
No that's not what I'm saying. There's a multi-factor equation that makes succubi as good as they are - it doesn't come down to just the solitary model.
It is not a multi factor question, when one or multiple options are spamed all across the globe. To be honest though, if succubi could be run in multiple ways, with all of them being broken, it would be worse.
Plus one has to remember how GW fixs stuff. They have one way, which I don't wish for DEs, which is the salamander or Inari way of fixing things. Or we have the army X got hit by errata number 4 and is still the top army.
To fix how DE work, GW would have to change rules, point costs and probably core rules for terrain too. And I don't think they would all of those at the same time, specially when their playtesters present DE as working as intended. And if they do it is going to take them months, the same way it took them months or years to fix the clearly broken stuff in 8th ed.
Why would playing in a simulator grant increased foreknowledge of what faction your opponent is bringing? I have experience playing both in real life and in a simulator and it strikes me that I knew down to 1-2 armies what people were bringing IRL and had no idea what I was playing in simulated games.
If you want to prove that BA losing against Drukhari is list dependent then that is your hypothesis to prove. BA losing to Drukhari is a fact.
In a simulator both players can bring whatever they want, in real life there's the issue of models availability which might not be the same for two different factions. Drukhari for example work very well with casual collections as it's entirely possible to field competitive lists without spamming anything.
BA losing to drukhari may be a fact, but BA refusing to tailor against drukhari is also another fact. Lists are available online, we know what competitive players bring to tournaments. Funny thing is that it's widely accepted that tailoring against SM is ok, but when it comes to tailor against something else it's not.
I can argue that while BA losing vs drukhari may be true, it doesn't necessarily mean that the drukhari codex is better than the BA one, that's just your speculation, not a fact. Maybe drukhari players are simply more skilled than SM ones on average .
That has to make more sense in the original Polish....
I think it does, it is based on the absurdity of the idea that any amount of training done by a fly could outweight , no pun intented, the weight difference between a fly an elephant. But as I said before, I am not good with jokes in the first place.
Am sure the english/US culture has something similar. Like 3ed grade dude saying that if the other guy was three heads smaller, blinded by the sun, then the fight would have gone totaly different.
The necron army lost, and whatifism of the , if only he had 200pts less, doesn't help us much, because we don't even know when or if GW decides to change the DE point costs.
In a simulator both players can bring whatever they want, in real life there's the issue of models availability which might not be the same for two different factions. Drukhari for example work very well with casual collections as it's entirely possible to field competitive lists without spamming anything.
BA losing to drukhari may be a fact, but BA refusing to tailor against drukhari is also another fact. Lists are available online, we know what competitive players bring to tournaments. Funny thing is that it's widely accepted that tailoring against SM is ok, but when it comes to tailor against something else it's not.
I can argue that while BA losing vs drukhari may be true, it doesn't necessarily mean that the drukhari codex is better than the BA one, that's just your speculation, not a fact. Maybe drukhari players are simply more skilled than SM ones on average .
I don't think anyone thinks that tailoring against their specific army is fun or okey. But with an army like BA it is just much easier to do, because tailoring against them automaticlly means the army tailors to some degree against other meq armies. And marines and meq armies make up the gross majority of play field, one can't really tailor heavy vs harlequins or DE, not if that means losing to armies like marines. If in a month DE super bad match up, becomes GSC, then it won't change much for the DE players, because GSC is and won't be wildly played.
Even at a non tournament level this is a thing. If your army is above avarge good vs marines, at the store you play, then you have 10-15 opponents to play against and you will win against them a lot easier. If at the same time your army has a bad match up vs some armies, then there is even a non zero chance that the army isn't played at your store.
And as the more skilled argument goes. Were the 2.0 IH players more skilled too, because their army had similar win rates too. And people tried to tailor vs them, but failed. Guess in 8th ed everyone who wasn't playing IH or 2.0 marines was unskilled, and only now with the advent of 9th ed we got a bunch of skilled players playing two armies with above avarge win rates.
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Marin 797783 11123098 wrote:
Really show me one faction that can`t do that ?
In 9th? Sure. No faction other then DE crossed the 70% win rate. Harlis were close at one time at 68% win rate. Everything else, as I said placed themselfs in the middle. I understand that not everyone is interested in sports statistics, but everything above 60% win rate is considered a big problem. And over 75% win rate is considered either a proof of cheating or some unexpected circumstances . Like USSR and all the other communist countrise not sending their sports people to the olympics, which ment that countries like US blew up in number of medals won.
People wouldn't have problems with DE if they had a 60% rate. It would be considered normal power creep. DE are doing stuff not even IH were able to pull off under their 2.0 rule set. Even at their high days, they were not able to take practicaly all spots in the top 8 of any big tournament.
People wouldn't have problems with DE if they had a 60% rate. It would be considered normal power creep. DE are doing stuff not even IH were able to pull off under their 2.0 rule set. Even at their high days, they were not able to take practicaly all spots in the top 8 of any big tournament.
I have problems with any faction over 55% win rate. Power creep can never be considered "normal", otherwise we can just give up any pretence of balance.
No that's not what I'm saying. There's a multi-factor equation that makes succubi as good as they are - it doesn't come down to just the solitary model.
It is not a multi factor question, when one or multiple options are spamed all across the globe. To be honest though, if succubi could be run in multiple ways, with all of them being broken, it would be worse.
