Something on my mind. I read and have talks with a lot of people daily on not just this game but a bunch of tabletop games. As a games designer myself I like to keep myself immersed in what makes people enjoy the things that they do.

Something I have read or heard a lot is the importance of points as a balancing mechanism. That they are required to hold interest in the game as they bring balance to the game.

Taking Age of Sigmar as the sample, but easily swapping out 40k as well, in actual reality on the table (where the rubber meets the road) we seek to actively break balance. Thats a given. Thats expected. When we talk about listbuilding we are talking about creating a powerful list that can win the game before the game even starts. This seems like a common goal with the community as a whole and also very expected.

When things like summoning first dropped, there was a LOT of rallying against those upset at it saying that free summoning was just fine, people just needed to develop skills to learn how to build a list that could do the same (a variant of git gud).

Now that more and more of the new edition have been revealed, we know for sure that some forces will indeed be able to easily bring in well over 500 points free (making a 2000 point game a 2500 - 2000 point game) and in some cases even more. Then there are the already good units that are operating above the bell curve of power getting points drops, pushing them even further up the bell curve of power.

This happened with GHB 17 as well.

The reactions went from "summoning won't be broken, stop worrying" to "summoning may be broken now but that just means we should build armies that can summon a lot now".

There is this general level of acceptance that thats fine and that army hopping should be a thing. That each edition has its darlings and you should play one of those or just be accepting that you are going to be losing a lot and there is really no game to be had, but that's ok. When the next edition drops and new darlings are unveiled, you should ebay your current force or put them away, and collect the new darling, and the cycle repeats and thats ok.

I ask - why is this acceptable? Not even acceptable... why is this desired? Why is imbalance desired? Why do we see stated over and over how important points are for balance but then when imbalance is given, the community embraces it and extols its virtues to the heavens?

It seems like a contradiction to me. For my own learning, I'd like to know why things like free summoning and undercosted units are desired by the community in such large quantities that it seems to rally for actual balance is a minority and an annoyance.

The main downside I see in community building is simply people don't like having to spend a lot of money and time collecting a new force regularly to keep up with the imbalance in the name of being able to get a good game in that isn't very one-sided. Thats probably been the largest challenge I've faced even back in my tournament days a decade ago. We do have a few people who love this, and regularly buy new armies and have them commission painted so they don't have to deal with any of that, but I don't find that the norm (here).

Im curious from a developer standpoint as to how this design paradigm of imbalance is desired, even when so many give lip-service to points and needing balance?

Now I know we haven't seen the new edition proper yet, but the reaction I'm reading from the people that DO have the material tells me that people are enjoying the propensity for listbuilding imbalance immensely.

The simple answer is that a community is still a collection of individuals and does not represent one unified vision of balance. This is essentially why games kind of fall apart when a company stops managing the game and players start trying to create their own sense of balance. Everyone has a different goal and you'll never quite get the kind of consensus needed to make the right kind of changes.

To drill down into the player mindset a bit; the truth is that competitive players often have a very pragmatic outlook on a game. It's their job to utilize the rules to the fullest to win and there's a very clear division of labor in their minds as to who's responsible for deciding what balance is. It's often not that they're rejecting balance; its that they have to play the ball where it lies.

You can't realistically reject the imbalances in a game that's presented to you. You might not like them or agree with them, but its not really your place to say what is and is not fair. You very well might be right, but just as often people are wrong on this stuff and fail to take it upon themselves to step up to the challenge their opponent places before them. It's a really fuzzy grey line and for a lot of people its easier to just let the developer's have totalitarian control over it and play the game as it exists to the best they can.

Now that more and more of the new edition have been revealed, we know for sure that some forces will indeed be able to easily bring in well over 500 points free (making a 2000 point game a 2500 - 2000 point game) and in some cases even more. Then there are the already good units that are operating above the bell curve of power getting points drops, pushing them even further up the bell curve of power.

Except they can't just up and do that every turn. This is where that whole "balance" thing comes into play.

With that said, most of the armies that are going to be summoning things are those which people already knew how to counteract/control their summoning.

Kan, it's pretty obvious he's talking about the 500 extra points over the game. Which is pretty easy to do with some of the top offenders.

Also explain to me how you stop a Slaan on a table with any kind of line of sight blocking terrain. He's generating about 120pts per turn with the astrolith bearer.

