AduroT wrote:
I have played two games with my Sylvaneth in the new edition. My friends already Despise the Wyldwoods more than anything else I can take.

How many Citadle Woods do you find yourself using in the game? Looking to start the twigs but wasn't sure how many forests I need to have on hand.

 Knight wrote:
Gavriel is getting fielded on Saturday. As I understand, the command ability stacks and his seems absurdly good with deep striking.

The SCE lore of magic is rather disappointing. Various flavour of spamming mortal wounds.

I won't pick any Stormhosts, there are artefacts that I'd like to try and no benefit really tempts me.

Anvils of the Heldenhammer seem like a nobrainer to me. The artefact is naff but everything else is just bonkers.

 kodos wrote:
What would it need to play the existing Liberators as Sequitors (except for exchanging the hammers with maces)?

That depends on how loose people will let you be with the counts-as. Personally I wouldn't let that fly unless there was some sort of tabard or heraldry to distinguish them. If I saw a unit of liberators with different weapon heads I'd be like 'oh cool, you converted the weapons on your liberators' not 'oh cool, liberators converted to be sequitors'.

Also note that sequitors aren't really better, just different. They cost more points than liberators and while their bonuses are cool that sweet, sweet +1 to hit against wounds 5+ models remains pretty awesome.

That is why I asked
WYSIWYG is complicated with Stormcast, as having the right weapons is not enough to different between unit types, while Liberators with robes and swords but alternative heads are still Liberators

But Sequitors for now look clear better, not just for the price but also with other synergies

The question is just how one can bild a Stormcast army

 kodos wrote:
What would it need to play the existing Liberators as Sequitors (except for exchanging the hammers with maces)?

Unique paint jobs might do the trick.
For example, my soul mace/star mace whatever they are called for the retributors as all painted bright electric blue.
Standard ones are painted metallic.

As long as they're easily identifiable, the rule of cool should help.
YMMV depending on your regular pool of players.

 kodos wrote:
That is why I asked
WYSIWYG is complicated with Stormcast, as having the right weapons is not enough to different between unit types, while Liberators with robes and swords but alternative heads are still Liberators

But Sequitors for now look clear better, not just for the price but also with other synergies

The question is just how one can bild a Stormcast army

It depends on the list, Sequitors may be the better choice for one army but not the other. As for building them, I'd advise a basic concept of spending points on 1/3 characters, 1/3 models with ranged attacks, 1/3 models that are straight melee. Use that as a guideline and your army will be decent enough for a casual setting. Try out different units and see what you like, there's a lot of them!

 LunarSol wrote:

 AduroT wrote:
I have played two games with my Sylvaneth in the new edition. My friends already Despise the Wyldwoods more than anything else I can take.

How many Citadle Woods do you find yourself using in the game? Looking to start the twigs but wasn't sure how many forests I need to have on hand.

About six so far in my games.

So the chaos mammoth at 320 points has to be a type-o. That thing has cleaned house for me the last couple of games. 22 wounds. Shed loads of mortal wound potential. Nasty damage.

320 points.

Has to be. Way off.

Oh yeah I think we all knew there was some sort of mistake upon seeing it. But until they fix it 'Spammoth' is among the strongest builds in the game!

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Oh yeah I think we all knew there was some sort of mistake upon seeing it. But until they fix it 'Spammoth' is among the strongest builds in the game!

Is one you can kill with a no-proxy policy

A no-proxy policy would also make it so a good chunk of forgeworld warscrolls should just be erased since so much is out of production.

auticus wrote:
A no-proxy policy would also make it so a good chunk of forgeworld warscrolls should just be erased since so much is out of production.

I'm a big fan of creative 3rd party "counts-as", conversions, etc... so I would be bummed to see an event organizer outright do away with those options... but I do think the Mammoth might call for special circumstances. Its clearly a typo (oh God I hope no one thought 320pts was the CORRECT price for it), and I already see local players chomping at the bit to spam them using anything that even vaguely looks like a war-elephant. :-p

 LunarSol wrote:

 AduroT wrote:
I have played two games with my Sylvaneth in the new edition. My friends already Despise the Wyldwoods more than anything else I can take.

How many Citadle Woods do you find yourself using in the game? Looking to start the twigs but wasn't sure how many forests I need to have on hand.

I've never been able to use more than 6 woods in a game. Usually three at the beginning of the game, but during the match, even with poor model placement on the enemy's part, I can only ever fit one base at a time.

auticus wrote:
A no-proxy policy would also make it so a good chunk of forgeworld warscrolls should just be erased since so much is out of production.

You need to make compromises. In my store we have no problems with this, but if I had the option of allowing forgeworld without proxies, or playing agaisnt 5 lists of 8 cheap elephant toys, I would pick the first option

Speaking of FW nastiness and proxies, local Destro WAAC dude already has a (square-based, icy blue painted but legit FW) magma dragon terrorizing the tables. That thing is for real, though also 500+ points, unlike certain spiky elephants

- Salvage

There's a reason it costs that many points...

Oh, it's beyond a doubt the standout from the Monstrous Arcanum for me. The mammoth smells like a mistake, but the magma dragon is a whole handful of resin and mortal wounds. I'm not surprised this dude is running one (he was doing terrible things to Free Peoples on release day), tho I commend him on having the actual model. Just needs to get that 160mm round action going

- Salvage

Guys I think I figured it out; the mammoth cost was a typo--it was printed as 320 points when really it should have been 230 points!

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Guys I think I figured it out; the mammoth cost was a typo--it was printed as 320 points when really it should have been 230 points!

Much more reasonable, Nurgle and Tzeentch armies need the help.

I think the mammoth would be reasonable at 520 points. My cost formulas put it around there anyway from a balance standpoint.

From a breaking the game standpoint though, in a world of seraphon spam summoning free points and legion of nagash players spam recycling their units, I'll bring a vastly undercost mammoth without blinking.

Well duh if it's a tourney you bring the most broken crap you can, it isn't a question of if you bring a mammoth but rather how many you can get the models for. Because four is really the ideal number here.

Had my first real outing with Idoneth today and first real game of 2.0 as well.

List was:
Mor'phann
2x Soulrenders(One of which was the General and rolled for the +2A trait)
1x Tidecaster(Sands of Infinity)
2 units of 10 Reavers
2 units of Thralls, 1 of 10 and 1 of 20.

I made a bit of a mistake dropping the 20 unit basically the whole table away from the enemy so they had to slog it and even with run+charge they were really far out of it.

But man once the 20 block got into combat, they butchered. Took out a Cauldron of Blood in a single turn.

With that said, holy hell is High Tide wonderful. You get to go first before the other person even if it's their turn. Used the Hangman's Knot on a Hag Queen on foot to ensure a kill and just...boop. 4 attacks with the Talunhook with rerolls to Hits was kinda mean.

Had my first two games of 2.0 as well, in fact my first AoS games since I tried it on launch day 3 years ago.

1000 pts Nightgaunts
(2x20 chainrasps and guardian of souls in battalion, 8 glaivewraiths, spirit torment and knight of shrouds on steed).

Completely crushed Beastclaw raiders (boss on stonehorn, 4 mounrfangs, some cats and allied shaman) and soundly beat new Sigmarines (lots of castigators and sequitors) both on kills and on objectives.

I'm not a super fan of how reliant the game is on buff auras, especially now with "completely within" auras, it really forces you to bunch up. And double turns are a dumb thing. But I did enjoy myself very much, I always felt like there were meaningful choices to make.

I got dumpstered by LoN last night.

1500 sylvaneth vs Legion of Sacrament. Arkhan, mortis engine battalion, 20 chainrasp, 30 skeletons, dogs, hosts, geminids, shackles.

First things first, I haven't played the sylvaneth in ~ a year and a half and I screwed up big time on side choosing and over all strategy. Should have given him the side with the wood, turtled in the back and then just made trees and teleported cross map to kill arkhan (because he only screened him from the front and doesn't have a lot of experience vs sylvaneth). Turn 1 durthuing with ghyrstrike and 2 units of bow hunters would have been enough.

Instead I got to eat 5 spells a turn between with +2 to +4 cast and +6". I've had this suspicion since last game when I used them, but geminids are the best damage spell since they have a giant cast range compared to the rest; generate the most mortal wounds reliably and majorily debuff. His first turn he had 3cp so I couldn't run them down easily, not that it matters since sacrament punishes you for camping gravesites with their 4+ on destroyed enemy units. Also hadn't really appreciated gravesites + 3 heroes healing skeles back every turn too.

Biggest complaint is really Arkhan. Not sure why he's gotten so much better than his OG version (more spells to cast other than bolt, shield and curse; skeleton heal+reroll on it, another easy +2 to cast within reach) while going down 20 points. That being said, my opponent did screw up a couple of important rules like having curse of years have unlimited range and healing of non combat kills.

Rant over; I needed to play better with sylvaneth, though its going to be harder since he knows about all the gimmicky teleporting they can do.

https://twitter.com/Jackwarmstrong/status/1015578616573448197

auticus wrote:
https://twitter.com/Jackwarmstrong/status/1015578616573448197

Yes, and...?

Dude was also called out for being "that guy". His whole feed today has basically been "this is what's wrong with AOS please fix!1!"

Yes, and...?

Kroak doing 105 wounds in a turn. I don't know what the remainder of his feed looks like, looked like mostly just tournament pictures, but if kroak did indeed crank out 105 wounds in a magic phase thats pretty... OTT. Not that thats new with him.

I lost league finals last fall to Kroak who in one turn tabled my nurgle army with all of his magic and a balewind vortex after he was summoned in). He's always been a bit over the top.

auticus wrote:

Yes, and...?

Kroak doing 105 wounds in a turn.

It was Kroak, sitting on a Balewind Vortex and with many people saying that he just spammed Celestial Deliverance(roll 3 dice and it deals d3 mortal wounds to every enemy unit in that range--D6 if fighting Chaos Daemons) whenever fighting Chaos(which is what he's fighting in that picture).

And again, the dude had a bunch of stuff that basically reads as "I'm trying to prove I can break the game so you need to fix it nao!".

No model should ever be doing that many mortal wounds in a whole game, let alone one turn. Period. It doesn't matter who was playing it, why they were doing it, what the scenario was, what he was fighting against, or anything else. One model Should. Not. Deal. That. Many. Mortals.

As someone that has to deal with Kroak on a fairly regular basis, I'm all for showing Ben and the AOS team how busted he is if he's doing something like that, because the seraphon player here will do that to me every chance he can get too and I don't see a point in playing a game like that, we can just give him the win and find something else more fun to do with that time.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
No model should ever be doing that many mortal wounds in a whole game, let alone one turn. Period. It doesn't matter who was playing it, why they were doing it, what the scenario was, what he was fighting against, or anything else. One model Should. Not. Deal. That. Many. Mortals.

On the contrary, it absolutely does matter the how and the why.

Purportedly from the opponent himself, the guy blew all 5 spells from Kroak(remember, he's on a Balewind Vortex) casting "Celestial Deliverance" repeatedly. He used Foresight in order to have rerolls for if it went bad.
That's 5 chances for every unit in 3D6+6 inches of Kroak to potentially take D6 wounds, with him having rerolls on hand to get things really shaking.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
No model should ever be doing that many mortal wounds in a whole game, let alone one turn. Period. It doesn't matter who was playing it, why they were doing it, what the scenario was, what he was fighting against, or anything else. One model Should. Not. Deal. That. Many. Mortals.

On the contrary, it absolutely does matter the how and the why.

Purportedly from the opponent himself, the guy blew all 5 spells from Kroak(remember, he's on a Balewind Vortex) casting "Celestial Deliverance" repeatedly. He used Foresight in order to have rerolls for if it went bad.
That's 5 chances for every unit in 3D6+6 inches of Kroak to potentially take D6 wounds, with him having rerolls on hand to get things really shaking.

I don't know. I don't like my warhammer to have an Exodia trick.

I don't like playing a game that doesn't need playing. If I'm chaos and my opponent is rolling kroak on his balewind, just GG and go find something else to do.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
No model should ever be doing that many mortal wounds in a whole game, let alone one turn. Period. It doesn't matter who was playing it, why they were doing it, what the scenario was, what he was fighting against, or anything else. One model Should. Not. Deal. That. Many. Mortals.

On the contrary, it absolutely does matter the how and the why.

Purportedly from the opponent himself, the guy blew all 5 spells from Kroak(remember, he's on a Balewind Vortex) casting "Celestial Deliverance" repeatedly. He used Foresight in order to have rerolls for if it went bad.
That's 5 chances for every unit in 3D6+6 inches of Kroak to potentially take D6 wounds, with him having rerolls on hand to get things really shaking.

I don't care. It shouldn't be possible.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I don't care. It shouldn't be possible.

Slaanesh Daemons army. 5 casts with D6 per unit being targeted.

It's a bit of a joke to be getting upset about this particular thing when it really does require a perfect storm of circumstances.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I don't care. It shouldn't be possible.

Slaanesh Daemons army. 5 casts with D6 per unit being targeted.

It's a bit of a joke to be getting upset about this particular thing when it really does require a perfect storm of circumstances.

You mean any daemon army. "Perfect storm" is when Arkhan kills a 40-man unit with Curse of Years. This is just... Kroak verses daemons, and way more damage on top of that. So I reiterate; it shouldn't be possible, at all, ever.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I don't care. It shouldn't be possible.

Slaanesh Daemons army. 5 casts with D6 per unit being targeted.

It's a bit of a joke to be getting upset about this particular thing when it really does require a perfect storm of circumstances.

You mean any daemon army.

Figured I didn't have to specify again since I specified earlier in the thread about Kroak doing double damage to Daemons, but I guess I should have specified again?

"Perfect storm" is when Arkhan kills a 40-man unit with Curse of Years. This is just... Kroak verses daemons, and way more damage on top of that. So I reiterate; it shouldn't be possible, at all, ever.

This is Kroak, on a Balewind Vortex, with multiple units of Daemons around him.

If you rolled 3 6s for the range, given where Kroak is there and you add the extra 6 inches for the Balewind--that's 42 inches of D6 mortal wounds per unit. Looked like Slaanesh guy is running MSU so that's more Mortal Wounds being added in. Without knowing the size of the table and exact distances from that picture, it leaves some of it open to interpretation as to what is or isn't in range. Given that for whatever reason Kroak isn't actually sitting centered on the Vortex, he's squeaking maybe an extra inch out of things. And hell--he's parked next to Arcane terrain too meaning +1 to his castings/unbindings and the other player doesn't seem to have a wizard in range to prevent these spells from going off.

For those curious as to the context, this is the photo that was provided by the person posting about it:


So yeah, he's putting out a lot of mortal wounds against Daemons. It's a spell that hits every unit within 3D6 inches of him. I'd be interested to know exactly how many units were in range of Kroak at the time and how many wounds the average one was taking. Because a lot of this seemingly can be laid at the feet of the Slaanesh player---if they ran MSU, they get burned by this.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
No model should ever be doing that many mortal wounds in a whole game, let alone one turn. Period. It doesn't matter who was playing it, why they were doing it, what the scenario was, what he was fighting against, or anything else. One model Should. Not. Deal. That. Many. Mortals.

On the contrary, it absolutely does matter the how and the why.

Purportedly from the opponent himself, the guy blew all 5 spells from Kroak(remember, he's on a Balewind Vortex) casting "Celestial Deliverance" repeatedly. He used Foresight in order to have rerolls for if it went bad.
That's 5 chances for every unit in 3D6+6 inches of Kroak to potentially take D6 wounds, with him having rerolls on hand to get things really shaking.

I don't care. It shouldn't be possible.

I'm fine with it being possible, assuming there's some kind of setup and possibility to interrupt. I've played Magic TCG enough to learn that combos are really nasty, but there's almost always some point where you can break the sequence.

The real question is, how do you implement something similar in AoS?

Just limit him to casting his spell once per phase again by errataing his warscroll. He’s good enough without it! Although I doubt they will do that, they always seem to fix these things in roundabout ways.

 Mangod wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
No model should ever be doing that many mortal wounds in a whole game, let alone one turn. Period. It doesn't matter who was playing it, why they were doing it, what the scenario was, what he was fighting against, or anything else. One model Should. Not. Deal. That. Many. Mortals.

On the contrary, it absolutely does matter the how and the why.

Purportedly from the opponent himself, the guy blew all 5 spells from Kroak(remember, he's on a Balewind Vortex) casting "Celestial Deliverance" repeatedly. He used Foresight in order to have rerolls for if it went bad.
That's 5 chances for every unit in 3D6+6 inches of Kroak to potentially take D6 wounds, with him having rerolls on hand to get things really shaking.

I don't care. It shouldn't be possible.

I'm fine with it being possible, assuming there's some kind of setup and possibility to interrupt. I've played Magic TCG enough to learn that combos are really nasty, but there's almost always some point where you can break the sequence.

The real question is, how do you implement something similar in AoS?

The question then becomes do you want something similar in AoS?
Powerful magic is great, but I think the design of Warhammer doesn't lend itself well nor favourably to the kind of power-combos that MTG has. MTG is a very fast game (typically) compared to Warhammer so having a spell combo that ends the match in one or two turns is fine. Because the player shuffle their decks and play again in a few moments.

In Warhammer if you have super spell combos that can wipe huge chunks of units from the table in one go you can't just shake your opponents hand and go "good game lets go again, best of three?". It's just not practical for many situations, plus its very unfun to have more time spent in setup and deployment than in actual gaming.



Another aspect is if you start to introduce superspell systems you start to heavily weight the game toward being caster heavy. Casters become mandatory and the default power of the army instead of desirable and one cog of many.



Personally I think wargames work best when there's a bit more "tarpit" in the game and unit design so that fights last a bit longer; that you get that feeling of engage, moral break, retreat, flank attack, manoeuvring etc....

 Overread wrote:
Personally I think wargames work best when there's a bit more "tarpit" in the game and unit design so that fights last a bit longer; that you get that feeling of engage, moral break, retreat, flank attack, manoeuvring etc....

I'll just chime to this thought. I simply dislike when everything just gets removed or there's no counter play to the stacked up abilities, plus I also dislike to see those few models I've painted to be sent back to the carrying case.

My issue is that Seraphon seem so obviously ahead of the curve in terms of overall power level compared to everyone else, yet they didn't really get any significant points hikes on some already top-tier units they had, and they got reductions elsewhere. Their summoning is also the best in the game if you build around it. Kroak being able to spam his spell again is just the cherry on top.

I’m sad that these issues with the game still exist. They went crazy with the mortal wound spam.

The Lens of Refraction (Hysh Artefact from Malign Sorcery) may very well become an auto-include for certain factions at tournaments. It reduces the number of mortal wounds inflicted by spells cast by enemy Wizards by D3 for units within 6" of the wielder. Chuck it on a durable hero on a big base and go from there.