Plus one has to remember how GW fixs stuff. They have one way, which I don't wish for DEs, which is the salamander or Inari way of fixing things. Or we have the army X got hit by errata number 4 and is still the top army.
To fix how DE work, GW would have to change rules, point costs and probably core rules for terrain too. And I don't think they would all of those at the same time, specially when their playtesters present DE as working as intended. And if they do it is going to take them months, the same way it took them months or years to fix the clearly broken stuff in 8th ed.
*looks over at space marines sitting between 45-55% winrates from being the undisputed top army*
*looks over at Necrons sitting between 45-55% winrates from being the undisputed bottom army*
Really? GW only knows one way to balance things, overbuff or overnerf?
No that's not what I'm saying. There's a multi-factor equation that makes succubi as good as they are - it doesn't come down to just the solitary model.
It is not a multi factor question, when one or multiple options are spamed all across the globe. To be honest though, if succubi could be run in multiple ways, with all of them being broken, it would be worse.
That's not true. The issue right now is there is one build for the Succubus that is clearly better than any other build, so that's what shows up in most tournament lists. That doesn't mean there aren't other broken builds for the Succubus but right now we don't really know because competitive lists are dominated by a single broken combo. If that combo was nerfed tomorrow we might see the Succubus remain just as popular and be almost as broken using a different combination of equipment and abilities.
Necrons have doomsctyhe and ghostark that are fast enough to get the angles and do alot of decent damage.
Is that point efficient ? Probably not, but they certainly can do that.
Also necrons have very interesting codex, Siegler almost beat that winning Dallas GT list with crons, playing some strange board army list. He could have probably have higher chance to win, if drukhari list was 100-200 pts more.
Led`s not fall to Karols level, who seem to think that you should be able to kill 6 raiders for one turn to have a chance to win the game.
Imagine thinking that empty transport is the most broken thing in the game, when playing factions with 100% WR vs new drukhari.
But if you don't kill at least 3 of the raiders or worse kill 1 or less, then on turn two you get slammed by the entire DE army and you can say the game goodbye on turn 2. Specially if you play a non horde army.
And the comment about the necron list possibly winning actually made my day. Because we have a joke about fly saying that, if it only had more training, it would reap its elephant enemy in half. The necron army lost, and the DE army cost what it costs right now.
You should have LoS to 1-2 raiders no matter what, if you do not then your tables terrain is bad.
The DE and all players for that matter should not be able to hide 90%+ of their army, you should have to make a choice. DO I want to hide my Raiders but leave out my Court/Hellions or leave out 2 raiders to hide my Court? I can not understand the tables some of you must be playing on to fully hide 6 raiders for 2 turns.
Also, all armies can kill a raider or two a turn, now did you take a TAC list, well thats up to your list but no army literally can't.
And I don't understand how you could be playing on different tables. Although that does maybe explain why some people think that marine shoting is too good. Without LoS blocking terrain they probably blast other armies while camping objectives.
Even in WTC terrain you are unable to hide more than 4 raiders and that is without other units. In 8th people complained that there is not enough terrain and shooting armies delete you for 1 turn, now we complain there is to much terrain, since on one tournament they overdid it.
N.Nanavathi played SM player on the pizza terrain and he said that is auto win for him.
When the terrain is one of the way that GW include in the balance and it`s not done right, there will certainly be huge imbalances.
If your army is unable to kill reliably 1-3 raiders or equivalent vehicles per turn, than what are you even doing ?
If you don`t bring elephant gun, than as for you they as good as flying elephants, since you are not killing them.
Interesting fact is that the Romans had huge problems when they first faced elephants, but they developed strategies to fight.
I guess they did not had the ability to whine and just ask God to fix the problem
Also i`m really interested where are you reading the win rates, because certainly are looking in different places or are you just pulling numbers from your hat ?
If terrain was one of the ways GW included to balance, then why didn't they give rules/guidelines beyond "hey, put some like, stuff on your table. Make sure you have enough!" and then never define enough.
In general, we recommend having one feature on the battlefield for every 12" by 12" area (rounding up). Don’t worry if your battlefield doesn’t match these requirements, but keep in mind that playing on a battlefield that is either a barren wasteland or filled to overflowing with terrain features may give an advantage to one side or the other.
In general, we recommend having one feature on the battlefield for every 12" by 12" area (rounding up). Don’t worry if your battlefield doesn’t match these requirements, but keep in mind that playing on a battlefield that is either a barren wasteland or filled to overflowing with terrain features may give an advantage to one side or the other.
Yea, that's the bad thing that they shouldn't do.
"hey, put some like, stuff on your table. Make sure you have enough!" and then never define enough.
Putting a shipping container in every square foot of my table is valid under these guidelines. is it a good, balanced table? Absolutely not! I sure hope GW isn't balancing their game around some specific definition of terrain that they never give.
You asked for a guideline. One terrain feature per 12" by 12" area is a guideline.
I'm pretty sure they still have pictures of complete battlefields in the core rulebook as well to show what GW thinks how it should look like.
Edit: Looked it up, yes they do.
They have three Strike force and three Incursion sized examples and even describe the reasoning behind the setup. One is directly called out as being more suited to narrative, while others are suited for matched play.
I asked for a guideline beyond "put some stuff on the table, figure it out".
If it was an integral part of the design of their balancing system I would expect pre-designed layouts a la Warcry for Grand Tournament missions. Not some extremely loose guidelines and a few example pictures.
They don't even mention what terrain rules each of their pieces have! They only show one weird angle!