 Hulksmash wrote:
Kan, it's pretty obvious he's talking about the 500 extra points over the game. Which is pretty easy to do with some of the top offenders.

But again, they can't just up and do that every turn for many armies.

Also explain to me how you stop a Slaan on a table with any kind of line of sight blocking terrain. He's generating about 120pts per turn with the astrolith bearer.

Yeah, and if you kill that Astrolith Bearer then the Slaan isn't casting any spells and not really making too much headway.

I think in a lot of cases, it isn't that gamers really want balance, they want the appearance of balance. A points system gives this appearance, even if it often is completely artificial and inaccurate. For a lot of folks, also, there's the drive they have to try to min-max things, and a points system lets them do this. Almost everyone realizes on some level that points are not going to be accurate, so the same kind of player who tries to roll up their D&D character to have the most benefits in game mechanics with the fewest flaws will try to throw together a wargame list with the fewest points but the highest performance.

Lots of historical gamers don't give a rat's about points, and play more based on scenario than anything else. For them, it's often more of a "simulation" than a "game." Many, many, many gamers by their very nature will try to exploit a ruleset to try to win; after all, for most gamers, that's the point of playing, right? Why else would you play unless it's to win? (Personally, for me this isn't the point. Yes, the objective of the game is to win, but the point of the game is to have fun, in my eyes.)

I believe it's "sport jock syndrome". Some people NEED to win with plastic toy soldiers and what ever gives them an edge they will take it. If we compare this to sports, the "imbalance" is the "drugs" that sports get you banned for. Thing is the "imbalance" is legal with GW.

Another thing I believe is lots of us have been with GW for almost 2 decades now. We are use to this and for lots of us, this is all we know so it's "normal". Be it a time sink, money sink, don't know any better or what not, we are just use to this. So while in the begining the pain was there, now it's a dull pain we can ignore since we are use to it.

I am not saying all people are like this but you know how the internet is, a few small group always ruins it for the larger group.

I don't think its a small group though. Its a very very large group.

And as to the above, the seraphon can pretty much generate free points every turn yes. Offing the astrolith bearer or the slaan is not trivial. Back in 2015 in the 1.0 days, that was the counter argument to tzeentch summoning spam. Just kill the caster. Its easy.

Except that every intelligent player knew that wasn't true and put their summoners deep in a corner and out of reach surrounded by screens. Ranged attacks in this game don't have the range to get across the table and into the corners, you have to push your way over there, and in four or so turns of trying to get to the corner, they've had that many turns to generate free points while keeping their summoners and accessories like astrolith bearers out of your range.

Some armies like stormcast or (lol other seraphon) can teleport wherever they want so that is not *as* much of an issue, but a lot of armies don't have that ability.

There is no way to "easily" stop seraphon from getting 500+ free points every game, thus reducing what is viable to take. You either need to match that or you need to generate a ton of damage to offset it.

I don't desire it. But here is my personal take;

-Back before 7ed 40k I used to build a new army yearly and take it around on the circuit around the US. I might add a unit here or there thru the year but the list stayed primarily the same for that year until I built a new list the following year. The rapid rate of change in 7th made this a non-workable plan so I just stopped. I built stuff I wanted, sold other stuff, and just borrowed for those same events. I'm still in that mode for 8th ed 40k because until all the books are out and the dust settles it's basically a slightly better balanced 7th ed.

-In Fantasy I tended to always stick with an army an add stuff for 2-3 years at a time. Never really jumped.

Now I'm happily at a point where I tend to have the majority of armies and they the worse ones at the time get played at local events or pick up games and the ones shining in the sun at the time go to cut throat tournaments. I just see the shifting of the scale as a chance to revisit old friends

I realize I'm also not the typical gamer or even tournament dude. I build a list that works for me, generally with things people see as weaknesses, and just play. In 40k that generally means 4-2 or 5-1 on the weekend with a chance at best overall. Based on local performance of AoS I expect it'll be largely similar since I regularly beat the snot out of one of the higher ITC dudes.

I did have hopes that essentially GW would drop most armies that couldn't summons usable stuff by what should equate to 200ish points per army and slightly bump summoner models make them SUMMONING armies to function at the same level as normal armies. They didn't so i am a bit sad. I mean happy for my lizards who will run rampant for a year but sad to see things like my FEC and Ironjawz stay below par.