Caederes wrote:
My issue is that Seraphon seem so obviously ahead of the curve in terms of overall power level compared to everyone else, yet they didn't really get any significant points hikes on some already top-tier units they had, and they got reductions elsewhere. Their summoning is also the best in the game if you build around it. Kroak being able to spam his spell again is just the cherry on top.

If he's spamming his spell, he's not summoning.
If he's spamming his spell, it's going from a 7 to an 8 to a 9 for three castings and then capping at that 9+ to cast.

I didn't see any in the picture but it would be staggeringly surprising if he had no Astrolith Bearers hunkered down for Celestial Conduit, granting another +1 to castings(he's parked next to an Arcane terrain feature) and an additional 8" to the range of the spell. Meaning my initial calculations of 3D6+6 need to be revised to 3D6+14--anywhere from 17" for 3 1s to 32" for 3 6s.

Honestly the only way I can think of him getting that 105 MWs is everything in that photo being in range and there having been other units of 5 in range as well but having been removed.

 Kanluwen wrote:

Caederes wrote:
My issue is that Seraphon seem so obviously ahead of the curve in terms of overall power level compared to everyone else, yet they didn't really get any significant points hikes on some already top-tier units they had, and they got reductions elsewhere. Their summoning is also the best in the game if you build around it. Kroak being able to spam his spell again is just the cherry on top.

If he's spamming his spell, he's not summoning.
If he's spamming his spell, it's going from a 7 to an 8 to a 9 for three castings and then capping at that 9+ to cast.

I didn't see any in the picture but it would be staggeringly surprising if he had no Astrolith Bearers hunkered down for Celestial Conduit, granting another +1 to castings(he's parked next to an Arcane terrain feature) and an additional 8" to the range of the spell. Meaning my initial calculations of 3D6+6 need to be revised to 3D6+14--anywhere from 17" base to 32".

Who said Kroak was the one summoning?
As I said, Kroak being able to spam his spell is "just the cherry on top", i.e. not the biggest deal of everything else Seraphon can do.

Caederes wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

Caederes wrote:
My issue is that Seraphon seem so obviously ahead of the curve in terms of overall power level compared to everyone else, yet they didn't really get any significant points hikes on some already top-tier units they had, and they got reductions elsewhere. Their summoning is also the best in the game if you build around it. Kroak being able to spam his spell again is just the cherry on top.

If he's spamming his spell, he's not summoning.
If he's spamming his spell, it's going from a 7 to an 8 to a 9 for three castings and then capping at that 9+ to cast.

I didn't see any in the picture but it would be staggeringly surprising if he had no Astrolith Bearers hunkered down for Celestial Conduit, granting another +1 to castings(he's parked next to an Arcane terrain feature) and an additional 8" to the range of the spell. Meaning my initial calculations of 3D6+6 need to be revised to 3D6+14--anywhere from 17" base to 32".

Who said Kroak was the one summoning?
As I said, Kroak being able to spam his spell is "just the cherry on top", i.e. not the biggest deal of everything else Seraphon can do.

Honestly, the biggest reason to take Kroak is his 4 spells--meaning 4 times(5 if you do a Balewind Vortex) you can instead do Celestial Conjuration, granting you a whopping 13 points at the end of your Hero Phase. That's before an Astrolith Bearer(+D3) even gets factored in.

I cannot help but stress that we're not seeing the full picture here, we don't know if there's a Slann Starmaster who was parked in the back who had rolled up "The Sage's Staff" for Celestial Configuration(+1 to casting rolls), we don't know if there's an Astrolith Bearer further back parked down with his Astrolith for another +1 to casting--meaning +3 to casts for spells that require a 7, 8, or 9. We don't know if he burned Kroak's command ability to ensure he got 3 rerolls to play around with. We don't know how big the distance ended up being for his casts, we don't know how many units there were in that range, etc.

Only thing we know is D6 wounds and a potential range band of 9 to 24 or 17 to 32--and with the potential for the Slann command trait of an additional 6 inches to range on casting rolls of 10+.

I apologize for the messiness with regards to the range brackets changing. It's legitimately not an attempt to shift goalposts, I've just been doing some research after this surfaced. It's scary for Chaos Daemon players for sure--but for anyone else, that 105 MWs would have been sliced in half to 52.

What this type of thing is really good for is running people out of the game and destroying gaming groups.

If you love combo gaming and obliterating your enemy with combos then this will be something you love, but for the rest of us, this kneecaps AOS trying to grow past the people that like magic the gathering with models.

If a lizard player really wants to have no game, he can just show up with this against a chaos player and elect to win by default.

Thats awful game design in my opinion.

auticus wrote:
What this type of thing is really good for is running people out of the game and destroying gaming groups.

If you love combo gaming and obliterating your enemy with combos then this will be something you love, but for the rest of us, this kneecaps AOS trying to grow past the people that like magic the gathering with models.

If a lizard player really wants to have no game, he can just show up with this against a chaos player and elect to win by default.

Thats awful game design in my opinion.

By your argument, someone with a missile heavy army can just 'elect to win by default' against a melee army.

But we know that's not how things work. This was someone who lucked out on their side of things. It happens.

 Kanluwen wrote:

Honestly, the biggest reason to take Kroak is his 4 spells--meaning 4 times(5 if you do a Balewind Vortex) you can instead do Celestial Conjuration, granting you a whopping 13 points at the end of your Hero Phase. That's before an Astrolith Bearer(+D3) even gets factored in.

I cannot help but stress that we're not seeing the full picture here, we don't know if there's a Slann Starmaster who was parked in the back who had rolled up "The Sage's Staff" for Celestial Configuration(+1 to casting rolls), we don't know if there's an Astrolith Bearer further back parked down with his Astrolith for another +1 to casting--meaning +3 to casts for spells that require a 7, 8, or 9. We don't know if he burned Kroak's command ability to ensure he got 3 rerolls to play around with. We don't know how big the distance ended up being for his casts, we don't know how many units there were in that range, etc.

Only thing we know is D6 wounds and a potential range band of 9 to 24 or 17 to 32--and with the potential for the Slann command trait of an additional 6 inches to range on casting rolls of 10+.

I apologize for the messiness with regards to the range brackets changing. It's legitimately not an attempt to shift goalposts, I've just been doing some research after this surfaced. It's scary for Chaos Daemon players for sure--but for anyone else, that 105 MWs would have been sliced in half to 52.

Not that I made it obvious but I was being facetious. I agree that he's best served summoning. Good information for those in this thread who are more worried about the mortal wound spam though, it's not a big deal for my armies personally as I either can absorb them or will be using the Lens of Refraction anyway.

Caederes wrote:

Not that I made it obvious but I was being facetious. I agree that he's best served summoning. Good information for those in this thread who are more worried about the mortal wound spam though, it's not a big deal for my armies personally as I either can absorb them or will be using the Lens of Refraction anyway.

I apologize for not catching the facetiousness. I'm just not a fan of the kneejerk nonsense we're seeing surrounding this. It looks like there was no Slaanesh Wizard to unbind or possibly it was being outranged by a series of factors allowing for Kroak to be outside of the 30" unbind range.

I'm totally understanding that yes, this mortal wound output on its face seems outrageous. But it's D3 Mortal Wounds per unit within 3D6" range, with the number going to D6 instead if you're fighting Daemons. Kroak can cast it four times, with it going from a 7+ to an 8+ and capping at a 9+ to cast.

So let's recap the potential modifiers:
Seraphon have a Battle Trait where they get an additional 6" to the range of the spell if the casting roll for the Slann Wizard is a 10+.
A Balewind Vortex grants another 6" to the casting range, plus an additional chance to cast a spell.
Arcane terrain(which Kroak is sitting next to) grants another +1 to cast.
An Astrolith Bearer grants +1 to cast and 8" to the range.
A Slann Starmaster can, potentially, roll up "The Sage's Staff" constellation before the game--meaning another +1 to cast.
Kroak also has a Command Ability allowing for him to roll 3 dice and for each 4+, he gets to reroll any single dice before his next Hero Phase.

That means a potential 5 chances to cast a spell with, with 2D6+3 for each cast. That means 5 chances for a spell that has 3D6"+14" guaranteed with a potential 6" if you rolled a 10+ for the casts. That means 5 chances for every enemy unit from a minimum of 17 to 23 inches and a maximum of 32 to 38 inches being affected by a spell that deals D3 Mortal Wounds, bumped up to D6 Mortal Wounds if playing against Chaos Daemons.

That is a massive footprint to be considering for a spell that deals those Mortal Wounds to units, meaning an army built up of MSU is going to be boosting that amount of Mortal Wounds being generated significantly.

Edit Note: Yes, I'm aware I factored in a few hypothetical variables here. Not everything can be observed from one photo.

Caederes wrote:
The Lens of Refraction (Hysh Artefact from Malign Sorcery) may very well become an auto-include for certain factions at tournaments. It reduces the number of mortal wounds inflicted by spells cast by enemy Wizards by D3 for units within 6" of the wielder. Chuck it on a durable hero on a big base and go from there.

I forgot to reply to this earlier--one of the things I'm exceedingly disappointed in them removing from the early days of AOS is the various battle standards. Wanderers had a great counter to this kind of nonsense in the form of the Banner of Athel Loren, which when planted granted an umbrella of potentially denying Mortal Wounds from spells.

 Overread wrote:

 Mangod wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
No model should ever be doing that many mortal wounds in a whole game, let alone one turn. Period. It doesn't matter who was playing it, why they were doing it, what the scenario was, what he was fighting against, or anything else. One model Should. Not. Deal. That. Many. Mortals.

On the contrary, it absolutely does matter the how and the why.

Purportedly from the opponent himself, the guy blew all 5 spells from Kroak(remember, he's on a Balewind Vortex) casting "Celestial Deliverance" repeatedly. He used Foresight in order to have rerolls for if it went bad.
That's 5 chances for every unit in 3D6+6 inches of Kroak to potentially take D6 wounds, with him having rerolls on hand to get things really shaking.

I don't care. It shouldn't be possible.

I'm fine with it being possible, assuming there's some kind of setup and possibility to interrupt. I've played Magic TCG enough to learn that combos are really nasty, but there's almost always some point where you can break the sequence.

The real question is, how do you implement something similar in AoS?

The question then becomes do you want something similar in AoS?
Powerful magic is great, but I think the design of Warhammer doesn't lend itself well nor favourably to the kind of power-combos that MTG has. MTG is a very fast game (typically) compared to Warhammer so having a spell combo that ends the match in one or two turns is fine. Because the player shuffle their decks and play again in a few moments.

In Warhammer if you have super spell combos that can wipe huge chunks of units from the table in one go you can't just shake your opponents hand and go "good game lets go again, best of three?". It's just not practical for many situations, plus its very unfun to have more time spent in setup and deployment than in actual gaming.



Another aspect is if you start to introduce superspell systems you start to heavily weight the game toward being caster heavy. Casters become mandatory and the default power of the army instead of desirable and one cog of many.



Personally I think wargames work best when there's a bit more "tarpit" in the game and unit design so that fights last a bit longer; that you get that feeling of engage, moral break, retreat, flank attack, manoeuvring etc....

10/10
I would exalt this post again

 Kanluwen wrote:

auticus wrote:
What this type of thing is really good for is running people out of the game and destroying gaming groups.

If you love combo gaming and obliterating your enemy with combos then this will be something you love, but for the rest of us, this kneecaps AOS trying to grow past the people that like magic the gathering with models.

If a lizard player really wants to have no game, he can just show up with this against a chaos player and elect to win by default.

Thats awful game design in my opinion.

By your argument, someone with a missile heavy army can just 'elect to win by default' against a melee army.

But we know that's not how things work. This was someone who lucked out on their side of things. It happens.

Except that I've never said a missile heavy army can elect to win by default against a melee army. The only missile army that could elect to win that way was kunnin rukk before the changes were put in place in 2017. There is a gigantic world of difference from saying one has a sizeable advantage compared with one can win by default.

One model should never be dealing 105 points of damage in a single magic phase. That is flat out bad game experience. That is something that needed caught in playtesting and toned down. The easy answer is stop letting that model recast the same spell over and over again. There was a reason they had the rule of one up until now, and now they've decided its ok to pitch that out the window.

auticus wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

auticus wrote:
What this type of thing is really good for is running people out of the game and destroying gaming groups.

If you love combo gaming and obliterating your enemy with combos then this will be something you love, but for the rest of us, this kneecaps AOS trying to grow past the people that like magic the gathering with models.

If a lizard player really wants to have no game, he can just show up with this against a chaos player and elect to win by default.

Thats awful game design in my opinion.

By your argument, someone with a missile heavy army can just 'elect to win by default' against a melee army.

But we know that's not how things work. This was someone who lucked out on their side of things. It happens.

Except that I've never said a missile heavy army can elect to win by default against a melee army. The only missile army that could elect to win that way was kunnin rukk before the changes were put in place in 2017. There is a gigantic world of difference from saying one has a sizeable advantage compared with one can win by default.

You've certainly implied that it was the case over the past few months.

One model should never be dealing 105 points of damage in a single magic phase. That is flat out bad game experience. That is something that needed caught in playtesting and toned down. The easy answer is stop letting that model recast the same spell over and over again. There was a reason they had the rule of one up until now, and now they've decided its ok to pitch that out the window.

The easy answer is to provide more abilities to mitigate spells. Unbind isn't and never will be enough.

he easy answer is to provide more abilities to mitigate spells. Unbind isn't and never will be enough.

That may be true. The end result is GW needs to look at extreme things like this and curb it pronto. If its adding more ways to mitigate spells, then so be it.

Lord Kroak running around tea bagging chaos armies is not good for the game's health.

He's not "teabagging Chaos armies".

He's doing this ONLY to Chaos Daemons units. That army didn't seem to have any non-Daemon stuff.

Actually, theres some cases where something being OP is only a problem of not having the right tools in other armies. In this specific case I don't think the problem can be fixed with that. If you just let this be as it is, and give "tools" to fight it, then you end up with an arms race where letality only scales up, and if your opponent just happens to not have that tool, then is an auto win.

Something similar happened with Hearthstone, where a Druid deck was absolutely dominating the meta with a specific 1-cost spell, and they introduced a neutral card of 6 mana that destroyed all 1-cost cards in both decks. But the card designed to counter that specific deck wasn't enough, and they ended up nerfing the original deck.

 Kanluwen wrote:
He's not "teabagging Chaos armies".

He's doing this ONLY to Chaos Daemons units. That army didn't seem to have any non-Daemon stuff.

Doesn't matter how you look at it, it isn't cool to have a model be an "auto-win" (Or so powerfull agaisnt them that makes a victory nearly impossible) button agaisnt Chaos demon Armies unles those armies play in a very specific way both in the table and the list-building phase.

Having had lord kroak literally tea bag my entire nurgle army in one turn recently, and my army is a mix of blight kings and nurgle demons, he's able to pretty much have his way with a lot of chaos configurations.

I'm not going to get into pedantics and nit picking. He is essentially an "I win" button against a good chunk of chaos builds.

He is the opposite of what you want in a game to encourage community building and growth.

The only people that I know of that don't mind this type of thing are people that enjoy the magic the gathering aspects of the game and expect you to buy new models every X months to keep up with the meta. For the rest, this is repulsive.

Yeah I'm not sure "its only that bad vs daemons" holds any weight when its still ~52 mortal wounds from one model if that exact same scenario happened vs any other army.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
No model should ever be doing that many mortal wounds in a whole game, let alone one turn. Period. It doesn't matter who was playing it, why they were doing it, what the scenario was, what he was fighting against, or anything else. One model Should. Not. Deal. That. Many. Mortals.

On the contrary, it absolutely does matter the how and the why.

Purportedly from the opponent himself, the guy blew all 5 spells from Kroak(remember, he's on a Balewind Vortex) casting "Celestial Deliverance" repeatedly. He used Foresight in order to have rerolls for if it went bad.
That's 5 chances for every unit in 3D6+6 inches of Kroak to potentially take D6 wounds, with him having rerolls on hand to get things really shaking.

He also gets +8" added to the range because of an Astrolith bearer, which means he's also casting at +2 with it and the vortex. That means an average of 24.5" radius on the spell, doing on average 6 mortal wounds per turn on non-daemon units, and 10.5 to any daemons in range. That's insane by any measure.

 Fafnir wrote:

He also gets +8" added to the range because of an Astrolith bearer, which means he's also casting at +2 with it and the vortex. That means an average of 24.5" radius on the spell, doing on average 6 mortal wounds per turn on non-daemon units, and 10.5 to any daemons in range. That's insane by any measure.

If you read further past that post, you'd notice that I actually showed all the potential range modifiers. But yeah, thanks.

It's "insane" but it's exceedingly situational. Yeah yeah yeah, it could still be "52 mortal wounds against anyone not Daemons!"--but it's still having to be built up to get that range modifier.

You plant the Astrolith by Kroak, Kroak casts Balewind Vortex. He's got 4 casts left to do his job on turn one. That's not much of a build up. You either deploy aggressively and start nuking from the first round, or you deploy defensively and dare your opponent to come within 32". That hardly sounds 'exceedingly situational.' Sure, you can't move after the Vortex is down, but who cares, you can cover the majority of the area of the board with it. 650 points for the setup, and then in a 2k game you've got more than enough to entrench that position or cover objectives.

 Fafnir wrote:
You plant the Astrolith by Kroak, Kroak casts Balewind Vortex. He's got 4 casts left to do his job on turn one. That's not much of a build up. You either deploy aggressively and start nuking from the first round, or you deploy defensively and dare your opponent to come within 32". That hardly sounds 'exceedingly situational.' Sure, you can't move after the Vortex is down, but who cares, you can cover the majority of the area of the board with it.

Astrolith can plant anywhere far as I can tell and grant the Celestial Conduit benefit.
With that said, the reason I factored in a lot of different things is that the spell does get progressively harder to cast. There's some support-y stuff that can be done to make it work more reliably.

It's also worth noting that several parts of my "setup" aren't anything more than Battle Traits(the extra 6" if the roll is a 10+) for the Slann or a benefit from having a Slann that rolled the + casting sign.
Oh--and the Arcane terrain that he was parked next to.

Hence my statement of there being "exceedingly situational factors" that might have been in play to force this to work. Like I said earlier, the dude seemed to have an axe to grind and wanted to make it very clear that he did this specifically to showcase "how broken" AOS2.0 is and Kroak in particular. It reminds me of the people who fielded multiple named characters before we got Matched Play and named restrictions.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I don't care. It shouldn't be possible.

Slaanesh Daemons army. 5 casts with D6 per unit being targeted.

It's a bit of a joke to be getting upset about this particular thing when it really does require a perfect storm of circumstances.

You mean any daemon army.

Figured I didn't have to specify again since I specified earlier in the thread about Kroak doing double damage to Daemons, but I guess I should have specified again?

"Perfect storm" is when Arkhan kills a 40-man unit with Curse of Years. This is just... Kroak verses daemons, and way more damage on top of that. So I reiterate; it shouldn't be possible, at all, ever.