Rihgu wrote: I asked for a guideline beyond "put some stuff on the table, figure it out".
If it was an integral part of the design of their balancing system I would expect pre-designed layouts a la Warcry for Grand Tournament missions. Not some extremely loose guidelines and a few example pictures.
They kind of can't. Lots of people are going to use whatever terrain they have on hand and much of that won't be GW specific.
They don't even mention what terrain rules each of their pieces have! They only show one weird angle!
Daedalus81 wrote: They kind of can't. Lots of people are going to use whatever terrain they have on hand and much of that won't be GW specific.
As evidenced in the picture that started this part of the discussion. Everybody is using what they have and what they think makes for an exciting game. TOs who need to provide several (dozens?) of tables don't want to, or simply can't create the same battlefield layout on every table. A set "official" layout for tournaments would be nice for you at home, where you can replicate it for you and your buddy. It would be largely ignored in actual tournaments due to the lack of terrain pieces at hand.
And again, there are exact layouts for matched play given in the rulebook.
Why would playing in a simulator grant increased foreknowledge of what faction your opponent is bringing? I have experience playing both in real life and in a simulator and it strikes me that I knew down to 1-2 armies what people were bringing IRL and had no idea what I was playing in simulated games.
If you want to prove that BA losing against Drukhari is list dependent then that is your hypothesis to prove. BA losing to Drukhari is a fact.
In a simulator both players can bring whatever they want, in real life there's the issue of models availability which might not be the same for two different factions. Drukhari for example work very well with casual collections as it's entirely possible to field competitive lists without spamming anything.
BA losing to drukhari may be a fact, but BA refusing to tailor against drukhari is also another fact.
My point was that your scenario does not fit reality, because you are never going to know beforehand that you will be playing against Drukhari while building your list so BA will not get to build a counter list. It's more realistic to be a BA player in real life and know you'll be facing Drukhari and be able to build a counter list, but that's frowned upon in 90% of communities and once Drukhari stop worrying about the mirror match then they can build better anti-BA lists.
No, that is not a fact. You said yourself you would like to see the BA lists that are losing to Drukhari, which means you haven't, which means you don't know if the BA lists that lost are the best anti-Drukhari BA list that money can buy. It's an unverified claim that the BA lists are outdated and it's an unverified hypothesis that building an anti-Drukhari list will grant even a 40% win rate against Drukhari.
I guess the entire field is Ruins + Armoured Containers?
No dense, no heavy cover, everything is scaleable and the majority of it is obscuring.
Massive firing lanes all over the place. This is the type of table we should be playing on? This is what GW is balancing the game around?
I agree that's not a great table. Not terrible, but definitely lacking. This suffers from GW not producing a good range of different terrain types, IMO. I think other than giving guidance on how much terrain should be on a table GW should also give guidance on how many of each type (dense, obscuring, heavy etc) we should have.
The problem I have with that table is the non-interactive nature of the terrain. If you're not an infantry model it's basically all impassable LoS-blockers while still being set up in such a way to create massive firing lanes. Some genuinely impassable terrain and some dense or difficult ground would make the board much more interesting IMO.
Rihgu wrote: Then how can we expect that GW balances the game around the terrain setup?
40K by it's very nature is a sandbox style game. There are some rough guidelines. A minimum recommendation for the table. Etc.. but it's probably never going to be "balanced" to the same degree a more competitive-styled game like Underworlds with far fewer variables ever will be.
How is GW "balancing" the game both for playing 3000 points Maelstrom on round table with a 10' diameter with lots of forest that all have the heavy cover keyword vs. playing it at 1000 points GT mission on the "recommended minimum table size" with the terrain following precisely the recommendations in the book?
Rihgu wrote: Then how can we expect that GW balances the game around the terrain setup?
40K by it's very nature is a sandbox style game. There are some rough guidelines. A minimum recommendation for the table. Etc.. but it's probably never going to be "balanced" to the same degree a more competitive-styled game like Underworlds with far fewer variables ever will be.
How is GW "balancing" the game both for playing 3000 points Maelstrom on round table with a 10' diameter with lots of forest that all have the heavy cover keyword vs. playing it at 1000 points GT mission on the "recommended minimum table size" with the terrain following precisely the recommendations in the book?
Short answer: they don't.
Well, if they gave actual rules about how to set up tables, then they wouldn't need to. They'd need to balance for GT2020/2021/etc Strike Force and Incursion games only, really. And then the majority of 40k players would do that or continue doing what they're already doing.
I think you missed the point that the catalyzing incident for this path of discussion was somebody claiming that Games Workshop balanced Drukhari around a specific terrain setup and that tournaments deviating from this terrain setup is obviously the source for imbalance.
I just want to point out that that's a ridiculous claim considering that Games Workshop doesn't even tell us that setupeven assuming that this is the case in the first place.
I do not want to misconstrue my position here: I do not think GW uses terrain as a balancing factor when planning their armies. I am merely saying that if they did they should tell us what terrain to use. You know, to feel the effects of this balancing factor.
ccs 797783 11123242 wrote:People wouldn't have problems with DE if they had a 60% rate. It would be considered normal power creep. DE are doing stuff not even IH were able to pull off under their 2.0 rule set. Even at their high days, they were not able to take practicaly all spots in the top 8 of any big tournament.
I have problems with any faction over 55% win rate. Power creep can never be considered "normal", otherwise we can just give up any pretence of balance.
I believe you've misquoted me here.
Those are Karols words, not mine.