Locally most people don't chase the dragon in AoS. I think that's because it's generally a year between point updates and they're getting into the feeling that most of the really egregious gak is going to be handled. Granted Tzeentch took to long but the rest of it is normally addressed pretty quick thru FAQ's on how they work. I'll be interested to see 2019's GHB since it'll include more US playtester results.

 Valander wrote:
I think in a lot of cases, it isn't that gamers really want balance, they want the appearance of balance. A points system gives this appearance, even if it often is completely artificial and inaccurate. For a lot of folks, also, there's the drive they have to try to min-max things, and a points system lets them do this. Almost everyone realizes on some level that points are not going to be accurate, so the same kind of player who tries to roll up their D&D character to have the most benefits in game mechanics with the fewest flaws will try to throw together a wargame list with the fewest points but the highest performance.

I'm leaning towards this view as well. Personally, I'd just want to have a pleasant experience without the feeling of a need that I need to play the system, rather than just a player. A bit subjective stance to take, but I do feel there are better activities out there where I could apply my analytical mind and time.

Yeah when I was chasing the dragon as a tournament player (1998 - 2007 or so) I had three priimary fantasy armies: chaos, vampire counts, and dark elves.

Those armies were very busted during my time, and I collected them largely because they were very busted.

Fear / autobreak was how I stayed in the top 10 at nearly ever GW GT i attended, and I had a chance of winning one in Chicago except that my game 5 was against another undead player so we drew and that knocked me down and out of the running for 1st overall.

From what I'm gathering, reading, and seeing on facebook... the UK guys that playtest this really honestly soulfully believe that this is an awesome version and that summoning spam is a great thing for the game. And these are tournament players that believe imbalance is *great* for the game. That just ... baffles me. Even at my worst powergaming, I knew that from a player retention standpoint and overall quality of game experience that my tournament group running amuk among the baby seals was bad for the game overall.

Thank you for the thoughts on the topic.

I know that my opinion on this matter was changed when i wrote azyr comp. The biggest complaint that hit my inbox on a regular interval until GHB killed the fan comps was "you killed the game by killing listbuildiing, you made things too boring now that 2000 points is the same as anyone else's 2000 points". I just never got the clarification as to why we see so much about points should be balanced but the goal seems to be keeping imbalance because thats what the community wants (otherwise listbuilding is pointless if you can't make 2000 points worth more than 2000 points then you aren't getting a leg up over someone else in the listbuilding phase). Considering the goal for me when writing azyr was a balanced system, I was taken a back a little by the negativity surrounding that goal.

I'd be interested to hear from Ninth and his experiences with PPC comp to see if they were similarly received.

I dont' want imbalance personally but I do want armies to function differently. Which is a hard sell to get right honestly. I'm a personality list person. My lists generally don't contain a massive load of "da best" current units. They contain the stuff that works well for me.

I'm hopeful that with the inclusion of more US playtesters for AoS and possibly sending over the AoS dev team like they do for 40k to major events will shift it a bit more toward 40k where if it weren't for 2 codexes dropping a month right now it's a pretty balanced game now that they've put in the rule of 3.

I wish there were a way to playtest and send feedback. I have no idea what channels they use for that kind of thing.


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Here is a response I found interesting on the topic:

IMO, points are like rules, a universal language that allows players to engage. With points, I can plan an unbalanced game and be aware of the odds.

You should be able to send opinions/thoughts to the faq email. That reaches the devs eventually from what I understand. At least now it does instead of being binned like 4 years ago.

auticus wrote:

The reactions went from "summoning won't be broken, stop worrying" to "summoning may be broken now but that just means we should build armies that can summon a lot now".

There is this general level of acceptance that thats fine and that army hopping should be a thing. That each edition has its darlings and you should play one of those or just be accepting that you are going to be losing a lot and there is really no game to be had, but that's ok. When the next edition drops and new darlings are unveiled, you should ebay your current force or put them away, and collect the new darling, and the cycle repeats and thats ok.

I ask - why is this acceptable? Not even acceptable... why is this desired? Why is imbalance desired? Why do we see stated over and over how important points are for balance but then when imbalance is given, the community embraces it and extols its virtues to the heavens?

My opinion:

It is not about any of the things you listed. Nothing to do with how people prefer to play at all.