This is Kroak, on a Balewind Vortex, with multiple units of Daemons around him.

If you rolled 3 6s for the range, given where Kroak is there and you add the extra 6 inches for the Balewind--that's 42 inches of D6 mortal wounds per unit. Looked like Slaanesh guy is running MSU so that's more Mortal Wounds being added in. Without knowing the size of the table and exact distances from that picture, it leaves some of it open to interpretation as to what is or isn't in range. Given that for whatever reason Kroak isn't actually sitting centered on the Vortex, he's squeaking maybe an extra inch out of things. And hell--he's parked next to Arcane terrain too meaning +1 to his castings/unbindings and the other player doesn't seem to have a wizard in range to prevent these spells from going off.

For those curious as to the context, this is the photo that was provided by the person posting about it:

Spoiler:

So yeah, he's putting out a lot of mortal wounds against Daemons. It's a spell that hits every unit within 3D6 inches of him. I'd be interested to know exactly how many units were in range of Kroak at the time and how many wounds the average one was taking. Because a lot of this seemingly can be laid at the feet of the Slaanesh player---if they ran MSU, they get burned by this.

My point is any army composed of predominantly daemons can get hit with this. It isn't a perfect storm. We could even assume the opposing army isn't daemons and he does ~60 mortals instead, it doesn't at all change the problem. For range he has +6" from vortex, +8" from astrolith bearer (don't even try to argue that every seraphon list doesn't have one), let's go with an average of 10" from dice, off a 4" base--that's a circle 52" in diameter in a board that is only 72" long. Range is not a problem. The only real element of chance here is actually casting it three times after vortex, with +2 to cast (vortex + astrolith) that's a 25% chance of getting it off all three times (after summoning the vortex with +1). This involves no re-rolls or other bonuses and is essentially a 25% chance of winning the game automatically. The only realistic option the opponent has to counter is dispelling needing a minimum of 8+ since that 25% includes all the spells going off on at least a 7. And that's already forcing opponents to bring wizards in order to have a chance at avoiding an automatic loss.

So let me reiterate, even if it were a perfect storm it would not be OK. But it is not a perfect storm, it's not even difficult. It's a 25% chance of winning in a turn because you brought kroak, a vortex, and an astrolith bearer. Further it's so much worse than that because even just getting the spell off twice would be devastating enough, and he can continue to do this in subsequent turns. I don't know why you are so tremendously resistant to admitting that there is a balance issue here.

And regardless of what either of us think, it is bad for the health of AoS that it exists. People looking to get/get back into AoS don't see the context; they see 100+ mortals off a single model and think "I don't care how hard it is to get that off, I don't want to play AoS if that's possible." I see it happen all the time with MtG; I can't count the number of people I've met who say 'I just want to play, not have to worry about stopping insta-win combos' and that is a game where 'comboing out' for a win is a legitimate and intended component of the meta.

 Fafnir wrote:
You plant the Astrolith by Kroak, Kroak casts Balewind Vortex. He's got 4 casts left to do his job on turn one. That's not much of a build up. You either deploy aggressively and start nuking from the first round, or you deploy defensively and dare your opponent to come within 32". That hardly sounds 'exceedingly situational.' Sure, you can't move after the Vortex is down, but who cares, you can cover the majority of the area of the board with it. 650 points for the setup, and then in a 2k game you've got more than enough to entrench that position or cover objectives.

And if he does not come closer you just spam Summoning instead

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
My point is any army composed of predominantly daemons can get hit with this. It isn't a perfect storm. We could even assume the opposing army isn't daemons and he does ~60 mortals instead, it doesn't at all change the problem. For range he has +6" from vortex, +8" from astrolith bearer (don't even try to argue that every seraphon list doesn't have one)

Never tried to. Didn't know initially about it, hence why I made the specific statement about not purposely trying to move goalposts later on. I've been, y'know, actually doing research here figuring out what's what. As I've been trying to dig up exactly what happened here(which is difficult because there's a lot of hyperbole floating around surrounding the events in question), I've amended some things. That's why I've posted as much as I have on this particular topic. I've heard at least a couple of different accounts where yes, he did have a Slann Starmaster that rolled up the spellcaster buffing constellation and he got a 10+ for his roll, meaning the Slann Battle Trait would come into play.

let's go with an average of 10" from dice, off a 4" base--that's a circle 52" in diameter in a board that is only 72" long. Range is not a problem. The only real element of chance here is actually casting it three times after vortex, with +2 to cast (vortex + astrolith) that's a 25% chance of getting it off all three times (after summoning the vortex with +1). This involves no re-rolls or other bonuses and is essentially a 25% chance of winning the game automatically. The only realistic option the opponent has to counter is dispelling needing a minimum of 8+ since that 25% includes all the spells going off on at least a 7. And that's already forcing opponents to bring wizards in order to have a chance at avoiding an automatic loss.

You shouldn't be keeping the chance to get it off all three times the same. The spell gets a point higher each time.

So let me reiterate, even if it were a perfect storm it would not be OK. But it is not a perfect storm, it's not even difficult. It's a 25% chance of winning in a turn because you brought kroak, a vortex, and an astrolith bearer. Further it's so much worse than that because even just getting the spell off twice would be devastating enough, and he can continue to do this in subsequent turns. I don't know why you are so tremendously resistant to admitting that there is a balance issue here.

Because of the circumstances surrounding the event itself. I can't find out whether or not this was during a team tournament portion, which is apparently how a guy got a Moonclan unit Champion dealing an obscene amount of wounds.

I get that there's an issue--I just don't see it as being a gamebreaking issue right off the bat. It's a tournament. I expect players to be tools there.

And regardless of what either of us think, it is bad for the health of AoS that it exists. People looking to get/get back into AoS don't see the context; they see 100+ mortals off a single model and think "I don't care how hard it is to get that off, I don't want to play AoS if that's possible." I see it happen all the time with MtG; I can't count the number of people I've met who say 'I just want to play, not have to worry about stopping insta-win combos' and that is a game where 'comboing out' for a win is a legitimate and intended component of the meta.

And that's fine and dandy, but education can definitely help. You don't have to talk down to them, you don't have to make it a situation of "git gud scrub" or anything like that. You just showcase how to potentially counter this--and while you might argue that "it's uncounterable!", I'm sure someone somewhere has already come up with a way to do so.

It's a tournament. I expect players to be tools there.

Except now this combo is about to be unleashed in games outside of the tournament hall too.

Which is going to cripple some AOS community building.

And even if it has a counter (I cannot at the moment think of one other than not playing), you'll have to build specifically for that. Which is also poison for building a community.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
My point is any army composed of predominantly daemons can get hit with this. It isn't a perfect storm. We could even assume the opposing army isn't daemons and he does ~60 mortals instead, it doesn't at all change the problem. For range he has +6" from vortex, +8" from astrolith bearer (don't even try to argue that every seraphon list doesn't have one)

Never tried to. Didn't know initially about it, hence why I made the specific statement about not purposely trying to move goalposts later on. I've been, y'know, actually doing research here figuring out what's what. As I've been trying to dig up exactly what happened here(which is difficult because there's a lot of hyperbole floating around surrounding the events in question), I've amended some things. That's why I've posted as much as I have on this particular topic. I've heard at least a couple of different accounts where yes, he did have a Slann Starmaster that rolled up the spellcaster buffing constellation and he got a 10+ for his roll, meaning the Slann Battle Trait would come into play.

I misinterpreted you on the astrolith--my bad. My point is that the actual context is largely irrelevant (it could be considered an example) because we can see from some basic numbers that it is very possible to achieve a game-breaking number of mortal wounds.

let's go with an average of 10" from dice, off a 4" base--that's a circle 52" in diameter in a board that is only 72" long. Range is not a problem. The only real element of chance here is actually casting it three times after vortex, with +2 to cast (vortex + astrolith) that's a 25% chance of getting it off all three times (after summoning the vortex with +1). This involves no re-rolls or other bonuses and is essentially a 25% chance of winning the game automatically. The only realistic option the opponent has to counter is dispelling needing a minimum of 8+ since that 25% includes all the spells going off on at least a 7. And that's already forcing opponents to bring wizards in order to have a chance at avoiding an automatic loss.

You shouldn't be keeping the chance to get it off all three times the same. The spell gets a point higher each time.

I did factor that in, I was just underlining that dispelling isn't a reliable counter since the absolute minimum one would need to stop even the lowest-cast spells is an 8+; likely higher.

So let me reiterate, even if it were a perfect storm it would not be OK. But it is not a perfect storm, it's not even difficult. It's a 25% chance of winning in a turn because you brought kroak, a vortex, and an astrolith bearer. Further it's so much worse than that because even just getting the spell off twice would be devastating enough, and he can continue to do this in subsequent turns. I don't know why you are so tremendously resistant to admitting that there is a balance issue here.

Because of the circumstances surrounding the event itself. I can't find out whether or not this was during a team tournament portion, which is apparently how a guy got a Moonclan unit Champion dealing an obscene amount of wounds.

I get that there's an issue--I just don't see it as being a gamebreaking issue right off the bat. It's a tournament. I expect players to be tools there.

And regardless of what either of us think, it is bad for the health of AoS that it exists. People looking to get/get back into AoS don't see the context; they see 100+ mortals off a single model and think "I don't care how hard it is to get that off, I don't want to play AoS if that's possible." I see it happen all the time with MtG; I can't count the number of people I've met who say 'I just want to play, not have to worry about stopping insta-win combos' and that is a game where 'comboing out' for a win is a legitimate and intended component of the meta.

And that's fine and dandy, but education can definitely help. You don't have to talk down to them, you don't have to make it a situation of "git gud scrub" or anything like that. You just showcase how to potentially counter this--and while you might argue that "it's uncounterable!", I'm sure someone somewhere has already come up with a way to do so.

People don't seek that advice--they just don't play. Also the only counter widely available is unreliable at best and ineffective when taken in context of multiple turns. Certain armies could manage niche counters but that isn't a solution. This is an extremely combo that takes minimal skill to pull off, if any. Usually cheese builds at least require that one knows how to play them. And/or 1200+ points to function at full capacity.

Has any brought this to the attention of the FAQ team? Or are we too busy screaming "GW bad!" into the void? This is the kind of thing they want to know about so it can be fixed.

Afaik no one is saying 'GW bad!' but rather discussing this specific issue. Certainly I find the new GHB very good and while the problems are rather severe there are much less of them than previous editions.

I haven't sent it to them yet because I am waiting for the FAQ/errata they do two weeks after release. After that I'll send one email with all my (remaining) questions/issues in it. If this isn't addressed it will be in there.

The two week FAQ/Errata are made based on customer feedback on issues like this. All you're doing right now is complaining about an issue on a message board. Instead, try pointing out issues like this to the people who actually have the power to fix them. Don't count on others to do so.

I'm pretty sure the post that started this whole discussion has done a hundred times more than one email; all you're doing is being a jerk on a message board.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To be extra specific; I feel FB feedback is better for short term issues and I want to have additional play time myself before submitting opinions rather than posting knee-jerk reactions as you apparently would. So perhaps consider applying thought to the matter rather than making superficial criticisms that do nothing to help the game. Of course, as you said, I don't count on other players to do that otherwise I wouldn't provide reasoned feedback at all; unfortunately I am all too aware that the game hosts many players with your attitude that leads to the very balance issues we often discuss on this board. Anything more than a cursory skim read would reveal that, but you'd actually have to give a dam for that.

You know what does nothing for the game? Arguing on DakkaDakka. GW has specifically said that they want players to submit feedback on issues like this. That's all I'm suggesting. You and auticus constantly arguing with Kan on this forum does nothing but make each other angry.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'm pretty sure the post that started this whole discussion has done a hundred times more than one email; all you're doing is being a jerk on a message board.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To be extra specific; I feel FB feedback is better for short term issues and I want to have additional play time myself before submitting opinions rather than posting knee-jerk reactions as you apparently would. So perhaps consider applying thought to the matter rather than making superficial criticisms that do nothing to help the game.

But have YOU brought it to their attention? That's all he's saying. If you think it's a problem but don't supply feedback (which we have ample proof they listen to now) then you really aren't helping the game. This isn't one of those things that needs extensive playtesting to see if messed up. I think it's one of the things that did get missed because kroak wasn't lighting up the table the last 6 months (or longer). So submit feedback. You're not limited on the number of times you can give feedback man. So give the obvious feedback that by the numbers is crap up front and playtest the iffy stuff and give it.

Also, for someone who is as thin skinned as you appear to be you're certainly quick to go to name calling and rudeness. Take a breath, submit a facebook reply or email to the dev team on things you see that are instantly bad (kroak) now and things that may be terrible (seraphon summoning) after you've played it a bit

I honestly think they just completely forgot the rules of 1. And older books that's warscrolls didn't change (like Seraphon) benefit massively.

 EnTyme wrote:
You know what does nothing for the game? Arguing on DakkaDakka. GW has specifically said that they want players to submit feedback on issues like this. That's all I'm suggesting. You and auticus constantly arguing with Kan on this forum does nothing but make each other angry.

First off, I see that I wrote a very angry post. That was unproductive at best and I apologize. For future reference, if I submit something that seems very... animated it's probably better to take it with a grain of salt. I can have uncontrolled mood swings at times due to mental illness.

At any rate, I get a lot out of these discussions beyond what it may seem. There's a lot of points brought up that I disagree with, and criticisms of my own points that I disagree with, but there's more to it than that. Having one's position criticized is the best way to improve that position, and I don't think it's wrong to want to wait a few weeks to get a dozen games in before sending my opinion to GW. Maybe Kroak is not an isolated issue but part of a larger one (he is. for example, part of a larger 'mortal wound meta' that is not addressed as simply). Maybe there is a counter I haven't realized exists. I understand that there will be loads of people offering quick feedback on issues so what I endeavor to do is take time to flesh out my feedback and provide a different perspective than one GW no doubt already has an abundance of. Considering feedback before submitting it is something to be encouraged--not the opposite. Just because I haven't submitted feedback on this specific point at this specific moment does not mean I will not do so in the near future, or have never done so in the past.

I use the board to discuss. Thats the point of the board. There are times when someone, maybe even if they are arguing angrily, has shown me that there is a legit counter or something. I'd never get that if all I did was submit a complaint to GW.

GW is aware of Lord Kroak's ability to be busted. The twitter in question has the AOS lead developer tagged right on it, he is 100% aware. What he does with that info is anyone's guess. He may feel that Kroak's ability to slam down 105 mortal wounds on chaos is working as intended. They never really give insight into their thinking so who knows.

Much like TGA rules forbidding any criticism of the game, and facebook groups flat out banning people that aren't just holding hands and singing in harmony with everyone, where are you supposed to go to discuss things anymore when the rules of engagement are "thou shalt not argue or criticize?"

Discussion forums will bring about debates which will bring about arguments. Thats the nature of the beast.

I don't think anyone was saying "GW Bad". We have an instance of something in their game though that is a community wrecker and it was made into a discussion.

Also GW does review this discussion board as well. They are just not allowed to post on forums, but they read them fairly regularly (I've been told).

Now the Lord Kroak counter point thats being discussed elsewhere not just here:

* Lord Kroak did 105 mortal wounds to demons and it would only be 52 against other armies so its ok
* Armies need to take things like the lens of refraction which would have made it harder for him to cast
* Armies with mortal wound saves wouldn't have done so bad

These are the things that GW is considering. But in this instance, we're walking the path of you have to build specifically to counter the kroak build and hope he rolls poorly. This I don't agree with. My opinion is very much in the minority though.

Now for my own group locally we have two seraphon players. One, the more casual of the two, has shelved his seraphon because he says they are too easy and he feels bad playing people with them. The other, the more competitive one, brings kroak every time and will continue to do so. There are a few competitive guys willing to play against this so as long as I have competitive people to throw at him, there won't be a problem.

auticus wrote:

Now the Lord Kroak counter point thats being discussed elsewhere not just here:

* Lord Kroak did 105 mortal wounds to demons and it would only be 52 against other armies so its ok
* Armies need to take things like the lens of refraction which would have made it harder for him to cast
* Armies with mortal wound saves wouldn't have done so bad

These are the things that GW is considering. But in this instance, we're walking the path of you have to build specifically to counter the kroak build and hope he rolls poorly. This I don't agree with. My opinion is very much in the minority though.

Lord Kroak did 105 mortal wounds to a Slaanesh Daemon army that ran multiple small units against a spell that targets units in a fairly hefty radius of the caster. Some of the MW numbers could very well have been toned down if the Slaanesh player had been running non-MSU.

Lens of Refraction is a good potential counter, but so would the Trickster's Helm(reroll successful casting rolls for enemy Wizards while within 8" of the bearer) be another potential good one--and both are in Malign Sorcery. There's probably more--I know Stormcast have a Scroll available to Lord-Arcanums and Knight-Incantors that make it so a caster's rolls that are equal to the spell's casting value are unsuccessful and the caster suffers D3 mortal wounds and a staff that makes it so an enemy Wizard in 12" of the bearer just can't cast any spells that phase.

Now for my own group locally we have two seraphon players. One, the more casual of the two, has shelved his seraphon because he says they are too easy and he feels bad playing people with them. The other, the more competitive one, brings kroak every time and will continue to do so. There are a few competitive guys willing to play against this so as long as I have competitive people to throw at him, there won't be a problem.

Suggest people not run MSUs then if they're so worried about the MW numbers.

For reference, Lord Kroak destroyed most of my force in one turn and my army was:

Great Unclean One
Festus
30 plague bearers
30 plague bearers
10 blight kings
Chaos Mammoth

In one turn of casting he killed the great unclean one, festus, left the plague bearers down to 4 models, left the other plague bearers down to 5 models, killed the blight kings, and the mammoth was taken down to 6 of its 22 wounds.

auticus wrote:
For reference, Lord Kroak destroyed most of my force in one turn and my army was:

"One turn" doesn't tell us how many casts.

Great Unclean One
Festus
30 plague bearers
30 plague bearers
10 blight kings
Chaos Mammoth

In one turn of casting he killed the great unclean one, festus, left the plague bearers down to 4 models, left the other plague bearers down to 5 models, killed the blight kings, and the mammoth was taken down to 6 of its 22 wounds.

So 3 units of Daemons and 3 not.
D3 wounds per cast on the Mammoth, Blightkings, and Festus--D6 wounds per cast on the PBs and GUO.

Its one model, that destroyed over 90% of my army in one turn. Its obscene.

At this point of having gone over the game several times over I have no idea how one counters that, nor do I want to waste time setting up models to face that again.

That doesn't even count the rest of his army and what they can do (and he now has two engines of the gods in the hopes of free summons that free up his slaan from summoning)

auticus wrote:
Its one model, that destroyed over 90% of my army in one turn. Its obscene.

I literally had someone complain about my Akhelian King doing the same thing to his force during a charge at High Tide, with Lord of Tides on him and the Command Trait that gives his melee weapons an additional 2 attacks.