You can tell because I never reference tourney win %s etc - unless I'm deriding everyone's worship of the tournament scene
The same tournament scene that claims that balancing action must be taken to ensure that armies that dont bring heavy infantry skew lists must be made artificially weaker because lists that tailor to fight heavy infantry skew lists cant fight them?
Currently, mechanized lists make up a combined total of....what, 15% of the lists people are bringing? 20%? In their most dominant moment in the meta so far in 9th.
Meanwhile, heavy infantry skew has never dipped below 50% of the overall competitive player pool even for an instant.
Yep, definitely seems like that one army that brings a solid mech list is a real huge emergency problem! We gotta balance that NOW so we can get back tp what the game is supposed to be: >66% heavy infantry skew!
the_scotsman wrote: The same tournament scene that claims that balancing action must be taken to ensure that armies that dont bring heavy infantry skew lists must be made artificially weaker because lists that tailor to fight heavy infantry skew lists cant fight them?
Currently, mechanized lists make up a combined total of....what, 15% of the lists people are bringing? 20%? In their most dominant moment in the meta so far in 9th.
Meanwhile, heavy infantry skew has never dipped below 50% of the overall competitive player pool even for an instant.
Yep, definitely seems like that one army that brings a solid mech list is a real huge emergency problem! We gotta balance that NOW so we can get back tp what the game is supposed to be: >66% heavy infantry skew!
Given that people bringing heavy infantry lists make up a large percentage of the meta and that this space is occupied by the system's flagship faction you should probably make sure that power-armored factions function well at every point in an edition. The other factions, which collectively make up the rest of the games design space are all much more fragmented in terms of their core identity and statlines so they should never have that same level of spotlight on them lest a faction that has a <5% play rate makes the game less fun for 50% of an entire community. This is the issue with DE as things currently stand.
the_scotsman wrote: The same tournament scene that claims that balancing action must be taken to ensure that armies that dont bring heavy infantry skew lists must be made artificially weaker because lists that tailor to fight heavy infantry skew lists cant fight them?
Currently, mechanized lists make up a combined total of....what, 15% of the lists people are bringing? 20%? In their most dominant moment in the meta so far in 9th.
Meanwhile, heavy infantry skew has never dipped below 50% of the overall competitive player pool even for an instant.
Yep, definitely seems like that one army that brings a solid mech list is a real huge emergency problem! We gotta balance that NOW so we can get back tp what the game is supposed to be: >66% heavy infantry skew!
What is Eradicator whining if not clamour for the ability to bring more mechanised lists?
Thats a good way to balance a game, yeah, absolutely. If a meta is overwhelmingly dominated by one thing, make sure anything that counters that gets stamped down immediately so that people playing the currently dominant strategy have the most fun possible.
Thats how they do it in sports too, right? Like how Americans complained that soccer games were too boring because people didnt score enough, so they made the field half as long and the goal twice as big to get that american Cashish.
the_scotsman wrote: Thats a good way to balance a game, yeah, absolutely. If a meta is overwhelmingly dominated by one thing, make sure anything that counters that gets stamped down immediately so that people playing the currently dominant strategy have the most fun possible.
Thats how they do it in sports too, right? Like how Americans complained that soccer games were too boring because people didnt score enough, so they made the field half as long and the goal twice as big to get that american Cashish.
Your argument got lost in the sarcasm. Are you saying that OP Eradicators are keeping Drukhari in check?
the_scotsman wrote: The same tournament scene that claims that balancing action must be taken to ensure that armies that dont bring heavy infantry skew lists must be made artificially weaker because lists that tailor to fight heavy infantry skew lists cant fight them?
Currently, mechanized lists make up a combined total of....what, 15% of the lists people are bringing? 20%? In their most dominant moment in the meta so far in 9th.
Meanwhile, heavy infantry skew has never dipped below 50% of the overall competitive player pool even for an instant.
Yep, definitely seems like that one army that brings a solid mech list is a real huge emergency problem! We gotta balance that NOW so we can get back tp what the game is supposed to be: >66% heavy infantry skew!
What is Eradicator whining if not clamour for the ability to bring more mechanised lists?
When mechanized and heavy armor lists make up like 5% of the meta, given that roughly half of the units in the game are vehicles and monsters one might say their absence indicates some kind of problematic imbalance.
You could say the same thing about light infantry hordes....psykers....flyers...the fact that a tiny fraction of the meta that brings something off the wall and unexpected might do well is an indication that an unexpected strategy can beat a "solved" meta, not that the unexpected strategy needs to be immediately steamrolled.
This is what the crying that raiders must be brought in line with other transports that quite simply do not exist in the meta at all reads like to me. For all the "HAHA people said let the meta adjust 74% winrate lololololol" earlier I dont hear a lot of acknowledgement that it's been a couple of weeks and with zero rebalancing the winrate dropped 11-12%.
Where would that be if the obvious bs everyone agrees is obvious bs got cut out BEFORE we lay in with the "dark eldar players get 200 fewer points than they have now" nerfs?
Would we have a meta where people just bring some weapons that can deal with light vehicle skew lists and DE settle into a healthy win percentage?
the_scotsman wrote: Thats a good way to balance a game, yeah, absolutely. If a meta is overwhelmingly dominated by one thing, make sure anything that counters that gets stamped down immediately so that people playing the currently dominant strategy have the most fun possible.