This is purely about GW being given a free pass for crap game design because it is GW. People just bend over backwards to make excuses for GW and convince themselves that EVERYTHING IS JUST HOW I LIKE IT because nostalgia or stockholm syndrome or something. The exact same rules would crash and burn if published by anoyone else.

Some things to keep in mind:

-If a player isn't looking to make a strong/strongest list they tend not to be asking advice. Which is to say the majority of armies out there are not trying to break the balance but have a disproportionately tiny place in online discussion. To use myself as an example; I have four armies but only one of them makes an effort to break the game.

-To use the example of 500 points of summoning over a game, this isn't as simple as making it 2500 vs 2000, because those summons require mechanics that must be used properly and more importantly these summons only see use during a fraction of the game rather than the whole thing.

Now to get down to the original premise of the thread. I accept/tolerate imbalance for two reasons. One is that I understand the average perso cares less than I do. Two is that I realize it is somewhat of a lost cause. I will criticise imbalance where I see it but I also make a big effort to move on and enjoy the game anyways. On summoning I see it as being a bigger issue in casual games because players will be less prepared to counter it and because it scales very poorly. Nurgle in particular summons just as much in a 1000 point game as it does in 2500 point game and that's a problem. Many of the other mechanics only scale in small ways by size, like Seraphon.

My terror about summoning being free was exactly that... that for the most part it'd be fine (like with nurgle... its not that big a deal) but that they'd bust the game wide open with a few factions. And they appear to have done just that with seraphon and the death recycling and to a lesser extent tzeentch.

To add to my thoughts; even in a perfect balance situation it does not kill listbuilding, quite the opposite. Because having the right roles to support each other and a balance of units/model count/characters to complete objectives efficiently is worth more in a balanced setting than just spamming the most effective units. If someone says that balance kills list building then no offense but they actually do need to get good.

Games Workshop know they could put out just about any slop of rules, probably written by an intern in fifteen minutes and people will pay for it, and then go on the internet and defend to the death why ACTUALLY the imbalance is totally fine.

Surprised people have such a positive view of GHB 2019. Seems like GW would just keep releasing new stuff that isn't really balanced, much like what they're doing now.

I appreciate the semblance of balance they're trying to do with FAQ's and what not, but I don't think GW's aim is really balance. It's to sell great models and a fun exciting system.


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 Arbitrator wrote:
Games Workshop know they could put out just about any slop of rules, probably written by an intern in fifteen minutes and people will pay for it, and then go on the internet and defend to the death why ACTUALLY the imbalance is totally fine.

Not that you're completely wrong, but your statement does come off as kind of "STOP ENJOYING THINGS I DON'T"

auticus wrote:
I don't think its a small group though. Its a very very large group.

And as to the above, the seraphon can pretty much generate free points every turn yes. Offing the astrolith bearer or the slaan is not trivial. Back in 2015 in the 1.0 days, that was the counter argument to tzeentch summoning spam. Just kill the caster. Its easy.

And for some armies--even then, it was. I didn't have a huge issue with Tzeentch as Wanderers(albeit with a Gryph Hound or two on the field as well). Couple of Glade Captains with Battle Standards to provide umbrellas for my Glade Guard against spells, Waywatchers to go hero-hunting, and a couple of Gryph-Hounds in the list to make them have to either bottle themselves up or move around where they pick to summon.

I'm not saying that it's going to be a cakewalk to beat, but let's chill out a bit eh? If a Slann is building up points--they're not casting. If an Astrolith Bearer is camped back in safety--he's not buffing.
Also, it's now been stated (can't confirm 100%) that if your General is slain in matched play, you can't pick a new one. That means an assassination run on a Slann CAN be a viable tactic.

Except that every intelligent player knew that wasn't true and put their summoners deep in a corner and out of reach surrounded by screens. Ranged attacks in this game don't have the range to get across the table and into the corners, you have to push your way over there, and in four or so turns of trying to get to the corner, they've had that many turns to generate free points while keeping their summoners and accessories like astrolith bearers out of your range.

I feel this is a bit disingenuous from you. You were one of the people arguing against me when it came to me mentioning that I hoped to see something to buff ranged units since they can now be locked into combat(a thing that didn't exist before), implying that ranged units had some kind of definitive ownership of the tables. Now you're arguing they really didn't?