At this point of having gone over the game several times over I have no idea how one counters that, nor do I want to waste time setting up models to face that again.

Then don't? I'm still curious as to how many casts it took during this "one turn" and how everything was set up. Was Kroak on a Vortex? Astrolith Bearer planted? Did he roll 10+?

That doesn't even count the rest of his army and what they can do (and he now has two engines of the gods in the hopes of free summons that free up his slaan from summoning)

*shrug* Smells like you have a powergamer problem then.

Yeah one model able to do that much damage needs an FAQ to fix things; the only two real solutions for players are to not include him or to basically rely on sniping the character off the table before it can get a turn doing any spells. Both of which are not that optimal solutions.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kanluwen wrote:

*shrug* Smells like you have a powergamer problem then.

A player building an army well and using good unit shouldn't be punished for playing hte game well. Instead it shows that there's room for abuse within the rules which should be addressed with an update from GW.

 Overread wrote:
Yeah one model able to do that much damage needs an FAQ to fix things; the only two real solutions for players are to not include him or to basically rely on sniping the character off the table before it can get a turn doing any spells. Both of which are not that optimal solutions.

The damage output IS EXCEEDINGLY SITUATIONAL. It's D3 Mortal Wounds, PER CAST OF THE SPELL, going to D6 Mortal Wounds per unit within the affected radius when models have the "Chaos Daemons" keyword. Those 105 MWs were because of the fact that the Slaanesh player ran MSUs--like a lot of tournament lists tend to--and the Seraphon player had a way to counter it. A cheesy, probably got him docked sportsmanship scores way--but he had a way to counter it.

The easiest fix with regards to Kroak's spell is to remove the ability to get ANY range modifiers on it. No Astrolith bonus, no bonus from rolling a 10+ to cast from Kroak being a Slann, no bonus from Balewind Vortex, nothing. Then it becomes a flat 3D6" range from Kroak's radius. 3 to 18 inches tops.

 Kanluwen wrote:

*shrug* Smells like you have a powergamer problem then.

A player building an army well and using good unit shouldn't be punished for playing hte game well. Instead it shows that there's room for abuse within the rules which should be addressed with an update from GW.

There's a difference between "building an army well and using good units" and "spamming powerful items". The Engine of the Gods is powerful right now because it frees up Slann for casting--and if they're using a regular Slann instead of Kroak that massive radius nonsense isn't happening.

Then don't?

In an event, I don't have that option. On the map campaign he's going to be chugging for chaos armies because he knows he can auto win against them for the most part.

auticus wrote:

Then don't?

In an event, I don't have that option. On the map campaign he's going to be chugging for chaos armies because he knows he can auto win against them for the most part.

Then I don't know what to tell you. Make it so that he can't pick who he plays against?

Why would he get sportsmanship scores docked for a list if it was perfectly viable?

 Skimask Mohawk wrote:
Why would he get sportsmanship scores docked for a list if it was perfectly viable?

Because sportsmanship scores aren't "is your list viable or not"...? A lot of people use them as a way to offset someone being a tool with their list/playstyle despite them having a well painted army etc.

 Kanluwen wrote:

auticus wrote:

Then don't?

In an event, I don't have that option. On the map campaign he's going to be chugging for chaos armies because he knows he can auto win against them for the most part.

Then I don't know what to tell you. Make it so that he can't pick who he plays against?

Unfortunately thats the point of a map campaign. You have banners on a map and you direct where they go.

With ladder events, its a little easier since he's going to be at the top of the ladder and therefore the chaos forces would have to directly challenge him. The bad part is the chaos armies won't challenge him, so can't get to the top of the ladder, so will start dropping since there is no point in playing in the ladder if you cannot climb it.

I hope that GW addresses this issue soon. Currently - it is what it is.

So why did you allow named characters in the first place?

 Kanluwen wrote:
So why did you allow named characters in the first place?

Because the community as a whole strongly dislikes removing legal entries from army lists. They feel it is arbitrary and a slippery slope. For the firestorm campaign this fall I may indeed say no named characters, but it would only be because of Kroak, which kind of sucks. But again - is what it is. Even with sudden death victory conditions, his ability to regularly erase armies in one or two turns would make even sudden death conditions rather pointless.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Skimask Mohawk wrote:
Why would he get sportsmanship scores docked for a list if it was perfectly viable?

Because sportsmanship scores aren't "is your list viable or not"...? A lot of people use them as a way to offset someone being a tool with their list/playstyle despite them having a well painted army etc.

Why would the armies paint job matter? Thats a thing for the painting score. Sportsmanship is for how the player behaves, not the list he plays or how painted it is

 Skimask Mohawk wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Skimask Mohawk wrote:
Why would he get sportsmanship scores docked for a list if it was perfectly viable?

Because sportsmanship scores aren't "is your list viable or not"...? A lot of people use them as a way to offset someone being a tool with their list/playstyle despite them having a well painted army etc.

Why would the armies paint job matter? Thats a thing for the painting score. Sportsmanship is for how the player behaves, not the list he plays or how painted it is

I'm saying that since tournaments tend to have multiple things that are scored on, some people use Sportsmanship as a way to dock people overall points when they know the person did a really douchey list or did things like drag out their turns, etc.


But then again you probably already knew this and are just trying to start an argument.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

auticus wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
So why did you allow named characters in the first place?

Because the community as a whole strongly dislikes removing legal entries from army lists. They feel it is arbitrary and a slippery slope. For the firestorm campaign this fall I may indeed say no named characters, but it would only be because of Kroak, which kind of sucks. But again - is what it is. Even with sudden death victory conditions, his ability to regularly erase armies in one or two turns would make even sudden death conditions rather pointless.

There's nothing really "arbitrary" about saying "No named characters". It means any named characters are out.

There's no slippery slope, there's nothing beyond "No named characters".

Is it just me or are Liberators vastly inferior to Sequitors? Sequitors get 2(!) more great weapons (total of 5 in a unit of 10, compared to the 2 a unit of 10 liberators can take), better to hit/wound and can re-roll saves or hits. For 20 extra points. I don't want to be the dude who whinges, so is there a reason to take Liberators over Sequitors? Yes they get +1 to hit vs things with 5+ wounds, but Sequitors pretty much just have that against everything comparatively.

It is arbitrary to a lot of people because its a guy (me) saying no named characters because their named character happens to be powerful and I don't like it.

Whether it is or is not arbitrary will depend on the point of view and opinion of each individual. The named character ban topic has been off and on for twenty-plus years and always involved people getting steamed and saying its arbitrary because someone doesn't like how powerful their characters are.

The follow-up debate points are "but shooting can be powerful, are we going to ban shooting? Magic is really powerful should we ban magic?" Thats the slippery slope part.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Tiberius501 wrote:
Is it just me or are Liberators vastly inferior to Sequitors? Sequitors get 2(!) more great weapons (total of 5 in a unit of 10, compared to the 2 a unit of 10 liberators can take), better to hit/wound and can re-roll saves or hits. For 20 extra points. I don't want to be the dude who whinges, so is there a reason to take Liberators over Sequitors? Yes they get +1 to hit vs things with 5+ wounds, but Sequitors pretty much just have that against everything comparatively.

From a power gaming perspective, no I would never take liberators when there are very obviously much better choices to fill battleline.

 Tiberius501 wrote:
Is it just me or are Liberators vastly inferior to Sequitors? Sequitors get 2(!) more great weapons (total of 5 in a unit of 10, compared to the 2 a unit of 10 liberators can take), better to hit/wound and can re-roll saves or hits. For 20 extra points. I don't want to be the dude who whinges, so is there a reason to take Liberators over Sequitors? Yes they get +1 to hit vs things with 5+ wounds, but Sequitors pretty much just have that against everything comparatively.

As said, think Libs are just bad now.

I guess if you did Hammers of Sigmar you can get the unit back on a 5+ but that's spending a command point and only happens 1/3rd of the time.

Better troop choices now. the 20 extra points is well worth what Sequitors bring

Aren't Libs going up to 3 attaks? Or is that still not enough to redeem them? As Seqs do have a lot going for them, don't they.

- Salvage

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Aren't Libs going up to 3 attaks? Or is that still not enough to redeem them? As Seqs do have a lot going for them, don't they.

- Salvage

Nah still only 2 attacks unfortunately. At least the duel weapons have seen a slight buff, getting extra hits on 6's to hit. I'm surprised Sequitors get so many grand weapons, it's insane

auticus wrote:Now for my own group locally we have two seraphon players. One, the more casual of the two, has shelved his seraphon because he says they are too easy and he feels bad playing people with them.

This doesn't really make sense if you think about it. You don't just accidentally get the combo you are having issues with. Why wouldn't they just not play this one amazing combo and take the opportunity to try out the different datasheets that make up this army? THe player here is trying to match the list power level of the rest of the group, so why doesn't he just do that instead of dropping the whole army?

I think because the seraphon now have the stain of being a power gamer army he doesn't want people to say he is only winning because he's playing a broken army.

I think to get around the Kroak issue without hammering the rest of the game the easiest event modification would simply be "Kroak follows the rules of one for his abilities like everyone else".

You should tell him that tournament level lists are finely tuned machines and that he shouldn't give up playing an entire range of models he likes just because a tiny portion of it can be combined in a broken fashion.

He really should just say "Seraphon, but I'm not doing the Kroak combo."

Tell him there's more casual player street cred it choosing an army that can do powerful things and then choosing not to than their is in not playing the army at all.

auticus wrote:
I think because the seraphon now have the stain of being a power gamer army he doesn't want people to say he is only winning because he's playing a broken army.

I think to get around the Kroak issue without hammering the rest of the game the easiest event modification would simply be "Kroak follows the rules of one for his abilities like everyone else".

Honestly, even without being able to drop the nuke 3 times in one go, Kroak would still be obscene. The amount of raw damage just one cast can do is already ridiculous.

And "casual player street cred" is just another word for "sandbagging." It's patronizing.

 Fafnir wrote:

And "casual player street cred" is just another word for "sandbagging." It's patronizing.

That's too bad that you feel that way. Might I suggest you read it as tongue in cheek instead?

My point was that the idea of shelving an entire army because one small part of it combined in a particular way gave it a bad reputation is an awful idea.

Why let the army choices of people other players of your faction cause you to not play what you might otherwise want to? Competitive play already reduces what's "viable" in a given battletome down and down the more powerful the armies get, so why in the world would you want to let that same sort of reduction of available options restrict your casual play? To the point of dropping an entire army! Ridiculous.

There was a time when Tzeentch was the top dog by a wide margin. People not playing the entire faction just because a small portion of the players overloaded on a particular selection of warscrolls would be dumb. Especially when you could have just said, "I'm playing Tzeentch, but I'm not running Skyfires" (or whatever the killer unit was when they were top dog at the tournaments again and again.

People actually like variety so when an army has a single obvious combo and you don't run it every time, people enjoy the games more. If local players who do not want to run the combo stop playing the faction entirely then the only thing people will ever experience of that army is the combo.
`

 Tiberius501 wrote:
Is it just me or are Liberators vastly inferior to Sequitors? Sequitors get 2(!) more great weapons (total of 5 in a unit of 10, compared to the 2 a unit of 10 liberators can take), better to hit/wound and can re-roll saves or hits. For 20 extra points. I don't want to be the dude who whinges, so is there a reason to take Liberators over Sequitors? Yes they get +1 to hit vs things with 5+ wounds, but Sequitors pretty much just have that against everything comparatively.

I was previously thinking that they were relatively on-par but after reading points made by others (namely the special weapon allotment) I am leaning towards Sequitors being the better option. However I wouldn't say they are vastly inferior; liberators' +1 to hit against wounds 5+ is a significant bonus potentially made more so by the change to dual wield granting extra attacks on 6s (it depends on "6+" or "unmodified 6"). Also liberators are generic battleline while sequitors are only such with a Lord Arcanum general, which may not be a big deal for many army builds but is certainly a not-insignificant factor.

Both have a special ability against some opponents, Liberators against Wound 5+, Sequitors againbst Nighthound & Damons
Sequitors can have more heavy Weapons, Liberators can have Dual Weapons
Liberators with double Swords gain an extra attack in a 6, Sequitors with swords have the extra attack build in.
The Mace hits better than the Hammer

Sequitors can buff themselves and don't need a babysitter

+1 to hit for maces or +1 attack for swords for 20 points would be ok
the self buff is worth another 20 points and having 2 more heavy weapons would be another 20 points

And while the Lord Arcanum may be considered a tax, he would be there in most lists anyway

Something just feel wrong here
There is no cheap VS good Battleline

Liberators should at least get a new weapon profile or also the possibility to buff themselves (make it re-roll to wound and re-roll saves to be different) but they are missing something because even with a point increase for Sequitors there would be no reason not to take them

“I’d love a points decrease on Liberators!” says the guy building a Guardians of Alarielle list that requires two units of Liberators.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
On a related note, what do people feel about Judicators in light of all the new stuff for Stormcast?

 AduroT wrote:
On a related note, what do people feel about Judicators in light of all the new stuff for Stormcast?

I'm no expert but they seem head and shoulders above Castigators in a vacuum. Sacrosanct-only buffs may change that, I dunno.

Castigators seem decent for putting a dent on a unit with a good armour save. A minimum sized unit might be decent for last turn objective grab. Although you might get some synergy with lord arcanum I'm rather sceptical, if the the investment is worth it. I'm going to use them, reason mostly related to my budget.

Judicators have a lot of good things going for them. With army wide special rule, even the crossbows might get to see more play. Maybe. They're also battle line in SCE army, I could also skip on the lord Arcanum altogether with them covering that criteria.

 kodos wrote:
Both have a special ability against some opponents, Liberators against Wound 5+, Sequitors againbst Nighthound & Damons
Sequitors can have more heavy Weapons, Liberators can have Dual Weapons
Liberators with double Swords gain an extra attack in a 6, Sequitors with swords have the extra attack build in.
The Mace hits better than the Hammer

Sequitors can buff themselves and don't need a babysitter

+1 to hit for maces or +1 attack for swords for 20 points would be ok
the self buff is worth another 20 points and having 2 more heavy weapons would be another 20 points

And while the Lord Arcanum may be considered a tax, he would be there in most lists anyway

Something just feel wrong here
There is no cheap VS good Battleline

Liberators should at least get a new weapon profile or also the possibility to buff themselves (make it re-roll to wound and re-roll saves to be different) but they are missing something because even with a point increase for Sequitors there would be no reason not to take them

Doing some number crunching:

5-Man Sequitor unit with 3 greatmaces & 2 blades (special vs nighthaunt/daemons)
5-Man Liberator unit with 1 grandweapon & 4 double-hammers (special vs wounds 5+)

Against normal stuff (we'll assume a 5+ save since that's the most common) there's 6.5 wounds from the Sequitors, 3.7 from the Liberators
Against special stuff 7.7 from Sequitors, 5 from Liberators

If we assume the channeling off Squitors is worth 20 pts (I agree) that normalizes these results and they should be similar. Instead we see Sequitors out-performing Liberators by a fair margin. It's a bigger difference than I thought. However, what I am seeing here is not that Liberators are bad but that Sequitors are just too good on their weapon profiles. Their mace is better than the liberators' basic weapon (and the glaive is better than that--already in internal balance issue within the warscroll) and their special weapon is better too, for no apparent reason. The special feature of the unit is supposed to be anti-daemonhaunt and the channeling, but instead those become icing on the cake to a way better set of equipment. Not only is there a raw balance issue but a thematic one as well. Further there is yet another issue in that Sequitor units can't be balanced with a fixed point cost because unit sizes larger than 5 have diminishing returns since their special weapon is 3/5 on the initial unit but only 2/5 on expanding it.

So after looking at it I have to say the Sequitor warscroll has all sorts of problems and it's worse than I previously thought. I feel it isn't very well designed; too much stuff was crammed into it when less would have been more. At any rate I think your assessment of 150-160 for them is probably sound.

Sidenote: Liberators are a bit sub-par but that's a separate issue from the Sequitors which are the lion's share of imbalance here. Personally I think Liberators would be better at 90 (16/model, +10 for champion with special weapon).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Knight wrote:
With army wide special rule, even the crossbows might get to see more play. Maybe.

Not unless they changed the weapon profiles.

That Kroak example is blatently staged I mean it could be done I guess but chance would be so small as to be unreal.

The 5 spell rolls are individually a 41% chance each with the Buffs Kan mentioned without they drop dramatically. He then seems to have rolled 8x6's for damage based on the picture.

It is certainly powerful no doubt but seems like those examples you get in online games forums NERF x threads because I play y.

It encourages list building down a narrow corridor of viable overall builds, excluding a giant chunk of the game. It needs toned down just a little.

IMO.

I've played against kroak in this edition now and overall I'd say he needs sledgehammered down a notch or two unless you are ok with staying at the top of the power builds. It wrecks casual environments with ease.

SeanDrake wrote:
That Kroak example is blatently staged I mean it could be done I guess but chance would be so small as to be unreal.

The 5 spell rolls are individually a 41% chance each with the Buffs Kan mentioned without they drop dramatically. He then seems to have rolled 8x6's for damage based on the picture.

It is certainly powerful no doubt but seems like those examples you get in online games forums NERF x threads because I play y.

How are they 41% chance each? Once the vortex is down (DC7 spell cast at +1), we're talking about a DC7/8/9 spell cast with +2 and average of two free rerolls a turn.

Chance of success (not factoring in rerolls):
Balewind Vortex: 72.2%
Celestial Deliverance 1: 83.3%
Celestial Deliverance 2: 72.2%
Celestial Deliverance 3: 58.3

Those are pretty good odds considering the ridiculous damage output. Especially since being at +2 to cast means it's going to be a lot harder for them to be dispelled. That's overall a 25% chance of everything going off without a hitch, to massive effect. Even if you don't get every piece of the combo down, you're still going to be extremely effective, and even if you do manage to fail the Balewind Vortex (very unlikely with rerolls, but whatever), you can just bank your remaining casts on summoning points until your next round.

Considering the odds most competitive armies have to rely on, and the fail-safes that Kroak has available, I'd hardly call this unlikely or unreal.

Whats giving Kroak the +2 to spell cast?

+1 from the Astrolith Bearer, and then he gains another +1 once the Balewind Vortex comes down.

It's also worth noting that that +2 to casting also makes it easier for Kroak's casting rolls to get to 10+ (41.7% chance of occuring), increasing the range of Celestial Deliverance by a further 6".

Ultimately, this gives him a potential minimum/average/maximum threat radius of 17"/27"/38". So at this point we're easily capable of threatening the entire table. This means that attempting to deny the spell isn't even all that safe, since Kroak can potentially just outrange them, or force you to put your wizards so far up front that they're easy pickings for the rest of his army anyway.

But the balewind doesn't give +1 to spellcasting, it gives an additional spell to cast.

Arcane Invigoration: The Balewind Vortex empowers as well as elevates the wizard to whom it is bound.