Nobody is asking for DE to be 'stamped down' we're saying that a 70% win rate is a disaster that makes the entire tournament scene less fun for a lot of people and that nerfs are needed to correct this.
Thats how they do it in sports too, right? Like how Americans complained that soccer games were too boring because people didnt score enough, so they made the field half as long and the goal twice as big to get that american Cashish.
What people want is more like what F1 did to Mercedes' Dual-Axis Steering system. They said that it was legal but that it wouldn't be moving forward into the next season. This ban was done so that other teams weren't forced to develop yet another new part just to not lose pace next to the undisputed top team in the sport.
Tyran wrote: Marines should naturally have a lesser win-rates because they are the meta and everyone brings lists to counter them.
The most popular faction should be bad because of reasons argument. Why shouldn't we overtune Marines slightly to counteract the known anti-marine meta? The goal is a game that can be balanced at the tournament level and you can't do that if one faction gets the same power budget as others in spite of facing a hostile meta.
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As for claims about DE winrates falling let's see what people who analyze the stats for a living have to say about that:
Peter "The Falcon” Colosimo wrote:
Dark Technomancers Liquifiers
Since the Drukhari release there has been an awful lot of talk, here and elsewhere, about what if anything needs to be addressed in the codex to relieve some of the eye-watering numbers that their codex has been putting out over the last 6 weeks with a particular eye on targets like Cult of Strife and Dark Technomancers, the former for its access to incredible relics, combos and stratagems, the latter for its ability to delete elite units at effectively no cost due to how it interacts with the liquifier.
In tracking all of the competitive games that have occurred, it has been interesting to deep dive into exactly what is and isn’t working for Drukhari because, despite having that much ballyhoo’ed 70%+ win rate, there have indeed been lists that haven’t lived up to the hype. While at this point it has become common to see Drukhari in the top 4s of any GT+ event, there are still some Drukhari lists that fall below .500 and all of those sub-500 lists have had something in common.
Since the first events played out that allowed the use of the new codex on April 10th, there have been 56 players that have brought Drukhari out to play as their primary faction at GTs and Majors, playing a total of 324 recorded games. Of those 56 lists, 25 have run Dark Technomancers and not a single one of them has had a record worse than 3-2. In fact, lists that include Dark Technomancers are currently 119-24-1 in tournament play boasting an 83% win rate, 86.5% when you account for mirror matches. If you remove Dark Technomancer results from the current Drukhari win rate they go from a 70.2% win rate to 60.2% off of that change alone.
This isn’t all to say that a ‘fix’ for Dark Technomancers would be a total ‘fix’ for Drukhari; firstly because even a 60% win rate is well above a healthy number (though far more digestible than 70) and secondly because it does not account for those players currently running Dark Technomancers just moving to something else in this deep codex. What it does show is that this particular added ability is a bit of a problem, though perhaps a bit is in itself a bit of an understatement…
This essentially shows that DE do in fact have some builds that don't just crush the meta simply by showing up and that an influx of new players running 'bad' lists is responsible for lowering the average DE win percentage.
It also breaks down DG, Necrons, SoB, and Tyranids by subfaction just as they've done for Marines. So people can finally stop whining about Marines being treated as special by the stats.
I would like for more transports to be made viable. I love me some mechanized infantry. But in many cases even if you like to do it, is hardly worth it.
In Tau for example, I love my breachers in devilfishes but I'm paying 90 points to have a 99 point squad inside. And thats less about points and more about lack of options of what to put inside those transports.
Galas wrote: I would like for more transports to be made viable. I love me some mechanized infantry. But in many cases even if you like to do it, is hardly worth it.
In Tau for example, I love my breachers in devilfishes but I'm paying 90 points to have a 99 point squad inside. And thats less about points and more about lack of options of what to put inside those transports.
The issue that the Tau have with transports is that anytime your units are embarked they're doing nothing with the weapons they paid points for. Even in the case where you hold an objective if an enemy force can crack the transport with one unit they can almost always kill its contents with a melee unit in the same turn. This isn't the case with DE, Necrons, or Marines to nearly the same extent.
the_scotsman wrote: The same tournament scene that claims that balancing action must be taken to ensure that armies that dont bring heavy infantry skew lists must be made artificially weaker because lists that tailor to fight heavy infantry skew lists cant fight them?
Currently, mechanized lists make up a combined total of....what, 15% of the lists people are bringing? 20%? In their most dominant moment in the meta so far in 9th.
Meanwhile, heavy infantry skew has never dipped below 50% of the overall competitive player pool even for an instant.
Yep, definitely seems like that one army that brings a solid mech list is a real huge emergency problem! We gotta balance that NOW so we can get back tp what the game is supposed to be: >66% heavy infantry skew!
What is Eradicator whining if not clamour for the ability to bring more mechanised lists?
When mechanized and heavy armor lists make up like 5% of the meta, given that roughly half of the units in the game are vehicles and monsters one might say their absence indicates some kind of problematic imbalance.
You could say the same thing about light infantry hordes....psykers....flyers...the fact that a tiny fraction of the meta that brings something off the wall and unexpected might do well is an indication that an unexpected strategy can beat a "solved" meta, not that the unexpected strategy needs to be immediately steamrolled.
This is what the crying that raiders must be brought in line with other transports that quite simply do not exist in the meta at all reads like to me. For all the "HAHA people said let the meta adjust 74% winrate lololololol" earlier I dont hear a lot of acknowledgement that it's been a couple of weeks and with zero rebalancing the winrate dropped 11-12%.