Some armies like stormcast or (lol other seraphon) can teleport wherever they want so that is not *as* much of an issue, but a lot of armies don't have that ability.

A lot more armies have that ability than don't. We've gotten a lot of heroes/units that have a way to start off the board now. For my Idoneth, as an example, I can use Soulscryers(amusingly enough--they saw a 20pt reduction!) to bring in some units with Fly and just say screw it to any screen that someone has. It's certainly a more extreme example as I don't know a whole lot of armies that can do the trick plus bring in units that have Fly to avoid screens, but I'm sure that some exist.

What Summoning abilities aren't tied to casting? I feel like Summoning would have been way worse had the Unbinding range still been 18" and not the 30" it is now.

Don't the summoned dinos have to be place close to the banner? So if that banner is hiding in the corner, the dinos you summon will be in that same corner. Those "500+ points" aren't going to do you much good if they're not holding or taking an objective.

 EnTyme wrote:
Don't the summoned dinos have to be place close to the banner? So if that banner is hiding in the corner, the dinos you summon will be in that same corner. Those "500+ points" aren't going to do you much good if they're not holding or taking an objective.

You can either;

1) spend a few turns saving up and then teleport him up and summon away

or

2) Teleport him up turn 1 to a good position in hiding and summon off of him

It's hard to flat stop the summoning. And generally you'll get back the value from your summoners because of their natural abilities. It's not game breaking but it's definitely good.

I feel this is a bit disingenuous from you. You were one of the people arguing against me when it came to me mentioning that I hoped to see something to buff ranged units since they can now be locked into combat(a thing that didn't exist before), implying that ranged units had some kind of definitive ownership of the tables. Now you're arguing they really didn't?

Ranged units not being able to reach across the entire table to tag a hero hiding and summoning is not the same as ranged units not being powerful because they are in range to nail the rest of the army.

I don't consider ranged units not having the ability to go corner to corner on the table as making them weak or not owning tables. I consider that if I want to hide a single summoning hero behind a screen and away from ranged units, that I can do so for a few turns to benefit from my free points. That does not mean ranged units were not king.

 jreilly89 wrote:
What Summoning abilities aren't tied to casting? I feel like Summoning would have been way worse had the Unbinding range still been 18" and not the 30" it is now.

From what's been seen so far, the ability to "Summon X" is being flatout removed as a spell.


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 EnTyme wrote:
Don't the summoned dinos have to be place close to the banner? So if that banner is hiding in the corner, the dinos you summon will be in that same corner. Those "500+ points" aren't going to do you much good if they're not holding or taking an objective.

Yes. They have to be placed within 9" of the banner, which can't be placed within 9" of an enemy via the method Hulksmash suggests.


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auticus wrote:

I feel this is a bit disingenuous from you. You were one of the people arguing against me when it came to me mentioning that I hoped to see something to buff ranged units since they can now be locked into combat(a thing that didn't exist before), implying that ranged units had some kind of definitive ownership of the tables. Now you're arguing they really didn't?

Ranged units not being able to reach across the entire table to tag a hero hiding and summoning is not the same as ranged units not being powerful because they are in range to nail the rest of the army.

I don't consider ranged units not having the ability to go corner to corner on the table as making them weak or not owning tables. I consider that if I want to hide a single summoning hero behind a screen and away from ranged units, that I can do so for a few turns to benefit from my free points. That does not mean ranged units were not king.

Again, this is still being disingenuous IMO. If ranged units don't have the damage output to tear through the screens to get at the casters for summonfarms--then they clearly aren't "king".

Certainly some ranged units have been overperforming but most ranged units have been lackluster.

If you feel that if ranged units can't perform everything and beat everything that they aren't king, so be it. Thats your definition of what makes a strong unit.

To me thats not the case. And thats certainly backed up by a solid chunk of power cheese featuring as much shooting as they can get their hands on because why would you never.

So no dis ingenuity, simply a difference in opinion on what a term means.

auticus wrote:
If you feel that if ranged units can't perform everything and beat everything that they aren't king, so be it. Thats your definition of what makes a strong unit.

To me thats not the case. And thats certainly backed up by a solid chunk of power cheese featuring as much shooting as they can get their hands on because why would you never.

So no dis ingenuity, simply a difference in opinion on what a term means.