A Wizard on a Balewind Vortex can attempt to cast an additional spell in each of their hero phases (including the turn in which the Summon Balewind Vortex spell was cast), and you can add 6" to the range of any spells that the Wizard casts.

Ah, was looking at the old rules for the Vortex. Either way, the chances are still very much in Kroak's favour.

I definitely think this scenario was cherry-picked to show how powerful Kroak can be (from the comments on that blog post, it looks like this guy has a history of doing this), but the scenario shouldn't be possible in the first place. I'd like to see GW balance powerful spells like this by adding some sort of mitigating rule such as "The range and casting roll of this spell cannot be modified in any way".

 EnTyme wrote:
I definitely think this scenario was cherry-picked to show how powerful Kroak can be (from the comments on that blog post, it looks like this guy has a history of doing this), but the scenario shouldn't be possible in the first place. I'd like to see GW balance powerful spells like this by adding some sort of mitigating rule such as "The range and casting roll of this spell cannot be modified in any way".

Should definitely at least get "visible to the caster" and "cannot be cast through other models" at least.

I am not sure if this is not intended.
Or at least the designer comments has some strange answers that read like they want to kill matched play as soon as possible

(eg the FAQ has clarified that you can move forward and then backward with a flying model to count as having passed over another unit and that pile in counts as moves, this alone allow some stupid stuff that was considerd unsportsmanlike in best case and cheating in the worst case, but now you can say that the designers clearly said that this game need to be played that way)

Well of course they would like to kill matched play. GW abhors matched play. They already killed it 3 years ago. Then they realized that no matched play means no sales.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Well of course they would like to kill matched play. GW abhors matched play. They already killed it 3 years ago. Then they realized that no matched play means no sales.

Lets not forget that killing matched play (which previously was just normal play and the only version they made) was the last major act of the old Kirby era GW management. For a time it did actually boost sales of Sigmar/Fantasy models, then again by that phase fantasy was at an exceptionally low sales rating anyway. In addition lets not forget the entire attitude of GW toward its fans and products was very different then; GW has changed since then. Sure many of the staff are still the same so there are similar patterns, but the overall attitude and focus has shifted.

Sigmar is also still finding its feet somewhat, though with 2.0 its in a good place to build from.

I don't see them trying to kill matched play at all. All of the GW dev buddies on twitter are hardcore matched play fanatics and the GW designers when they post on twitter are constantly posting their tournament armies or talking about tournament events.

Oh, just let them have their pity party, auticus. /s

Seriously, though, it gets really old hearing a bunch of armchair designers posting on every thread about how a missed issue obviously means GW is trying to kill the game.

auticus wrote:
I don't see them trying to kill matched play at all. All of the GW dev buddies on twitter are hardcore matched play fanatics and the GW designers when they post on twitter are constantly posting their tournament armies or talking about tournament events.

That and fast FAQ/Errata releases and, you know, releasing the Index and a whole editions worth of 40K codex in a year or so. Yes GW profits with every release; but those changes alone show that GW is taking a much more serious focus on matched play mechancis since all of those things tie right into matched play.

auticus wrote:I don't see them trying to kill matched play at all. All of the GW dev buddies on twitter are hardcore matched play fanatics and the GW designers when they post on twitter are constantly posting their tournament armies or talking about tournament events.

Than why are we getting a designer's comments FAQ with such stupid answers
Changings rules that peple liked and encourage unsportsmanlike behaviour

Or is it just that the FAQ guy wanted to show the Twitter guys who is the real boss

EnTyme wrote:Oh, just let them have their pity party, auticus. /s

Seriously, though, it gets really old hearing a bunch of armchair designers posting on every thread about how a missed issue obviously means GW is trying to kill the game.

Not the game, but matched play.

Of course, a FAQ that says its perfectly fine to act like a WAAC dick is the best way to get people to enjoy matched play
I don't know why I have the impression that it is the other way around

But it is really old hearing of a bunch of Fanboys that everything is fine while the printed book is outdated before it is released and 2 weeks after release the first events already have their own tournament comp including rule changes.

I hoped GW learned from the past but it seems they did not
At least it would have been a thing to release the GHB later. I hope the points and errors are fixed sooner and not next year with the GHB19

Overread wrote:

That and fast FAQ/Errata releases and, you know, releasing the Index and a whole editions worth of 40K codex in a year or so. Yes GW profits with every release; but those changes alone show that GW is taking a much more serious focus on matched play mechancis since all of those things tie right into matched play.

For 40k.
But there the first FAQ did not go that route if strange answers and changes

No, GW does not want to kill matched play. Years ago they simply made a mistake and over estimated the ability of their customers to set up games without explicit guidance. They thought the miniatures were "jewel like objects of magic and wonder" (actual Kirby quote) and that the rules didn't really matter and people would figure it all out for themselves. The truth is most people need scaffolding to prop up their collecting as well as the setting up of games. It was a dumb move, but it wasn't done out of hate for a particular mode of play. It was down out of an insane level of cost cutting. The less money and time they invested in rules development the more Kirby could squeeze out of the company with an unsustainable dividend payout ratio.

GW does not abhor matched play nor do they want to kill it. There was simply a time where they incorrectly believed they didn't need it. Under old management that was trying to cut costs no matter what. As someone who doesn't really do matched play, my instinct is that GW has gone a bit too far in its support of it, but it's actually probably about right.

They also seemed to be under the mistaken belief that players were adults who could sort out that "Big Scary Monster" is not the same as "Little Guys with Spears/Bows/Swords".

It still surprises me when people really seem to believe that open play is played with every model you own. So whomever can buy more will win. No one who actually plays open play does that, but people seem to have an idea in their head that it's what people do with open play.

Than why are we getting a designer's comments FAQ with such stupid answers
Changings rules that peple liked and encourage unsportsmanlike behaviour

Or is it just that the FAQ guy wanted to show the Twitter guys who is the real boss

I would say without polling information that really what this comes down to you is that they put something out you didn't agree with or like, so you are saying that that means they are trying to kill matched play when really they just went in a direction that you strongly disagree with.

 frozenwastes wrote:
It still surprises me when people really seem to believe that open play is played with every model you own. So whomever can buy more will win. No one who actually plays open play does that, but people seem to have an idea in their head that it's what people do with open play.

I think that's partly because that's how GW marketed Age of Sigmar open play initially.
Don't forget the launch of Sigmar had no formal points at all, they were stripped out and the original Battle Tomes brought off sale. There were rules, light rules, but there was no point system to balance the armies unless players had earlier battletomes to use those points.

Ergo its not that gamers couldn't tell a monster from a spearman; but that they had no way to know if that monster was equal to one spearman or thirty or fifty. There was no grounding for them, meanwhile GW was basically encouraging them to put whatever they owned on the table. At that time that could mean just throwing together random models not even with any army alliance.

Yes that is the ultimate extreme of casual play and that's what was pitched.


Right now its totally different; casual play is far more structured and there's a points system to let players have a measure by which to balance their armies up. Sure its not perfect (no game is perfectly balanced) but it at least established a base line. Players now know if they are doing a narrative or open play that the monster is equal to 20 spearmen; so they know if they are taking 10 its going to be a challenge in the narrative or even a loss; whilst if they take 50 they should win - in theory.

Essentially the modern take of casual is that its got some formal backbone to it that gives structure to the play.

Players who want to just line up whatever they've got and have fun with no rules never needed GW to give them a "rules system" to allow that; they just do it. It's the other end, the formal end, that needs the rules established. And good established rules filtrate down into more casual environments

auticus wrote:

I would say without polling information that really what this comes down to you is that they put something out you didn't agree with or like, so you are saying that that means they are trying to kill matched play when really they just went in a direction that you strongly disagree with.

It is not what I don't like, it it something that was considered cheating or un-sportsmanship (we got once a FAQ that said don't be "that guy"), and now they say that it is fine as this is how the game is played.

The thing I personally don't like in this point is that GW is still not able to print rule books that are valid for more than a week.

So yes, at the moment GW is doing things I don't like by selling outdated rules, and is doing stuff I don't understand by having a designers comment that say "being "that guy" is fine, this is how matched play works"

That Guy is just the person playing the rules as written and designed to best advantage. That just means they are playing the game well, they shouldn't be "that guy" for doing that at all; its a (common) miss-use of the term.

Now I do agree if the rules identify an issue that gives a faction a series of options that results in them being way more powerful than the average bar then that should be addressed; but that's probably beyond the authority for the community relations team to put into practice. That's the kind of thing you get from a bigger FAQ/Errata release after a bit more time in the market with the game being tested at large by the playerbase.

I'm kind of confused as to which FAQ you're referring to.

 EnTyme wrote:
I'm kind of confused as to which FAQ you're referring to.

Designers’ Commentary

Q: Sometimes an ability is used after a model moves. When this is the case, assuming the model is allowed to make a move, if Idecide to leave it stationary, can I still use the ability?
A: Yes. For the purposes of the Age of Sigmar rules, if a model is allowed to move, you can choose to ‘move’ it 0 inches.

Q: Some abilities require a model that can fly to ‘pass across’ a model from an enemy unit. How exactly does this work?
A: In order for a model to pass across another, part of the moving model’s base must have moved across any part of the other model’s base. To determine if this is the case, trace the flying model’s move across the battlefield, checking to see if its base passed across any part of the other model’s base at any point in its move. Note that this means that the flying model can move up to an enemy model so that their bases overlap, and then move back, and will count as having ‘passed across’ the other model.

I agree that the first ruling is counterintuitive, but the second seems pretty logical. Not sure why anyone has a problem with it. Do you have a link to that FAQ?

Having start and endpoint being the same (and with the FAQ confirmed that pile in is move), stuff like he Stardrake mount trait "Stormwinged" workes fine in close compat as you can pile in to move a bit forward, end at the same position in base to base contact and deal mortal wounds for crossing across the unit.


Link:
https://whc-cdn.games-workshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/age_of_sigmar_core_rules_designers_commentary_base_sizes_en2.pdf

All makes sense to me and how it works in most other games.

 AduroT wrote:
All makes sense to me and how it works in most other games.

It is however counter to 20 years of previous GW rulings.

We can't use WHFB rulings as a basis for AOS though.

Wow... I don't think some of the... probably unintended... rules for piling-in being a move, impact me. Things like Hexwraiths just got even better, getting their mortal-wound roll-chance, every combat phase...

NewTruthNeomaxim wrote:
Wow... I don't think some of the... probably unintended... rules for piling-in being a move, impact me. Things like Hexwraiths just got even better, getting their mortal-wound roll-chance, every combat phase...

I have every reason to believe that they've thought of this...read the current bit for Spectral Hunters as it's written on the app.

In your movement phase, immediately after this unit has moved, you can pick an enemy unit that has any models that a model from this unit passed across. If you do so, roll a dice for each model from this unit that passed across the enemy unit. For each roll of 5+, that enemy unit suffers 1 mortal wound.

They don't get the chance to do it again since it's specifically locked to the Movement Phase.

Good catch, Kan. I didn't have the book in front of me. Interesting, but i'll admit, I would've been ok with Hexwraiths getting a little unexpected love. So much of the new Nighthaunt book eclipses them.

NewTruthNeomaxim wrote:
Good catch, Kan. I didn't have the book in front of me. Interesting, but i'll admit, I would've been ok with Hexwraiths getting a little unexpected love. So much of the new Nighthaunt book eclipses them.

Looks like the Hexwraiths are in movement phase only, too:

In your movement phase, immediately after
this unit has moved, you can pick an enemy
unit that has any models that a model from
this unit passed across. If you do so, roll
a dice for each model from this unit that
passed across the enemy unit. For each roll of
5+, that enemy unit suffers 1 mortal wound

from the newest warscroll online.

The stardrake + metal realm cloak is a filthy combo. It's a 2+ and a 3+ chance for mw for every move, charge, and pile in. Thats a decent chance for 6d3 mw without swinging.

 EnTyme wrote:
I agree that the first ruling is counterintuitive, but the second seems pretty logical. Not sure why anyone has a problem with it. Do you have a link to that FAQ?

Barring a rule saying there is a minimum amount required in order to count as a move that first ruling was in effect anyways; one could always have chosen to 'move' an infinitely small distance; moving 0.000001 of a millimeter is still moving.

Speaking of the faq, I'm not sure that changing the summoning command ability from start of hero to end of movement was a good idea. Sure, the unit can't move again, but now they don't have to position their general

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:
I agree that the first ruling is counterintuitive, but the second seems pretty logical. Not sure why anyone has a problem with it. Do you have a link to that FAQ?

Barring a rule saying there is a minimum amount required in order to count as a move that first ruling was in effect anyways; one could always have chosen to 'move' an infinitely small distance; moving 0.000001 of a millimeter is still moving.

They could gave also FAQ'd it to be 1" minimum instead of 0".


All those answers could have been different and I am not sure what was the intention of changing rules back to the old version were people were looking forward to the new one.

My guess would be a large number of the tournament players that also drink at the pub with the designers expressed a desire for that to be the direction that the faq went.

Got around to my first tourney in the new edition. Top three armies were (get ready for a shock): Seraphon, Tzeentch, and Legions of Nagash.

Kroak is as bad as they say, even without spamming the one spell just being able to summon the portals and sit in the corner while dropping the aoe from the middle of the board is enough just with one cast to grant an insurmountable advantage. Seraphon summoning is also as bad as they say between summon points and engine of the gods; the wise play is to bring another slann as the general to be a summon battery while kroak casts. Great remember also lets kroak teleport out to the middle, drop his aoe, and teleport back. One of the players the Seraphon guy went up against conceded without even deploying. (Fortunately the Seraphon guy was very polite about all this and readily acknowledged how broken his list was.)

Legions is also as bad as they say, with a potential caveat. The Legions guy would have done better expect he kept being unable to finish games due to time since his army took so long to actually play. Might have just been his specific build though.

Overall it feels like there are less cheese builds but the ones that are there are much worse than before. It was a big de-motivator seeing and hearing about some of the top tier lists floating around.

auticus wrote:
I think because the seraphon now have the stain of being a power gamer army he doesn't want people to say he is only winning because he's playing a broken army.

I think to get around the Kroak issue without hammering the rest of the game the easiest event modification would simply be "Kroak follows the rules of one for his abilities like everyone else".

I play a full Saurus list with no summoning. If someone wants to call that power gaming, then they're welcome to try.

If someone is claiming they won't play a faction because they're easy mode due to one particular strategy, then they can always just not use that strategy.

I’m entering into a tournament in two weeks time, and there’s a good chance there will be one player using Kroak. Yay.

Went to a small tournament yesterday with my iizards. It was billed as a lighter event so I took just a slann and a astrolith for summoning (no engine, no cogs) ), a sunclaw battalion with 90 saurus, 4 razordons, and a carno scar vet.

Summoning didn't do much but it normally added a stegadon or replaced my lost scar vet. But since I deliberately nerfed it I didn't expect it to do to much. The true ugly is the the still available conga lines. Saurus buffed up can eat most things in the game with 20-25 of their models. Leaving a lot of available models to daisy chain.

Overall after playing it with just light summoning amd never being 8n danger of losing a game I'd say seraphon are going to be one of, if not the, best armies until the next ghb or until they make adjustments. They're so good I won't take them to local events that aren't 2 day events.

They are pretty dominant here. Competitive minded players maxing their lists are starting to gravitate toward kroak lists. We have three of them now where before it was just the one and so far they haven't lost a game yet.

I'm a bit surprised that kroak lists are working. I mean, with the Lens being available I wouldn't think anyone but daemon armies would have issues with Kroak.

Not that Seraphon aren't over the top I just didn't think Kroak would be the issue because of the lens. And I haven't seen the summoning go crazy but maybe that's it.

People around here are already seeing a drop off in mortal wound overdose armies (magic or mundane) because of the lens unless they have a way of killing a character at range which is actually pretty limited.

Because at least on a local level not everyone is taking the lense. And if they do, the kroak army just turns into a massive summoning battery and they win based off creating a 3000 vs 2000 point game.

The only real viable counters to this list so far include mandatory lense and having an army that can spam summon as well. Other than other lizardmen, that is a death army or a tzeentch army (right now from what I can tell)

auticus wrote:
Because at least on a local level not everyone is taking the lense. And if they do, the kroak army just turns into a massive summoning battery and they win based off creating a 3000 vs 2000 point game.

The only real viable counters to this list so far include mandatory lense and having an army that can spam summon as well. Other than other lizardmen, that is a death army or a tzeentch army (right now from what I can tell)

I think a fast hard hitting army with the lens could carry it thru. Nighthaunt, Stormcast, and Daughters are all examples depending on what comes with Kroak. With Kroak summoning with cogs and an astrolith you get 16+d3 so a decent chance at summoning 180pts per turn. That's solid but I think a lot of lists could smash thru the protection or drop Kroak. Add in that if he's the general you also aren't getting great rememberer which is huge I think nowawadays. Honestly I'd be gravitating toward this if i wanted to go nuts on summoning and have a solid hitting core to summon around. Second item to be determined.;

Slaan General w/Great Remember
Starpriest
Starpriest
Astrolith
Engine of the Gods w/Lens
Sunblood
40 Saurus w/Spears
40 Saurus w/Spears
10 Saurus w/Spears
Sunclaw Host
Cogs & Balewind

To me this is the no friends list. It'll summon well over 1k in a 5 turn game. Hits like a truck against most armies. It doesn't have kroaks spell which is nasty again non-lens armies but it's probably better at top tables where the lens is likely to show up. Essentially where I would personally start and something that will never see a table in a 3 round event.

 Glane wrote:

auticus wrote:
I think because the seraphon now have the stain of being a power gamer army he doesn't want people to say he is only winning because he's playing a broken army.

I think to get around the Kroak issue without hammering the rest of the game the easiest event modification would simply be "Kroak follows the rules of one for his abilities like everyone else".

I play a full Saurus list with no summoning. If someone wants to call that power gaming, then they're welcome to try.

If someone is claiming they won't play a faction because they're easy mode due to one particular strategy, then they can always just not use that strategy.

People playing non-busted Tzeentch lists got the same treatment last edition. If they played a match and lost it was 'good on you for bringing non-cheese Tzeentch' but if they played a match and won it was 'oh you just brought Tzeentch' even if they brought a completely toned-back one. The powergamer army will get that treatment even if it is deliberately toned back. That the player in question doesn't want to deal with it is a perfectly valid preference, pretending that not using the cheese methods protects from that stigma is silly.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Glane wrote:

auticus wrote:
I think because the seraphon now have the stain of being a power gamer army he doesn't want people to say he is only winning because he's playing a broken army.

I think to get around the Kroak issue without hammering the rest of the game the easiest event modification would simply be "Kroak follows the rules of one for his abilities like everyone else".

I play a full Saurus list with no summoning. If someone wants to call that power gaming, then they're welcome to try.

If someone is claiming they won't play a faction because they're easy mode due to one particular strategy, then they can always just not use that strategy.