Where would that be if the obvious bs everyone agrees is obvious bs got cut out BEFORE we lay in with the "dark eldar players get 200 fewer points than they have now" nerfs?
Would we have a meta where people just bring some weapons that can deal with light vehicle skew lists and DE settle into a healthy win percentage?
What does nerfing Raiders to make Drukhari fair and nerfing Eradicators to open up the meta to more mechanised lists have to do with each other?
Your claim that nobody were complaining about unviable vehicles and the source of them being unviable (Eradicators) is just false. Eradicators were one of the most complained about units of all time.
I don't know how many more points Drukhari need to cost, but the more extreme cost increases do make some sense if GW decides to balance Drukhari purely through points, which is how the game should be balanced for the most part. Having to errata broken relics, Stratagems and WL traits should require an excuse not be a matter of course. GW decided not to nerf DT liquifier Wracks rules, which makes sense rules have been tested and if DT liquifier Wracks are the best Wracks or the only viable liquifier carriers then that's just how it is and liquifiers will have to cost 5 or 10 more points on Wracks.
Daedalus81 wrote: Yea, 18 pieces. One problem could be the lack of diversity in that terrain. When everything is an obscuring ruin it becomes easy to hide.
Yes...and something like 50% to 75% of terrain on "competitive" tables is LOS blocking/ obscuring. It's kinda always been that way too. It was in fact the ITC organizers which are mainly responsible for 9th editions new objectives and terrain. This is why "casual" and "competitive" experience is normally much different.
The most popular faction should be bad because of reasons argument. Why shouldn't we overtune Marines slightly to counteract the known anti-marine meta? The goal is a game that can be balanced at the tournament level and you can't do that if one faction gets the same power budget as others in spite of facing a hostile meta.
Because you are basically demanding that Xenos factions have to be inherently weaker because they are not popular, and that sucks.
Tyran wrote: Marines should naturally have a lesser win-rates because they are the meta and everyone brings lists to counter them.
Meanwhile counter-meta factions like DE should naturally have higher win-rates because they run into fewer counters.
Of course, if DE becomes the meta army, then the situation reverses.
Marines are meta just needs to die. Marines are always easy to kill because they don't have invulnerable saves. However - lots of units have armor saves you need to remove too or you can't kill them accross all armies minus a few...and they are a lot more threatening than marines...like custodian bikers or dreads - or pretty much any unit with a 2+ save. Marines are just weak because they don't have the invune...it doesn't make them "meta" to kill.
They in fact aren't meta by your description too. DG are -1 damage to flat 2 weapons are bad against them / bad against necrons/ sisters/ harliquens/ pretty much flat 2 is only effective against vaniala space marines. The majority of other armies that are top teir have invunes on all their models - which counters AP. There is no meta weapon. That is probably the intent of the rules. Here is what it does though. It forces everyone to take extreme weapons. It ether has extremely high shot count or gives you really high damage attacks.
This is why you don't see anyone bringing autocannon type weapons because they stand the highest chance of being worthless.
You do make a point though. What is available to attack in the field has a strong impact on what armies are viable. I think you just got it wrong. Marines suffer from being "underprotected" they don't suffer from being "meta".
Tyran wrote: [Because you are basically demanding that Xenos factions have to be inherently weaker because they are not popular, and that sucks.
That's the nature of the beast. Xeno factions don't have any underlying unified design the same way power armor does so if one of them is powerful it means that players of one specific faction are happy. If elite infantry is good CSM, Marines, Sisters, Necrons, Custodes, and DG are all likely to be in a decent spot and that makes a greater number of players happy. A game should focus on keeping the majority happy while giving minority factions a unique, but not overpowering niche.
Marines are meta because they are the most common faction, because if you play a random 40k game, there is an overwhelming chance you will play against a Marine army, it is only tangentially related with actual power.
Canadian 5th wrote: That's the nature of the beast. Xeno factions don't have any underlying unified design the same way power armor does so if one of them is powerful it means that players of one specific faction are happy. If elite infantry is good CSM, Marines, Sisters, Necrons, Custodes, and DG are all likely to be in a decent spot and that makes a greater number of players happy. A game should focus on keeping the majority happy while giving minority factions a unique, but not overpowering niche.
That is a terrible argument because most players are not competitive nor go to tournaments. Thus according to your logic, the biggest focus should be keeping the vast casual majority happy, and such majority plays in an entirely different environment.
Moreover you are not asking them to not have an "overpowering niche", but to be straight up weaker and hope their niche is enough to make up for the imbalance.
Marines are meta because they are the most common faction, because if you play a random 40k game, there is an overwhelming chance you will play against a Marine army, it is only tangentially related with actual power.
Canadian 5th wrote: That's the nature of the beast. Xeno factions don't have any underlying unified design the same way power armor does so if one of them is powerful it means that players of one specific faction are happy. If elite infantry is good CSM, Marines, Sisters, Necrons, Custodes, and DG are all likely to be in a decent spot and that makes a greater number of players happy. A game should focus on keeping the majority happy while giving minority factions a unique, but not overpowering niche.
That is a terrible argument because most players are not competitive nor go to tournaments. Thus according to your logic, the biggest focus should be keeping the vast casual majority happy, and such majority plays in an entirely different environment.
Moreover you are not asking them to not have an "overpowering niche", but to be straight up weaker and hope their niche is enough to make up for the imbalance.