You argued that ranged needed to be able to be 'locked down' because otherwise it can delete units from the board.

You specifically argue that, while having only been really talking about Skyfires and a select few Stormcast ranged units(nobody's going to be upset by a bunch of Vanguard with their hand crossbows for example). It's disingenuous at best, straight up nonsense at worst considering your statements here.

I, personally, feel that dedicated ranged units for the most part are overpriced considering most of their statlines. The weapons just don't have the weight of fire, the capability for Mortal Wounds, or the Rend to justify their prices. Do you really want to argue that Namarti Reavers are worth the same as Thralls? That a Waywatcher at 120 pts is worth the same as a similar CC character?


I get that it all comes down to opinion--but I've never really seen an all-ranged list that a good melee centric army can't beat. The lack of a Stand and Shoot/Overwatch mechanic ensures that. Now with the caveat of ranged units having to shoot units that are in their face, chaff suddenly means something more than "a screen I might have to shoot through".

Ranged units being able to delete units off the board has nothing to do with being unable to pick out a caster purposely hiding in the opposite corner of the table out of range.

I've already done a complete math analysis of the entire game twice now to know that a good chunk of ranged units are by far and away not overpriced. A lot sit on the bell curve which is fine, but a unit being priced correctly or near correctly does not make it over priced because a solid 20% of the game is underpriced. It means that GW fails to balance their game for the 20% of the game that is underpriced, which includes a good chunk of units with ranged options. (the exact number sitting ABOVE the average bell curve was 18%)

The ranged units that I see day in and day out are usually the ones that sit above the bell curve of power, meaning that they are under cost for what they do.

I've already done several threads on dakka about this very topic several times now over the past three years. If you have some kind of math that shows the majority of ranged units are overcost, please present it because I'd like to see it.

auticus wrote:
Ranged units being able to delete units off the board has nothing to do with being unable to pick out a caster purposely hiding in the opposite corner of the table out of range.

I've already done a complete math analysis of the entire game twice now to know that a good chunk of ranged units are by far and away not overpriced. A lot sit on the bell curve which is fine, but a unit being priced correctly or near correctly does not make it over priced because a solid 20% of the game is underpriced. It means that GW fails to balance their game for the 20% of the game that is underpriced, which includes a good chunk of units with ranged options. (the exact number sitting ABOVE the average bell curve was 18%)

The ranged units that I see day in and day out are usually the ones that sit above the bell curve of power, meaning that they are under cost for what they do.

And that's the rub. What ranged units are those? Complete listing of the ones you see "day in and day out".

I've already done several threads on dakka about this very topic several times now over the past three years. If you have some kind of math that shows the majority of ranged units are overcost, please present it because I'd like to see it.

I don't care about the math, to be honest. The simple fact that a Waywatcher is now 120pts speaks for me.

Ok. Well if the waywatcher is 120 points for you means that ranged units across the board are all undercost, bless you.

I've already been in this conversation multiple times. You want to needle and nitpick and pedant.

This whole conversation started with stating that a summoner can hide in the corner of the table means that saying ranged units being too powerful is some form of lying.

I don't care about the math, to be honest.

And with that we can end the discussion here. In a game that revolves around stats, probabilities, and number generators, math is the only source of information that matters when it comes to gauging numeric strength of odds and what is under / over costed.

If one person has a ton of math and calculations to back that up and the response is "well I don't care I'm just right" it isn't going to come across very well.

auticus wrote:
Ok. Well if the waywatcher is 120 points for you means that ranged units across the board are all undercost, bless you.

Compare a 120pt Waywatcher to a melee dedicated hero. I can wait.

A Waywatcher gets 3 attacks at 22" with 3+/3+ and Rend of -1. He can make two different shots; one where he gets 3 more attacks and to Hit rolls of 6 grant additional attacks OR one where he deals 2 damage with each bow shot and each time he makes a wound roll of 6 or more then the Rend is -2 instead of -1. He has a -1 to be hit during the Shooting phase and gets +1 to hit rolls with his bow if he stood still during Movement. He has a Command Ability allowing him to make it so that a Wanderers unit within 18" of him gets the same -1 to being hit during the Shooting phase as him.

Even when he was 100pts, quite a few of the Wanderers players that I've read their lists for tournaments and the like only take them to unlock Sisters of the Watch as Battleline. SoTW are considered a pretty damn good shooting unit simply because they get an "Overwatch" ability that very few units get.