People playing non-busted Tzeentch lists got the same treatment last edition. If they played a match and lost it was 'good on you for bringing non-cheese Tzeentch' but if they played a match and won it was 'oh you just brought Tzeentch' even if they brought a completely toned-back one. The powergamer army will get that treatment even if it is deliberately toned back. That the player in question doesn't want to deal with it is a perfectly valid preference, pretending that not using the cheese methods protects from that stigma is silly.

I had to hear the same thing playing Cryx for a long time. It’s gotten to where the vast majority of games I play I gravitate towards the underdog factions and models just so I’m not constantly having my victories be dismissed. I’m still sticking with Sylvaneth though because the models are just too stupid cool.

 AduroT wrote:

I had to hear the same thing playing Cryx for a long time. It’s gotten to where the vast majority of games I play I gravitate towards the underdog factions and models just so I’m not constantly having my victories be dismissed. I’m still sticking with Sylvaneth though because the models are just too stupid cool.

I had someone do that to me on my third game with my Idoneth. Not someone I care to play usually, but didn't really get a choice as it was a Path to Glory event and matches were getting handed out, not chosen. The whole game was just nonstop "Of course they have a special rule..." kind of complaining.

I literally handed him my warscroll cards so that he could see what things do at the outset of the game. Told him to keep them over on his side so he had a point of reference. Yet he still managed to be surprised by the King dealing 3 damage a hit with his polearm on the turn he charged, that the Soulrender brings back Namarti, etc.

I do definitely get that reaction to the Wyldwoods too. Cast a spell near them and they might kill you. Run thru them and they might kill you. Ancient has a spell that will make them kill you. Dryads get harder to hit for being near them. A Wraith will spawn more Dryads in them. They teleport from one to another. Wych’s get bonuses to hit you if she’s near them. Some of my healing effects are stronger if I’m near them. I do like the idea of them but they probably tied way too many special rules to them.

 AduroT wrote:
I do definitely get that reaction to the Wyldwoods too. Cast a spell near them and they might kill you. Run thru them and they might kill you. Ancient has a spell that will make them kill you. Dryads get harder to hit for being near them. A Wraith will spawn more Dryads in them. They teleport from one to another. Wych’s get bonuses to hit you if she’s near them. Some of my healing effects are stronger if I’m near them. I do like the idea of them but they probably tied way too many special rules to them.

Having that many rules is pretty wyld.

Thats definitely a resounding complaint with many people about AOS. There are too many rules.

Remember when the amount of rules that were there was considered by most to be next to none?

If there's any army who's gameplay probably should be massively centered around a terrain piece, I'd think its the living tree people.

 AduroT wrote:
I do definitely get that reaction to the Wyldwoods too. Cast a spell near them and they might kill you. Run thru them and they might kill you. Ancient has a spell that will make them kill you. Dryads get harder to hit for being near them. A Wraith will spawn more Dryads in them. They teleport from one to another. Wych’s get bonuses to hit you if she’s near them. Some of my healing effects are stronger if I’m near them. I do like the idea of them but they probably tied way too many special rules to them.

I mean, without the forests you have no trait. Sylvaneth have everything tied to the forests currently

 Skimask Mohawk wrote:

 AduroT wrote:
I do definitely get that reaction to the Wyldwoods too. Cast a spell near them and they might kill you. Run thru them and they might kill you. Ancient has a spell that will make them kill you. Dryads get harder to hit for being near them. A Wraith will spawn more Dryads in them. They teleport from one to another. Wych’s get bonuses to hit you if she’s near them. Some of my healing effects are stronger if I’m near them. I do like the idea of them but they probably tied way too many special rules to them.

I mean, without the forests you have no trait. Sylvaneth have everything tied to the forests currently

IMO, that's how it should be.

Oh, I agree. It's just when people complain about the trees, they don't realize that that's really all they have going.

Well, that and some pretty potent datasheets.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Remember when the amount of rules that were there was considered by most to be next to none?

People are referring to the warscrolls; there are a large number of special rules that hit the point of being complex without actually adding to the gameplay. Take Sequitors for example; is the unit really more fun as a result of that many special things? From my perspective the warscroll would be better designed (sidenote: and balanced) with just the channeling and dumping all the extra equipment or just the equipment and removing the channeling. Castigators or the ballista are a good example of 'butter zone' complexity where they have one special thing (because they are specialist units) and that's it. GW seems to have forgotten that a unit doesn't need a unique gimmick to be cool and that an army is more fun/engaging when some stuff doesn't have anything fancy; when every single unit has it's own special ability then it dilutes the significance & fun for all of them while making the game more tedious to play. I also feel that special abilities shared across multiple units in a faction is a much smoother way of doing things than every one being different. Many factions, for example, have their music/standards/shields do the same thing across the faction and I believe AoS would be improved if special rules went more in that direction. Like multiple Sacrosanct units having a channeling ability with the same functionality even if the exact effect is customized for the unit. Compare to Liberators get +1 to hit big stuff, Judicators get re-rolls against Chaos, Protectors do bonus damage to monsters on wounds of 6, Decimators nerf enemy bravery, etc... Wouldn't it be nice if they just had a "favored opponent" rule that, say, gave re-roll hits of 1 against a certain type of target with the specific target being different for each unit? The effect is the same and easy to remember, each unit still gets it's own flavor, and the game flows much better for everyone involved.

To give GW credit there are plenty of places where rules have been designed as such and from my experience these factions/units are just more fun to have on the table as a result.

 Fafnir wrote:
Well, that and some pretty potent datasheets.

There's alarielle after the summoning and command ability changes and bow hunters? Tree Revenants? Treelords?

Dryads are too fragile without reliable cover and the -1, spite revenants are complete garbage anyways, melee hunters are too slow, durthu is too slow, ancient has half its warscroll dedicated to wood interaction and loses out on offensive stats as a price, wraith needs woods, wych needs to get into position first.

That is a pessimistic view on Sylvaneth warscrolls that ignores numerous strengths.

Their strengths are mostly tied to the woods, I'm saying that they don't have a whole lot if the woods are removed, since a lot of people complain the woods add too much.

The annoying part is when it comes to setting up terrain. Trying to find the right balance when the Sylvaneth player needs open spaces to put their Woods down.

 Skimask Mohawk wrote:

 Fafnir wrote:
Well, that and some pretty potent datasheets.

There's alarielle after the summoning and command ability changes and bow hunters? Tree Revenants? Treelords?

Dryads are too fragile without reliable cover and the -1, spite revenants are complete garbage anyways, melee hunters are too slow, durthu is too slow, ancient has half its warscroll dedicated to wood interaction and loses out on offensive stats as a price, wraith needs woods, wych needs to get into position first.

You obviously havent played dreadwood where its one drop, dirthu re-sets up 6" away from your unit with the ghyrestrike (+1h/+1W), with a 3+ rerolling 1s...so yeah lol ok.

Back to the topic of countering Kroak, what about the Malevolent Maelstrom? Gives you a second chance to unbind, and you plop in right next to Kroak and you now have a deterrent in that every spell he casts and every unit he destroys near the Maelstom gets it that much closer to going boom. You still have to overcome what is likely a really high casting value from Kroak, and it's only d3 MW when it pops, but at least it's something.

 Sal4m4nd3r wrote:

 Skimask Mohawk wrote:

 Fafnir wrote:
Well, that and some pretty potent datasheets.

There's alarielle after the summoning and command ability changes and bow hunters? Tree Revenants? Treelords?

Dryads are too fragile without reliable cover and the -1, spite revenants are complete garbage anyways, melee hunters are too slow, durthu is too slow, ancient has half its warscroll dedicated to wood interaction and loses out on offensive stats as a price, wraith needs woods, wych needs to get into position first.

You obviously havent played dreadwood where its one drop, dirthu re-sets up 6" away from your unit with the ghyrestrike (+1h/+1W), with a 3+ rerolling 1s...so yeah lol ok.

So your opponent can use chaf to screen his units and then just blast him with spells? People very much screen characters and good stuff if they deploy normally.

Also taking ghyrstike lol. Take lens instead and have it be useful

One thing I just happened to notice that's really good is that GH2018 changed Woods to actually block LOS at long last! I had not noticed this before today.

Models are not visible to each other if an imaginary straight line 1mm wide drawn between the closest points of the two models crosses over more than 1" of the base of a Citadel Wood. This scenery rule does not apply if either model can fly.

The FAQ today also stated that Sylvaneth Wyldwoods have that same ability. So wood terrain finally does more than just be decoration.

Wayniac wrote:
One thing I just happened to notice that's really good is that GH2018 changed Woods to actually block LOS at long last! I had not noticed this before today.

Models are not visible to each other if an imaginary straight line 1mm wide drawn between the closest points of the two models crosses over more than 1" of the base of a Citadel Wood. This scenery rule does not apply if either model can fly.

The FAQ today also stated that Sylvaneth Wyldwoods have that same ability. So wood terrain finally does more than just be decoration.

The terrain rules alone put AoS light years ahead of 40k.

Yeah. Fortunately for me I've been using that house rule about forests blocking line of sight for years and years

auticus wrote:
Yeah. Fortunately for me I've been using that house rule about forests blocking line of sight for years and years

But now you can show it's "official" and not some lame house rules that will teach people to play wrong

The other day I had to fight a Stardrake that had a 1+ save with rerolls on the 1, a 4+ save against mortal wounds and healing. 40+ attacks from Orruk Brutes failed to do anything. An entire game spent attacking it did nothing. I am a little disappointed that this kind of thing can happen in the game. Am I a sore loser or is ok to be peeved at this kind of thing?

Wayniac wrote:

auticus wrote:
Yeah. Fortunately for me I've been using that house rule about forests blocking line of sight for years and years

But now you can show it's "official" and not some lame house rules that will teach people to play wrong

#truth!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Future War Cultist wrote:
The other day I had to fight a Stardrake that had a 1+ save with rerolls on the 1, a 4+ save against mortal wounds and healing. 40+ attacks from Orruk Brutes failed to do anything. An entire game spent attacking it did nothing. I am a little disappointed that this kind of thing can happen in the game. Am I a sore loser or is ok to be peeved at this kind of thing?

Those are negative play experiences. I definitely see that as a frustrating thing to face.

The git gud response is that you have to feed it chaffe and hope you have decent terrain to help bottleneck it but its a flying monster that has enormous table control aura.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
The other day I had to fight a Stardrake that had a 1+ save with rerolls on the 1, a 4+ save against mortal wounds and healing. 40+ attacks from Orruk Brutes failed to do anything. An entire game spent attacking it did nothing. I am a little disappointed that this kind of thing can happen in the game. Am I a sore loser or is ok to be peeved at this kind of thing?

You're not a sore loser, but context is important. Was it a relic? Mystic shield spammed?

Also, Brutes have at least 1 point of Rend so it would have been a 2+ for most attacks right?

Armor saves always fail on a 1 anyways. Just means you need to get to Rend 2 to make a dent.

And with the reroll you need an average of 36 wounds to even get through, let alone number of attacks

This is the kind of thing we needed Grav weapons for in 40k 7th. I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

Off hand I think one of the Metal Realm’s spells did a thing where it wounded you using you your save roll or something like that.

 EnTyme wrote:
I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

I mean, mortal wounds pretty much exist to cut through armor skew like this, they are the paper to this rock from a design perspective. Unfortunately realm artefacts, not known for their balance, get even more imba when slapped on really big heroes. (And yep, Ignax's Scales is in my top five as well, even without playing an army with a save over 4+. Negating mortal damage (i.e. anti-nasty single target weapons) against my big expensive monster hero on a 4+ instead of the 6+ of other items (or 5+ vs spells if you're lucky)? Yes please!)

Related: It's an interesting choice to make when selecting your god-tier realm artifact these days. There's a number of ways to go offensively - Blade of Judgement if you've got a weapon with a bunch of attaks or a way to manipulate to hit rolls or an in-built delivery system; Ghyrstrike if you've got a solid weapon to buff and want to push its probability or have to cut through a lot of debuffs; Anraheir's Claws or Blade of Endings if you just want more damage (choice depends on which buffs your dude has available); any number of shooting attaks if you want to have something to do in the shooting phase (Wraithbow for range; Rockjaws for dependability; Sunderblade for adding carnage to a beast that's already up close and personal). Then there's a handful of tactical / synergy options that are pretty great (healing, getting CP back, stopping spells or blunting their effect), if not as important to the livelihood of the bearer.

But let's say you want to go defensive and your base stats are just ok. Do you add armor, making yourself a target for mortal wounds? Add a save after the save, which has been FAQ'd to do nothing for mortals? Or add mortal protection, providing nothing against mundane damage? Do you straight up go untargetable in the shooting phase? Or in the fight phase? How about a blanket -1 to be hit in either of those? (Gryph-feather so good!) What about just going faster to make use of cover and dictate the terms of engagement? You've got a couple ways to do that too, with their own side effects. Or what about trying to tool for healing, on the assumption that whatever you take, you're still taking damage? You've got a few options there, with trade-offs aplenty (single use here, low heal there, situational procs here and here). There's more than a little meta surfing to do with this choice, and of course the tools your army brings to support this character will push some artefacts over others (including command traits if this is your general you're kitting out).

Anyway, some of the mental gymnastics I go through with AOS list design these days, especially since the rest of my lists are very samey, as they're pulling from both limited subfactions and my own model pool And also why I'm against banning realm artefacts at this point, as they add far more choice than I expected. There are some stunningly great choices, but I don't really feel like there's a clear Obvious Choice in any one category. Even when the Lens was still stupid good.

- Salvage

 EnTyme wrote:
This is the kind of thing we needed Grav weapons for in 40k 7th. I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

Shyish Reaper is the one that immediately comes to mind.
After you move, you roll a dice for each model that it moved over and if the roll is equal to or greater than the model's Save then they suffer a mortal wound.

I mean yeah, it's 1MW...but that option is there.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
The other day I had to fight a Stardrake that had a 1+ save with rerolls on the 1, a 4+ save against mortal wounds and healing. 40+ attacks from Orruk Brutes failed to do anything. An entire game spent attacking it did nothing. I am a little disappointed that this kind of thing can happen in the game. Am I a sore loser or is ok to be peeved at this kind of thing?

You are entirely justified; that is an unfun experience and I encourage you to send GW an email stating as such. GW wants AoS to be a big thing but to do that they need to be better. That means we need to inform them of issues like this because the people they use for playtesting are (as has been made abundantly clear through three GHBs) insufficiently skilled at the task.

I remember seeing that Chamon spell now. That would probably be my go-to against something like this. How effective would the list actually be though? It kind of sounds like my 60-wound Archaon list. Not really a strong list, just annoying to play against. I generally save it for those waffles who run the broken list of the month.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:
This is the kind of thing we needed Grav weapons for in 40k 7th. I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

Shyish Reaper is the one that immediately comes to mind.
After you move, you roll a dice for each model that it moved over and if the roll is equal to or greater than the model's Save then they suffer a mortal wound.

I mean yeah, it's 1MW...but that option is there.

I understand what you are suggesting, but consider that your army has been decimated by a 16w monster and someone else suggests a Nighthaunt-specific endless spell that does at most 1 mortal wound per round. It's a slap in the face.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:
This is the kind of thing we needed Grav weapons for in 40k 7th. I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

Shyish Reaper is the one that immediately comes to mind.
After you move, you roll a dice for each model that it moved over and if the roll is equal to or greater than the model's Save then they suffer a mortal wound.

I mean yeah, it's 1MW...but that option is there.

I understand what you are suggesting, but consider that your army has been decimated by a 16w monster and someone else suggests a Nighthaunt-specific endless spell that does at most 1 mortal wound per round. It's a slap in the face.

He was talking about mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them.
That's one. Sure, it isn't going to do diddly against a Stardrake by itself--but that doesn't change that it's a mechanic in the game that lets you turn a model's save against them.

As of right now, we only have a few and they tend towards being on the low side from damage as far as I am aware.

For me, chaos mammoths love star drakes.

But yeah, the playtesters are all tournament players, and tournament players are all playing extreme rock paper scissors.

The problem with that is that casual games are often not playing at that extreme and as such the game testing is highly skewed toward one avenue of play.

It's also not really casual to build a combo piece like that star drake. That is someone taking a tournament appropriate choice and bringing it to a non-tournament game. Just like if someone brought the 66 attack unit of plague drones they talked about on Stormcast ep #26.

Ah, just to be clear, we were playing a ‘warm up’ game to test out our tournament lists so I was expecting something like this. Although...it has found it’s way into friendlier games in the past. An entire army of Overlords shooting over 3 turns not putting one scratch on a couple of concussors. Staunch Defenders is the bane of me.

Maybe I should send a letter. I love AoS but GW is falling into the trap of going over the top with everything again. It’s regrettable to see the game boiling down to how many mortal wounds you can throw out and withstand.

auticus wrote:
For me, chaos mammoths love star drakes.

But yeah, the playtesters are all tournament players, and tournament players are all playing extreme rock paper scissors.

The problem with that is that casual games are often not playing at that extreme and as such the game testing is highly skewed toward one avenue of play.

I would accept that they were balancing around tournament play if tournament play had even a rough balance. It doesn't. It is dramatically worse than casual play; even the power lists from different armies are not on par with each other. Casual is better than tournaments by virtue of things averaging out, but even then it is only balanced in a relative sense; I originally typed 'good enough' there but for many would-be players it is not. The people GW has playtesting are not doing their jobs competently. And I do not say that lightly; I would say it to them directly if I could. If AoS is to expand, and I mean really expand, it needs to do better.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:
This is the kind of thing we needed Grav weapons for in 40k 7th. I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

Shyish Reaper is the one that immediately comes to mind.
After you move, you roll a dice for each model that it moved over and if the roll is equal to or greater than the model's Save then they suffer a mortal wound.

I mean yeah, it's 1MW...but that option is there.

I understand what you are suggesting, but consider that your army has been decimated by a 16w monster and someone else suggests a Nighthaunt-specific endless spell that does at most 1 mortal wound per round. It's a slap in the face.

He was talking about mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them.
That's one. Sure, it isn't going to do diddly against a Stardrake by itself--but that doesn't change that it's a mechanic in the game that lets you turn a model's save against them.

As of right now, we only have a few and they tend towards being on the low side from damage as far as I am aware.

Fair point, I misunderstood.

I agree, the playtesting needs to get its head out of its own ***. The problem with GW playtesting is its always needed to get its head out of its own ***.

auticus wrote:
I agree, the playtesting needs to get its head out of its own ***. The problem with GW playtesting is its always needed to get its head out of its own ***.

I think right now it's more that playtesting isn't so much in GW's ***, but in certain tournament player groups' ***.

That said, it's surprisingly hard to do really thorough playtesting. Especially when the playtest group is relatively small compared to the player base (and this will usually be the case for all but the most niche games). Regardless of how much is caught, there will always be zero-day exploits as soon as 20,000 more sets of eyes are on things.

Now, I'm not "excusing" it, and agree that there are things that are seeming to slip through that really make you scratch your head. Just saying that, from personal experience, it's harder than it seems.