You might be more likely to run into a marine army in a tournament but that means almost nothing. They could be spamming -1 damage dreads - they could be whitescars spamming BGV and VV and attack bikes. They could be DA spamming terminators...entirely different profiles and counters to each other these armies. The end result is the primaris marines archtype is one of the least common profiles. It is just a profile that gets wrecked by most weapons because flat 2 exists - AP is rampant and there are much bigger fish to fry that a space marine.
It has always been my opinion that keeping "casual" gamers happy - Leads to the best competitive setting. If the game is of good balance - all list archetypes are viable. Casuals love that...know who else loves that? Everyone else.
The game was in a pretty great state before Drukhari dropped (Outside us poor tau, AM, GSC and some other 8th armies). Marines were back at a 50% winrate and the best factions weren't marines or marines and equivalents, being sob and harlequins. All 9th books had a fair chance agaisnt each other, maybe necrons are a little left behind right now but nothing that can't change without points reductions.
Drukhari are the outlier. And lets hope they aren't the heralds of a new age of power. Nerfing drukhari is NOT being pro-marine biased. They trump all other armies just the same. No, the meta WAS not marine skewed when most armies had to take the tools to kill sisters of battle or harlequins or demon and orks hordes to win tournaments. But theres not amount of optimization you can do agaisnt drukhari to have a consistent fair game against them. Thats the truth.
I'm not saying that Drukhari are not a problem, they are and need nerfs.
But they are also a niche faction and that means that in a tournament setting, asuming they get balanced, are still going to have better win-rate than the more common factions.
The game was in a pretty great state before Drukhari dropped (Outside us poor tau, AM, GSC and some other 8th armies). Marines were back at a 50% winrate and the best factions weren't marines or marines and equivalents, being sob and harlequins. All 9th books had a fair chance agaisnt each other, maybe necrons are a little left behind right now but nothing that can't change without points reductions.
Drukhari are the outlier. And lets hope they aren't the heralds of a new age of power. Nerfing drukhari is NOT being pro-marine biased. They trump all other armies just the same. No, the meta WAS not marine skewed when most armies had to take the tools to kill sisters of battle or harlequins or demon and orks hordes to win tournaments. But theres not amount of optimization you can do agaisnt drukhari to have a consistent fair game against them. Thats the truth.
The game is honestly in a terrible state. The only thing keeping the numbers somewhat more reasonable is harlequins/SOB/Custodians/Daemons are really low play rate compared to their power. DA are obnoxious / DG and marine supplements were more reasonable....DE have errors and combos equivalent to 8.5 Iron hands. Game honestly sucks right now - unless you are just playing for fun.
Tyran wrote: [Because you are basically demanding that Xenos factions have to be inherently weaker because they are not popular, and that sucks.
That's the nature of the beast. Xeno factions don't have any underlying unified design the same way power armor does so if one of them is powerful it means that players of one specific faction are happy. If elite infantry is good CSM, Marines, Sisters, Necrons, Custodes, and DG are all likely to be in a decent spot and that makes a greater number of players happy. A game should focus on keeping the majority happy while giving minority factions a unique, but not overpowering niche.
Actually we have already done that 1-2 years ago and players were not more happy. I think it was considered even worst.
In fact SM players were so annoyed, because they played other SM players 24/7.
If SM are to good, than all will play SM, because most people have some marines.
Custodes and GK are super low count armies, so everyone who decide and had the money can acquire such army and it`s not hard to paint also.
So generally if you make power armor too good, it kills the diversity.
Tyran wrote: That is a terrible argument because most players are not competitive nor go to tournaments. Thus according to your logic, the biggest focus should be keeping the vast casual majority happy, and such majority plays in an entirely different environment.
How do you balance around a casual scene that generates no statistics, has no indicators of skill, and which may be using custom scenarios and house rules? The short answer is that you can't so you shouldn't bother trying.
Moreover you are not asking them to not have an "overpowering niche", but to be straight up weaker and hope their niche is enough to make up for the imbalance.
Let me put it this way. In League of Legends assassin-type champions are generally tuned to be slightly weaker than the average champion. This is done because, across most levels of play, this class is found to be unfun to play against. They have a niche and dedicated assassin players can get wins with them but their difficulty and generally low stats means that you don't see them in every game.
This is how the most popular game in the world does balance, so why is 40k so special that it shouldn't do the same?
The game was in a pretty great state before Drukhari dropped (Outside us poor tau, AM, GSC and some other 8th armies).
Nah, pretty awful. Orks were pretty much the only faction with multiple competitive builds AFAIK, every other army had 0-1 builds that were competitive even before Drukhari. 9th edition is the narrative edition, I called it from the start. Getting rid of gamey mechanics like occupying the second floor of a ruin entirely to be unchargable, wrap and trap, paint points, fight in four ranks... Drukhari got great narrative rules as well I hear. If we shut up now then GW is going to get rid of points, there's nothing they'd rather want, none of the designers are any good at math and every codex and points release shows it.
We are arguing because GW shills won't acknowledge any wrongs made by GW and because Marine haters love to see Marine players suffer.
How do you balance around a casual scene that generates no statistics, has no indicators of skill, and which may be using custom scenarios and house rules? The short answer is that you can't so you shouldn't bother trying.
You definitely can, but it means putting more attention to interactions and mathematics than to tournaments. To be fair, GW sucks at that.
This is how the most popular game in the world does balance, so why is 40k so special that it shouldn't do the same?
Because a good percentage of the 40k player base doesn't play in that environment. A lot of it plays on smaller scale friendly gaming groups with more repeated interactions, instead of the random ones of tournament settings (or videogame matchmaking systems). In such environment, niche advantages don't really exists and thus armies need to be able to stand in even ground.
The game was in a pretty great state before Drukhari dropped (Outside us poor tau, AM, GSC and some other 8th armies). Marines were back at a 50% winrate and the best factions weren't marines or marines and equivalents, being sob and harlequins. All 9th books had a fair chance agaisnt each other, maybe necrons are a little left behind right now but nothing that can't change without points reductions.
Drukhari are the outlier. And lets hope they aren't the heralds of a new age of power. Nerfing drukhari is NOT being pro-marine biased. They trump all other armies just the same. No, the meta WAS not marine skewed when most armies had to take the tools to kill sisters of battle or harlequins or demon and orks hordes to win tournaments. But theres not amount of optimization you can do agaisnt drukhari to have a consistent fair game against them. Thats the truth.
The game is honestly in a terrible state. The only thing keeping the numbers somewhat more reasonable is harlequins/SOB/Custodians/Daemons are really low play rate compared to their power. DA are obnoxious / DG and marine supplements were more reasonable....DE have errors and combos equivalent to 8.5 Iron hands. Game honestly sucks right now - unless you are just playing for fun.
Honest I wonder how bad the complaints would be if there was no Covid and everyone was actually playing eachother as much as we used to.
Tyran wrote: Because a good percentage of the 40k player base doesn't play in that environment. A lot of it plays on smaller scale friendly gaming groups with more repeated interactions, instead of the random ones of tournament settings (or videogame matchmaking systems). In such environment, niche advantages don't really exists and thus armies need to be able to stand in even ground.
Shouldn't a small scale tight-knit group be able to fix their own specific issues and play in a way that lets niches shine often enough to keep everybody happy? You're already likely aiming for a 50/50 win rate for everybody and nerfing the more skilled players in your group, so why not do the same for armies that cause you trouble?
People wouldn't have problems with DE if they had a 60% rate. It would be considered normal power creep. DE are doing stuff not even IH were able to pull off under their 2.0 rule set. Even at their high days, they were not able to take practicaly all spots in the top 8 of any big tournament.
I have problems with any faction over 55% win rate. Power creep can never be considered "normal", otherwise we can just give up any pretence of balance.
I believe you've misquoted me here.
Those are Karols words, not mine.
You can tell because I never reference tourney win %s etc - unless I'm deriding everyone's worship of the tournament scene
Apologies, it was an enormous quote so I cut it just for the relevant part and I made a mistake
The game was in a pretty great state before Drukhari dropped (Outside us poor tau, AM, GSC and some other 8th armies).
Nah, pretty awful. Orks were pretty much the only faction with multiple competitive builds AFAIK, every other army had 0-1 builds that were competitive even before Drukhari. 9th edition is the narrative edition, I called it from the start. Getting rid of gamey mechanics like occupying the second floor of a ruin entirely to be unchargable, wrap and trap, paint points, fight in four ranks... Drukhari got great narrative rules as well I hear. If we shut up now then GW is going to get rid of points, there's nothing they'd rather want, none of the designers are any good at math and every codex and points release shows it.
We are arguing because GW shills won't acknowledge any wrongs made by GW and because Marine haters love to see Marine players suffer.
I have to disagree here, TBH. I have played extensively in TTS, a "meta" more know for the ease of spamming the most broken gak, and 9th was heading on a great direction.
Most factions, in the most competitive tops, have always at best one build. But thats true everywhere. Once the most optimal solution to a problem has been reached theres little reason to use other stuff. But thats a flawed metric.
Necrons, for example, at this point in time cannot compete without warrior spam agaisnt the biggest stuff out there thas true. But the new book made possible to make a ton of lists that have enough tools and power to face most other lists of the game. Heavy warrior lists, heavy elite lists with inmortals, praetorans and lychguard, canoptek heavy lists, probably vehicles are the weakers but this is an edition were vehicles are pretty weak.
Of course, for most people here I'm saying crazy talk and everything is trash and you only face the tournament-winning lists everywhere. But normally I measure how good a edition is by the difference in power of the good stuff and the "Normal" stuff, and before drukhari, for most codexe, internal balance was pretty reasonable.
I'll say it: Most space marine units are extremely reasonable with the exception of some very overpriced vehicles (And some units like scouts) and you can make strong marine armies with most units in the codex and face most other armies outside the 5 top tournament lists and have a reasonable chance of winning.
It is not as good as post 2.0 marine codex but pre-supplement meta, that was the top of balance 40k has achieved in probably 10 years but is not that bad.
The meta is still undeniably some SM faction, particularly a type of meta where most on foot.
This is because 9th edition changed so much (ie board size and new mission rules for scoring), such that it wasn't worth putting these SM in rhinos or some other troop transport.
What does DE do really, really well?
They kill SM. They are the anti-elite counter army.
Their weapons/stats/options are totally geared for anti-SM.
However, DE shooting at SM vehicles? Not as efficient as folks believe.
The cynic in me believes this was purposely designed to bust up the meta a bit by GW. Why purposely? They want to sell more vehicle models or simply non-infantry SM models.
I still say, for SM, no one should leave home without bringing 2 or 3 vokite culverin Contemptors. Yes, that'll leave your total CP dangerously low, but these guys are the bane of my DE list and they do reasonably well against other non-DE armies.
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