I will at least give credit that GW is doing errata and FAQs again, and that (even if they're slower or different than what many may think is needed), they're better than when I dropped GW originally 15 years ago.

They're better than the 40k faqs too.

GW is learning and improving
But they are still not there were they once were regarding rules writing/game design

Of course they had more or less build up from scratch and re-learn doing things after the "no FAQ" and and " never doing any kind of testing" policy


But playtesting to be worth it must be done right.
Not knowing how exactly GW is doing it makes it difficult to say how they could improve it, but the general impression from the outcome is, that the playtester have too much influence on the end result. While testers should only report battle reports with different lists/settings they get from the designers and lists they write on their own, it seems that the Testers report only back what units they think are too weak or too strong without knowing the full set of rules or how the rules should actually work.

Playtesting is not easy and there is room for improvement no matter how GW is doing it.
But one thing they need to get done is to write good rules. No matter how good your testing is, it is useless if the testers are not using the rules how they are meant to be because of bad writing or changes after release

I was OK with the 'they're learning/re-learning' sentiment... But it has been years and we are on the third GHB now. I can't think of a factor that would excuse balance upsets of this severity. Maybe there is one, I don't know.

But... Maybe a different perspective is that more people should volenteer. I mean, if GW sent every new warscroll to Auticus just for him to do numbers and send it back withput anything more than a few efficiency scores things would imprpve dramatically. I guess I'm wishlisting, it's just... It would be nice if they got some people from outside the inner circle involved to shake things up because their current approach has some big holes. And it's a shame to see how much potential and really great content is tarnished by games that are rendered unfun due to imbalance.

If they posted an open letter to this site looking for playtesters I’d volunteer. I’ve had much experience having my ass kicked by imbalanced armies. I am after all, an Overlords player.

I've already been told so many times that math can't balance the game that I've given up on the community lol.

In fact I seriously think that the gw design team intentionally unbalances the game as part of their design ethos because there is a large chunk of the community that loves imbalance so that listbuilding can be more prominent.

When we had community comps before GHB that was one of the biggest complaints I fielded. Everything is too balanced, its "boring".

The other issue with playtesting, and I speak from 25 years as a game designer myself, is that the concept of what is and is not unbalanced will differ from person to person.

The larger your playtester base, the more conflicting complaints you will get. I know Azyr comp at its peak we had about 100 or so testers sending input on the regular, and it was common for one person to say "Unit X is WAYYY too powerful for its cost" and then another person underneath that would say "Unit X is WAYYYYY overcost and needs to come down in points!"

Really though without designer commentary we have no idea what their design goal is. They seemed to really really embrace the loose point costs that intentionally made monsters too cheap to encourage people to take them despite being imbalanced (which is what SCGT was before it became official points) and again to conclude, I firmly believe that the gw team intentionally imbalances things to make listbuilding more prominent because listbuilding exercises are what drive a lot of sales.

If everything is really balanced, listbuilding becomes less and less important... and "boring" to a lot of people.

auticus I think list building and boring is only present if every unit ends up balanced to a point where there's no variety or such present. I think if the armies are balanced, but where individual units have very distinct and specific roles and then the objectives vary game to game then the list building becomes more a case of asking questions and answering them with what choices the player makes.


I'd also say that the kind of person who wants a super-powered list is possibly not the best to work toward for a wargame. It's a mentality better suited to far faster games like Magic t he Gathering where you can play out multiple matches in very short spans of time so if you've got a supercombo it might not happen every time. Meanwhile in wargames the time commitment to just getting to the table (building etc...) let alone the setup time and play time means that a balanced game is far more fun for both players. Sweeping half the army off a table in one or two turns is not fun - sure its neat hte first time or so for the attacker, but its no fun to play against and in truth not super fun for both players when the win is so easily established when there was so much prep time.




I do agree with your point regarding balance viewpoint variation. Even if the player doing the balance testing is of a known good skill level the variation in their opponents and local scene cna vary a lot. One might be playing those of less skill and thus sees a lot of units being overpowered; whilst another might be going up against much harder fights and thus the models appear too weak.

I do agree further that without background understanding we can't really guess what GW's long term goals are, nor really what their exact testing method even is. I'd also say that online often amplifies calls of imbalance way more so than reality experiences for the majority of players.


Terrain is also a huge element - maths can balance the game up to a point; but if one player has basically an open field whilst another has a dense chock-a-block city ruin then the experiences and what works in balance for both is going to have some variation. Granted part of that is going to also be player skill so terrain can amplify both weakness and strength in a players skill relative to their opponenet.s

My original goal, and all of my games that I have ever written have had the same goal, was that 2000 points = 2000 points.

That is what is seen by a lot of people as "boring". That is what the most common complaint against Azyr was (not azyr the list builder that GW decided to call their product, Azyr the comp that came before that). That 2000 points = 2000 points. It was an eye-opening moment for me as a designer.

That if I list build a 2000 point list, that regardless of what you build, so long as its 2000 points, that we have comparably powered armies.

This is seen as bad game design by a whole lot of people because it minimizes list building's importance, since 2000 points is 2000 points. The point of list building is to take 2000 points and make it 4000 points (or a number greatly higher than the origin)

GW caters to that design ethos. The problem with that is you can never have proper balance because you are intentionally mucking up the balance to make listbuilding more important.

But isn't the effect just the opposite? Imbalance means everyone just copies the same spam list from the net, removing the list building phase entirely once the tryhards publish The One True List.

When you have something that’s an obvious auto take because it’s so op, then everyone takes it, and list building becomes utterly utterly pointless. Balance breeds variety.

One of the last discussions that I had on the TGA forums before I was banned for being overly negative toward the design of the game was this exact topic and there were a great many posters that heavily disliked the concept of 2000p = 2000p.

I think what they are going for, and this is just a pedestrian guess based on what I know of the designers and the talking heads that post on twitter that are known to be playtesters and buddies of the designers, is intentional imbalance, but removal of all really broken elements (like kroak was on release).

They are quick to address the REALLY REALLY broken things, but everyone over there cheers loudly the imbalance other than that. Thats part of "gittin gud", being able to identify what is good and what is not good.

You'd think that all that does is encourage netlisting but apparently that's not an issue because if you aren't a good player then netlisting will get you nowhere.

I strongly oppose the sentiments that were shared with me before my banning in this regard, because to me this is just GW trying in a way to emulate magic the gathering design by having little timmy, spike, and johnny builds, which I also don't agree with in the first place since all that does is put johnny and spike at each others' throats when they have to share a table at the FLGS.

I think that this type of design and intentional imbalance to cater toward listbuilding has been so prominent over the past 25 years of game design in popular games that its now expected to exist to the point that if it doesnt' exist, that people have a negative reaction over its absence.

I don’t think I know anyone that wants a game to be unbalanced because balanced is boring.

Some people have a different opinion, as not all a taking copy and paste lists from the web and local meta has an effect too.

But we can see the same attitude on other games were part of the community say the game is boring if every compination of units is viable and player skill is more important than list writ

I didn't know anyone that wanted the game to have imbalance either, until I put Azyr out. When you put forth a system where it didn't matter what you built, your opponent would have an equal chance at beating you if he had the same number of points, it made a lot of people angry.

Edit: as noted below, this is a common issue with Kings of War as well. Listbuilding is very much not as prominent and there is a large swathe of people that are not interested in a game where they can't win in the listbuilding phase.

 AduroT wrote:
I don’t think I know anyone that wants a game to be unbalanced because balanced is boring.

It is a common complaint about KoW.

auticus wrote:
. . . balance the game...

. . . unbalances the game . . . community that loves imbalance . . .

. . . what is and is not unbalanced will differ from person to person . . .

. . . the gw team intentionally imbalances things . . .

. . . If everything is really balanced . . .

. . . I think I just realized who was behind auticus' account this entire time. Someone get the Avengers on the phone!

Blanced is boring only the most extreme cases.

Better balance is good for the game. But not everything that is goog for the game is good for balance.

And if you wanna go really philosophical: "what is balance?"

Might make for an interesting discussion.

For me, balance is a point value representing itself accurately.

If I build a 2000 point list, it will have the same shot at beating your 2000 point list.

I’d like to have that discussion. I’m sure everyone has their own interpretation of what balance is. For me, balance is simply not being able to table your opponent in 2 turns because everything you have abuses what should be a rare mechanic of the game whilst simultaneously shrugging off everything your opponent throws at you due to ridiculous durability. Case in point, Stormcast hurling out mortal wounds like they’re confetti whilst having 1+ rerollable saves.

auticus wrote:
For me, balance is a point value representing itself accurately.

If I build a 2000 point list, it will have the same shot at beating your 2000 point list.

I'll put myself out here and say that I am a person who doesn't like this. I love list building, I love tech-ing and tinkering with lists, and I don't really enjoy KoW for the exact reason that list building is a boring affair. I'm not suggesting your view is wrong Auticus, just volunteering that I am of the mind set you're talking about.

I think that having powerful units is fine- so long as you pay proper points for it.

The problem with stormcast in general is a lot of their units are under cost for where they sit on the damage and resilience bell curves.

So they are essentially getting 3000 or more points for their 2000 points and you are only getting 2000 points. Which leads to negative play experience because you didn't listbuild properly to AOS competitive standard.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

auticus wrote:
For me, balance is a point value representing itself accurately.

If I build a 2000 point list, it will have the same shot at beating your 2000 point list.

I'll put myself out here and say that I am a person who doesn't like this. I love list building, I love tech-ing and tinkering with lists, and I don't really enjoy KoW for the exact reason that list building is a boring affair. I'm not suggesting your view is wrong Auticus, just volunteering that I am of the mind set you're talking about.

I hear ya and thats cool.

The problem with this deliverable is that I don't see how you can ever have a truly balanced game when this is the primary output goal... a game where listbuilding is first and foremost. To achieve that... you have to bake in imbalances and as such ... it is impossible to find a point where you will also have a balanced game.

Basically from my experience, you can't have both balance, and heavy listbuildiing outputs. The two do not coexist well together.

What that means to me is that since that is the direction the designers at GW have embraced since the end of 6th edition in 2004 or 2005 ish, that talk of imbalance in the game should be taken with the grain of understanding that the game is intentionally designed to be imbalanced, and that if balance is what one is seeking that a GW game is not where one should look.

I think that this has been a very volatile point of contention on forums since forums were a thing in the 90s because those arguing for balance are actively going against GW's design ethos which I believe is intentional. The designers of course don't give their insight so this can only be speculation. But this is why I don't think the GW designers are truly inept like a lot of comments will say. I don't think they are inept because I think they are intentionally doing what they are doing, not accidentally doing it and not knowing how to fix it.

My idea of "balance" is that two like-minded individuals can play a game, and each has a reasonable expectation of victory. I would be okay with tournament-caliber lists existing so long as they stayed in tournaments or tournament prep matches. I have an issue when tournament lists show up for an average Saturday gaming session against the guy who brought his Free City fluff list. What is the tournament player even gaining in that situation?

 EnTyme wrote:
My idea of "balance" is that two like-minded individuals can play a game, and each has a reasonable expectation of victory. I would be okay with tournament-caliber lists existing so long as they stayed in tournaments or tournament prep matches. I have an issue when tournament lists show up for an average Saturday gaming session against the guy who brought his Free City fluff list. What is the tournament player even gaining in that situation?

I’m often that free city guy. I actually hate how most tournament lists look. They often don’t look like a coherent force, but just a collection of random misfits designed to squeeze out as many mortal wounds as possible.

 EnTyme wrote:
My idea of "balance" is that two like-minded individuals can play a game, and each has a reasonable expectation of victory. I would be okay with tournament-caliber lists existing so long as they stayed in tournaments or tournament prep matches. I have an issue when tournament lists show up for an average Saturday gaming session against the guy who brought his Free City fluff list. What is the tournament player even gaining in that situation?

I'm the same way. THe problem is there is nothing in the rules that stop a guy from bringing a tournament list to a saturday casual game because there are no rules for a saturday casual game. Which is why I harp so hard on better balance. If the game didn't cater as much to listbuilding, then the tournament lists wouldn't be so grotesquely different from your saturday afternoon casual games.

Its a massive pain in my *** to try to run public campaigns because of that very issue. "Bring a casual list" means 1000 different things to 1000 different people. To some people it means taking their tournament nasty list and then like bumping a guy out for something that is also powerful but not as powerful, resulting in a list that is still grotesquely OP vs casuals, but to that player its now "gimped" because in a tournament setting its not as strong.

 EnTyme wrote:
My idea of "balance" is that two like-minded individuals can play a game, and each has a reasonable expectation of victory. I would be okay with tournament-caliber lists existing so long as they stayed in tournaments or tournament prep matches. I have an issue when tournament lists show up for an average Saturday gaming session against the guy who brought his Free City fluff list. What is the tournament player even gaining in that situation?

I don't think a rule set can ever fix this honestly. This is about 2 different people having 2 different interests and never finding a way to meld them.

Thing is "Casual" lists don't really exist. There are only good and bad with varying levels inbetween. For the same reason there's no such thing as a tournament list either.

That the communty tries to differ the two is telling that there is clearly too much imbalance within the system. It is one thing to have to build a good list; quite another when there's vast differences in the raw power level between a well made and a decently made list.

For this reason alone getting closer to near perfect balance is better since it reduces this divide in the community; that means more potential games and gamers getting on board.

auticus wrote:I strongly oppose the sentiments that were shared with me before my banning in this regard, because to me this is just GW trying in a way to emulate magic the gathering design by having little timmy, spike, and johnny builds, which I also don't agree with in the first place since all that does is put johnny and spike at each others' throats when they have to share a table at the FLGS.

I think this is a very good point. I'm just not sure where I stand on it.

I like that different people can get different things out of the game and think the magic model of obviously better cards go in obviously better decks (I'm not too familiar with magic deck building, but there's probably more built on that starting point) has some merit for a game that's supposed to be broad.

What I disagree with though, is the opposition towards an accurate points system where a given number actually says something about the level of power of a collection of units. I understand why people are opposed to it. As soon as you start putting in points costs for synergy or adjusting the points costs of things based on other things in the army, things get complicated. And if you don't do that then the power of a given unit changes depending on what else is in the list but with no change in points. An accurate point system is probably too complicated for most people and certainly too complicated for the real point of them: to sell models. To give people a list of products to buy to build a given list. You just don't need an actually accurate points system if the point is just to provide people some purchasing guidance and get things sort of in the same ball park provided they are playing against others with the same approach.

As for Johnny and Spike at each other's throats, I've found the social solution seems to be working. When i run a narrative event at a local store and put in the event description that this is not a tournament and tournament style lists are not appropriate and people who regularly play competitively should take the opportunity to play things they wish were better but are not, people show up with reasonable stuff. People actually do take their sub optimal stuff and put it in lists. Or they don't put the synergy/combo pieces together to push drones up to 11 attacks each just because they can. Staunch Defender doesn't get picked every time.

 Overread wrote:
Thing is "Casual" lists don't really exist. There are only good and bad with varying levels inbetween. For the same reason there's no such thing as a tournament list either.

I disagree entirely, this ignores a key factor when building a list which is intent. I regularly play with a guy who's goal when building a list is to take cool models - that is by definition a casual list. There can entirely be a tournament list and a casual list based on the intent when writing.

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

auticus wrote:
For me, balance is a point value representing itself accurately.

If I build a 2000 point list, it will have the same shot at beating your 2000 point list.

I'll put myself out here and say that I am a person who doesn't like this. I love list building, I love tech-ing and tinkering with lists, and I don't really enjoy KoW for the exact reason that list building is a boring affair. I'm not suggesting your view is wrong Auticus, just volunteering that I am of the mind set you're talking about.

In this same vein, I don't think that any list should automatically be able to beat any other list.

There's always going to be weird extremes on one end or the other. A good example of this is Idoneth--if you and I go to play a 2k points game and I say "I'm running Idoneth" and you prepare to fight a Fue'thain Eel Armada(turns 2+4 equal everything on the board running+charging) but then get caught fighting a Mor'phann Namarti Horde...should you really have your tailored list automatically shifted to be super effective?

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

auticus wrote:
For me, balance is a point value representing itself accurately.

If I build a 2000 point list, it will have the same shot at beating your 2000 point list.

I'll put myself out here and say that I am a person who doesn't like this. I love list building, I love tech-ing and tinkering with lists, and I don't really enjoy KoW for the exact reason that list building is a boring affair. I'm not suggesting your view is wrong Auticus, just volunteering that I am of the mind set you're talking about.

In this same vein, I don't think that any list should automatically be able to beat any other list.

There's always going to be weird extremes on one end or the other. A good example of this is Idoneth--if you and I go to play a 2k points game and I say "I'm running Idoneth" and you prepare to fight a Fue'thain Eel Armada(turns 2+4 equal everything on the board running+charging) but then get caught fighting a Mor'phann Namarti Horde...should you really have your tailored list automatically shifted to be super effective?

I agree 100% and I don't mean to suggest that I want list building to be the only factor. More that I do love to build lists and I love trying to squeeze out new efficiencies and I've seen how list building like Auticus likes works out in KoW. Again I don't mean denigrate anyone who enjoys that, it just isn't for me. I gave KoW a good try and could never really get myself involved in a meaningful way. I think that GW could do a better job by all means but I'd never want them to shift a hard 'lists don't matter' school of thought.

I've done polls in the past on this. It comes out to be about 75% people polled prefer their wargames to have listbuilding have a heavy influence in the game.

Its definitely something I have to consider for my own projects because it will run opposite to trying to also have balance. Games that stick more toward balance and less toward list building also tend to have a lot fewer players.

There's a slider there, where balance is wanted, but only minimally so. Its trying to figure out what that point is.

There are also two axes (at least) in this dilemma. Power and synergy.

A game where all units are fairly costed can still have a major list building component if a lot of the game depends on unit roles and synergies. See early Warmachine for an example. Such a game requires a coherent army list where lots of different combinations might work, but you do need to consider them and a randomly selected force of the appropriate points value might not function well.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
There are also two axes (at least) in this dilemma. Power and synergy.

A game where all units are fairly costed can still have a major list building component if a lot of the game depends on unit roles and synergies. See early Warmachine for an example. Such a game requires a coherent army list where lots of different combinations might work, but you do need to consider them and a randomly selected force of the appropriate points value might not function well.

The issue is - do you point them based on maximum synergy or none? Both have major issues.

Correct. And then there's the whole if we're going to find that grey area where the goal is to break balance with a strong list but we want balance.

Balance what?

Balance power?
Balance synergies?

I took the route of pointing them based on a notch or two below their max synergy with azyr. But I don't think there's really a correct answer. Some liked it. Others hated it because their preferred models cost a lot more and they werne't guaranteed full synergy.

Its definitely a tough nut to crack.

That is the tricky bit, yes. Maybe that's why so many companies are experimenting with Formations - paying for the synergy seperately from the units.

I don't think the goal for balance should be for every possable list to have equal chance at victory. It's not feasible and even then it was it would make list building boring.

Rather than making every army equal it should be to make every unit viable.

kodos wrote:GW is learning and improving
But they are still not there were they once were regarding rules writing/game design

You are wrong here. GW is at where they are rules wise right now. That might change in a month or two. Thing is GW have great rules IT'S THE COMMUNITY who doesn't want to play them. If people actually played the game instead of saying it was crap and ironically best prices at the time, GW could have used these rules for 40K and Age of Sigmar. I was hoping Age of Sigmar was going to use these rules but didn't.

So GW makes rules that the community wants. It does seem the community wants these rules. I am not saying ALL people want it but in general it seems more want it this way. The rules I am talking about is Lord of the Rings. I never played The Hobbit but I believe the rules are basically the same. There is also LotR mass battle as well which is a great rule set but people didn't play it either. Again prices were great. It's what people have been asking for at the time, great rules, BALANCED rules, and good prices. LotR offered this but the community balked at it for one reason or another. Why do I say GW might not be there in a month or so? Depending on the new rules for LotR since it's adding the "keyword" system that is 40K and AoS, we don't know what else is changed. Until that comes out, GW has great rules right now. It is just the Games Workshop community who doesn't want it.

So GW does do good rules, sadly it's us the community who refuses them.

I don't see how to make every unit viable when on the other hand imbalance is also our goal to promote the concept of listbuilding.

If every unit was viable that would mean that listbuilding would suffer.

Agreed you'll never make "every" list viable. The key is to give every unit a role and viability of it own and then let the player build lists that have varied composition, but which have a generally decent chance to victory. Something that GW appears to have done a LOT more of with the new edition of 40K and Sigmar than in the past.

In the past many armies relied on almost one or two big tricks and nothing else; with whole blocks of their models being near useless or just "not as good as something else that is better". Right now there's a lot more diversity present and its good. It's good for GW because now players have more reason to buy more models. Sure the power-gamer might only build one army; but many others are going to build varied armies - valid compositions that have a decent chance of winning.


Varied army builds comes with increased balance to the game. Mono-builds comes with decreased balance because reduced balance means more inclination to find the best and only go for that because the power difference between best and decent is going tobe big.

LOTR fails for the same reason KOW fails. The listbuilding phase in LOTR isn't interesting. The rules ARE great, probably to me the greatest set of rules GW ever did. But because its not a game about combos and synergies, it will forever be a game that is ignored by the bulk of players.

Listbuilding is more difficult in a balanced game, not non-existent. Having the right balance of front line, support, hammer, anvil, etc will still crush an army of randomly selected options. People know this. But some are afraid that without being able to get a dramatic advantage by making an overpowered list they won't be able to win as many games. Saying this sounds petty so there are other reasons brought up as a cover.

In regards to Azyr, I encourage Auticus & others to remember that people will readily reach out with complaints but rarely do the same with compliments. That's human nature. It's entirely possible if not plausible that there were as many or more people very pleased with the balance. If it actually weren't balanced there probably would have been more complaints on top of less people playing.

To say that the community of AoS wants imbalance and GW caters to that is to disregard that GW wants to expand the game. Players in AoS are skewed towards those who desire or at least tolerate significant imbalance, but those who aren't playing at all are the ones GW is aiming to recruit. The sales to powergamers are simply dwarfed by sales to casuals; the latter is the vast vast majority of players and is best harnessed by having reasonably good balance. From a pragmatic sales perspective as well as a community one GW is better off improving. I find it more plausible that GW tries for balance but is bad at it than it trying to make things imbalanced intentionally. Though I won't deny that certain elements push my view.

As a sidenote on KoW; back when I tried it things weren't all that balanced but listbuilding was still bland. The reasons for why armies feel stale in KoW is a discussion of itself but balanced options isn't the reason.

That is correct people tend to not send compliments, but I coupled that experience with all of the polls I had done that are always heavily skewed toward listbuilding needing to play a heavy hand in the game's outcome.

It could easily be that the people that want balance either dont frequent boards and facebook groups, or they don't care enough to vote in polls more so than the guys that want listbuilding to be highly influential.

This is true even in the pc strategy game world, where I spend a lot of time as that is where most of my game development lies.

Thats simply what sells more.

Is it time to make a new thread? I'm really enjoying this discussion, but it's kind of off-topic for this thread. In fact, this thread isn't particularly relevant anymore since the edition is already out.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Listbuilding is more difficult in a balanced game, not non-existent. Having the right balance of front line, support, hammer, anvil, etc will still crush an army of randomly selected options. People know this. But some are afraid that without being able to get a dramatic advantage by making an overpowered list they won't be able to win as many games. Saying this sounds petty so there are other reasons brought up as a cover.

What sounds petty is your assigning a motive to a group of players that is entirely off base.

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Listbuilding is more difficult in a balanced game, not non-existent. Having the right balance of front line, support, hammer, anvil, etc will still crush an army of randomly selected options. People know this. But some are afraid that without being able to get a dramatic advantage by making an overpowered list they won't be able to win as many games. Saying this sounds petty so there are other reasons brought up as a cover.

What sounds petty is your assigning a motive to a group of players that is entirely off base.

Explain how I am wrong and I will gladly rescind that statement.

Davor wrote:

kodos wrote:GW is learning and improving
But they are still not there were they once were regarding rules writing/game design

You are wrong here. GW is at where they are rules wise right now. That might change in a month or two. Thing is GW have great rules IT'S THE COMMUNITY who doesn't want to play them. If people actually played the game instead of saying it was crap and ironically best prices at the time, GW could have used these rules for 40K and Age of Sigmar. I was hoping Age of Sigmar was going to use these rules but didn't.

So GW makes rules that the community wants. It does seem the community wants these rules. I am not saying ALL people want it but in general it seems more want it this way. The rules I am talking about is Lord of the Rings. I never played The Hobbit but I believe the rules are basically the same. There is also LotR mass battle as well which is a great rule set but people didn't play it either. Again prices were great. It's what people have been asking for at the time, great rules, BALANCED rules, and good prices. LotR offered this but the community balked at it for one reason or another. Why do I say GW might not be there in a month or so? Depending on the new rules for LotR since it's adding the "keyword" system that is 40K and AoS, we don't know what else is changed. Until that comes out, GW has great rules right now. It is just the Games Workshop community who doesn't want it.

So GW does do good rules, sadly it's us the community who refuses them.

The time GW wrote good rules was also the time they made LoTR.

And people played it, it was just that the LotR Community was not so forgiving regarding pricing than the other GW Fanboys.
Doubling the price per miniature killed the game in an instand, and here it was more popular than Warhammer at the time

GW was able to write good rules, but the people they attracted with those were not those that would buy everything at any price

If the rules for fantasy & lotr were switched I would still be playing fantasy. The setting is what brought me to the game and at the end of the day what keeps me in it.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Listbuilding is more difficult in a balanced game, not non-existent. Having the right balance of front line, support, hammer, anvil, etc will still crush an army of randomly selected options. People know this. But some are afraid that without being able to get a dramatic advantage by making an overpowered list they won't be able to win as many games. Saying this sounds petty so there are other reasons brought up as a cover.

What sounds petty is your assigning a motive to a group of players that is entirely off base.

Explain how I am wrong and I will gladly rescind that statement.

Simple - you can simply enjoy list writing as an aspect of the hobby. I don't need list writing to win games as that's largely immaterial to my fun. I enjoy the actual process of writing lists and trying to squeeze extra efficiency out of units or trying to find a niche to make an overlooked unit viable. I don't do any of that to help me win games as I rarely play with those lists - I simply write them because its a part of my hobby. It started during my time working for GW when one of my favorite things to do was to sit down and write lists with customers which grew into helping customers find ways to use their favorite (often 'less than optimal') units. And from there its remained a favorite part of my hobby.

I'm not suggesting that's how everyone views it, I am suggesting that you've effectively pained everyone who enjoys list writing with the same brush stroke. That being that anyone who likes list building needs it or wants it because they are afraid they wouldn't be good at the game without it.

auticus wrote:LOTR fails for the same reason KOW fails. The listbuilding phase in LOTR isn't interesting. The rules ARE great, probably to me the greatest set of rules GW ever did. But because its not a game about combos and synergies, it will forever be a game that is ignored by the bulk of players.

I never thought about that. That is so true now that you told me that. I guess loving a faction was why I played and bought what was cool and just used that when I played. Thank you for that, I can see it in another way now that I haven't before.

EnTyme wrote:Is it time to make a new thread? I'm really enjoying this discussion, but it's kind of off-topic for this thread. In fact, this thread isn't particularly relevant anymore since the edition is already out.

While I agree the topic is not in the proper thread, thing is, 2.0 is out now and this thread should be closed and a new one open. Thing is as you said great discussions are going on now so I would hate to see this one closed especially a Dakka thread that is going respectfully.

kodos wrote:

Davor wrote:

kodos wrote:GW is learning and improving
But they are still not there were they once were regarding rules writing/game design

You are wrong here. GW is at where they are rules wise right now. That might change in a month or two. Thing is GW have great rules IT'S THE COMMUNITY who doesn't want to play them. If people actually played the game instead of saying it was crap and ironically best prices at the time, GW could have used these rules for 40K and Age of Sigmar. I was hoping Age of Sigmar was going to use these rules but didn't.

So GW makes rules that the community wants. It does seem the community wants these rules. I am not saying ALL people want it but in general it seems more want it this way. The rules I am talking about is Lord of the Rings. I never played The Hobbit but I believe the rules are basically the same. There is also LotR mass battle as well which is a great rule set but people didn't play it either. Again prices were great. It's what people have been asking for at the time, great rules, BALANCED rules, and good prices. LotR offered this but the community balked at it for one reason or another. Why do I say GW might not be there in a month or so? Depending on the new rules for LotR since it's adding the "keyword" system that is 40K and AoS, we don't know what else is changed. Until that comes out, GW has great rules right now. It is just the Games Workshop community who doesn't want it.

So GW does do good rules, sadly it's us the community who refuses them.

The time GW wrote good rules was also the time they made LoTR.

And people played it, it was just that the LotR Community was not so forgiving regarding pricing than the other GW Fanboys.
Doubling the price per miniature killed the game in an instand, and here it was more popular than Warhammer at the time

GW was able to write good rules, but the people they attracted with those were not those that would buy everything at any price

I am one of those unforgiving people who left when The Hobbit came out. I agree with you about the pricing and what not. All I was saying about the rules. Rules are current so therefore they are the best still. So it means GW can make great rules right now. Hope this makes sense since I didn't explain myself properly the first time.

I honestly hate list building because it's just combos and as a result, you have a large number of things being ignored because something else is better. That, to me, is awful design. There should never be a situation where one unit is invalidated because another can do the same role but better/cheaper.

I'd rather have a game where you are not penalized for liking the fluff/aesthetics of Unit X over Unit Y.

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Listbuilding is more difficult in a balanced game, not non-existent. Having the right balance of front line, support, hammer, anvil, etc will still crush an army of randomly selected options. People know this. But some are afraid that without being able to get a dramatic advantage by making an overpowered list they won't be able to win as many games. Saying this sounds petty so there are other reasons brought up as a cover.

What sounds petty is your assigning a motive to a group of players that is entirely off base.

Explain how I am wrong and I will gladly rescind that statement.

Simple - you can simply enjoy list writing as an aspect of the hobby. I don't need list writing to win games as that's largely immaterial to my fun. I enjoy the actual process of writing lists and trying to squeeze extra efficiency out of units or trying to find a niche to make an overlooked unit viable. I don't do any of that to help me win games as I rarely play with those lists - I simply write them because its a part of my hobby. It started during my time working for GW when one of my favorite things to do was to sit down and write lists with customers which grew into helping customers find ways to use their favorite (often 'less than optimal') units. And from there its remained a favorite part of my hobby.

I'm not suggesting that's how everyone views it, I am suggesting that you've effectively pained everyone who enjoys list writing with the same brush stroke. That being that anyone who likes list building needs it or wants it because they are afraid they wouldn't be good at the game without it.

My statement was only in regards to individuals who use listbuilding arguments as a cover when really what they want is, in essence, an unfair advantage just by bringing certain OP options. They do not enjoy listbuilding--they enjoy winning, and building a list is simply a means if not a chore to that end. Someone who really does enjoy listbuilding (I do, tremendously) knows full well that balance makes for a more interesting process, not less.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Listbuilding is more difficult in a balanced game, not non-existent. Having the right balance of front line, support, hammer, anvil, etc will still crush an army of randomly selected options. People know this. But some are afraid that without being able to get a dramatic advantage by making an overpowered list they won't be able to win as many games. Saying this sounds petty so there are other reasons brought up as a cover.

What sounds petty is your assigning a motive to a group of players that is entirely off base.

Explain how I am wrong and I will gladly rescind that statement.

Simple - you can simply enjoy list writing as an aspect of the hobby. I don't need list writing to win games as that's largely immaterial to my fun. I enjoy the actual process of writing lists and trying to squeeze extra efficiency out of units or trying to find a niche to make an overlooked unit viable. I don't do any of that to help me win games as I rarely play with those lists - I simply write them because its a part of my hobby. It started during my time working for GW when one of my favorite things to do was to sit down and write lists with customers which grew into helping customers find ways to use their favorite (often 'less than optimal') units. And from there its remained a favorite part of my hobby.

I'm not suggesting that's how everyone views it, I am suggesting that you've effectively pained everyone who enjoys list writing with the same brush stroke. That being that anyone who likes list building needs it or wants it because they are afraid they wouldn't be good at the game without it.

My statement was only in regards to individuals who use listbuilding arguments as a cover when really what they want is, in essence, an unfair advantage just by bringing certain OP options. They do not enjoy listbuilding--they enjoy winning, and building a list is simply a means if not a chore to that end. Someone who really does enjoy listbuilding (I do, tremendously) knows full well that balance makes for a more interesting process, not less.

That largely depends on what you want to get out of list building. Games like KoW, WoTR, LoTR (just games from my wheelhouse) are more balanced games than say AoS or 40k but I find list writing to be far less rewarding or entertaining in those games. A well balanced game doesn't make list writing more interesting if the only thing you get out of it is bringing different compositions of units. There is a great deal of fun to be had in tinkering and tech-ing with various lists, especially when your goal is optimize units or to make sub optimal units more viable. I don't mind having the conversation but you do a fantastic job of condescending to effectively anyone who doesn't share your view point.

I have to say that I spend much more time tweaking lists for KoW than for AoS.

A fun part of list building for me is to find synergies within the list with a specific theme and not to find the best artefact, command skill and unit.
This is just quick math (of course for those that are not good at calculations it is more difficult and not so obvious) between different options to get the best.

It is not like that there are not different lists, but like for Stormcast it is obvious what is better and what units you should take to get most synergies out.
While just taking the stuff you like gives you a weaker list most of the time


In KoW everything is viable but there are still units that work better together than others and finding those is not only math alone and with many more options they are harder to find.
Taking the stuff you like gives you not a list that make you lose the game by default, but you can still tweak it to make it better

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Farseer_V2 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Listbuilding is more difficult in a balanced game, not non-existent. Having the right balance of front line, support, hammer, anvil, etc will still crush an army of randomly selected options. People know this. But some are afraid that without being able to get a dramatic advantage by making an overpowered list they won't be able to win as many games. Saying this sounds petty so there are other reasons brought up as a cover.

What sounds petty is your assigning a motive to a group of players that is entirely off base.

Explain how I am wrong and I will gladly rescind that statement.

Simple - you can simply enjoy list writing as an aspect of the hobby. I don't need list writing to win games as that's largely immaterial to my fun. I enjoy the actual process of writing lists and trying to squeeze extra efficiency out of units or trying to find a niche to make an overlooked unit viable. I don't do any of that to help me win games as I rarely play with those lists - I simply write them because its a part of my hobby. It started during my time working for GW when one of my favorite things to do was to sit down and write lists with customers which grew into helping customers find ways to use their favorite (often 'less than optimal') units. And from there its remained a favorite part of my hobby.

I'm not suggesting that's how everyone views it, I am suggesting that you've effectively pained everyone who enjoys list writing with the same brush stroke. That being that anyone who likes list building needs it or wants it because they are afraid they wouldn't be good at the game without it.

My statement was only in regards to individuals who use listbuilding arguments as a cover when really what they want is, in essence, an unfair advantage just by bringing certain OP options. They do not enjoy listbuilding--they enjoy winning, and building a list is simply a means if not a chore to that end. Someone who really does enjoy listbuilding (I do, tremendously) knows full well that balance makes for a more interesting process, not less.

That largely depends on what you want to get out of list building. Games like KoW, WoTR, LoTR (just games from my wheelhouse) are more balanced games than say AoS or 40k but I find list writing to be far less rewarding or entertaining in those games. A well balanced game doesn't make list writing more interesting if the only thing you get out of it is bringing different compositions of units. There is a great deal of fun to be had in tinkering and tech-ing with various lists, especially when your goal is optimize units or to make sub optimal units more viable. I don't mind having the conversation but you do a fantastic job of condescending to effectively anyone who doesn't share your view point.

Im sorry if that's how my statements came across, but I intended them to apply to only a narrow category of players. Not anyone who disagrees or anyone outside that narrow group. As I mentioned in the same post; to me, an avid listbuilder, KoW listbuilding was bland before it was balanced and having it be bland after being balanced (I am assuming it is now, I haven't touched it in some time) just speaks to balance not being the cause. Regardless, the idea that I am speaking poorly of anyone who enjoys listbuilding is flawed on a fundamental level unless you wish to argue that I am insulting myself. Understand that from my perspective it is you acting condescending.

Theres a difference in list building when you are building an army and when you are building a deck.

People like list-building to be like a deck in a card game. They want cards that are bad, they want cards that are ok, they want cards that are OP and they want others that are OP under certain circunstances.

The List-building phase in AoS and Warhammer 40k is what defines your strategy. You have your combos premade, and you just try to use them. The less interaction with your opponent, the better (This is why many people also love the double turn. If I can do all my stuff without interruption and auto-win, is better)

In a game with a list building phase where you make your army, like LOTR, you have some kind of strategy, but that strategy is always made with the idea of facing an enemy on the field (Ex: I will take this horse unit to support my right flank because I have heavy infantry protecting the middle.), and once you enter the battlefield, for your strategy to work, you need to have an interactive game because if your opponent does nothing you can't basically play, because theres no interesting choices.

Funny side note. FEC might actually be able to be the summoning king with a relatively decent build. A properly built FEC list can summon 1k points by turn 3-4. They make lizardmen jelly.

Sadly this isn't as over the top as Lizards adding 500pts because FEC actually need the summoning to compete with any other battletome armies desperately.

This is why for any narrative event I run I'm sticking to my original scenario houserule where if you bring in more than 20% of your points for free your opponent gets a sudden death victory condition.

Its worked great for the past couple of years and is still very relevant today.