I've already been in this conversation multiple times. You want to needle and nitpick and pedant.

And, to put it politely, you'd rather just drop stats and not actually engage in a discussion. You think that the math is the end all be all. It is for tournaments, certainly.

This whole conversation started with stating that a summoner can hide in the corner of the table means that saying ranged units being too powerful is some form of lying.

Now hold on one second. If you think I'm saying you're lying, that's something I want to clarify right here and now--that's not the case. Accusing someone of being disingenuous does not mean you're accusing them of lying--it means that you're saying they're purposely leaving things out for the sake of their argument.

It would be like if I pretended that Skyfires didn't exist when I make my arguments about ranged units. I try to make sure I always have a caveat in there about how there are SOME units that are just ridiculous in terms of ranged.

I don't care about the math, to be honest.

And with that we can end the discussion here. In a game that revolves around stats, probabilities, and number generators, math is the only source of information that matters when it comes to gauging numeric strength of odds and what is under / over costed.

And here's the crux of the issue:
You just want to run the numbers, you don't really seem to care what the actual unit does.


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 NinthMusketeer wrote:
If one person has a ton of math and calculations to back that up and the response is "well I don't care I'm just right" it isn't going to come across very well.

That's fair enough, but realistically I feel that simply talking about the math isn't actually addressing the issue at hand.

What can we, realistically, do to make ranged units worth their points without making them into Skyfires?

Well a waywatcher is totally worth 120 points. I've seen it played, I've run the numbers vs melee equivalents and it is very much worth it. You don't think it's worth it because you frequently express the sentiment of wanting units you play to be better at no cost at all. Further, I raise your evidence that they aren't very tournament viable as good evidence they are appropriately costed now; a unit that sees limited tournament play likely needs a small point increase to bring it in line.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Well a waywatcher is totally worth 120 points. I've seen it played, I've run the numbers vs melee equivalents and it is very much worth it.

What are you using as "melee equivalents"?

You don't think it's worth it because you frequently express the sentiment of wanting units you play to be better at no cost at all.

I frequently express the sentiment of units that I play to be worth their points. I'd be absolutely fine with the Waywatcher to lose his Command Ability and ability to make Sisters of the Watch Battleline(never understood why that happened anyways--it should be the Waystrider doing that) in exchange for him to be a guaranteed character killer.

Further, I raise your evidence that they aren't very tournament viable as good evidence they are appropriately costed now; a unit that sees limited tournament play likely needs a small point increase to bring it in line.

Increase or decrease?

Because your statement makes no sense if you're truly meaning "increase".

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Well a waywatcher is totally worth 120 points. I've seen it played, I've run the numbers vs melee equivalents and it is very much worth it.

What are you using as "melee equivalents"?

You don't think it's worth it because you frequently express the sentiment of wanting units you play to be better at no cost at all.

I frequently express the sentiment of units that I play to be worth their points. I'd be absolutely fine with the Waywatcher to lose his Command Ability and ability to make Sisters of the Watch Battleline(never understood why that happened anyways--it should be the Waystrider doing that) in exchange for him to be a guaranteed character killer.

Further, I raise your evidence that they aren't very tournament viable as good evidence they are appropriately costed now; a unit that sees limited tournament play likely needs a small point increase to bring it in line.

Increase or decrease?

Because your statement makes no sense if you're truly meaning "increase".

So you just want the unit to be something different personally? That's totally fine, but it's about personal preference, not balance.

auticus wrote:
Ranged units being able to delete units off the board has nothing to do with being unable to pick out a caster purposely hiding in the opposite corner of the table out of range.

I've already done a complete math analysis of the entire game twice now to know that a good chunk of ranged units are by far and away not overpriced. A lot sit on the bell curve which is fine, but a unit being priced correctly or near correctly does not make it over priced because a solid 20% of the game is underpriced. It means that GW fails to balance their game for the 20% of the game that is underpriced, which includes a good chunk of units with ranged options. (the exact number sitting ABOVE the average bell curve was 18%)

The ranged units that I see day in and day out are usually the ones that sit above the bell curve of power, meaning that they are under cost for what they do.

I've already done several threads on dakka about this very topic several times now over the past three years. If you have some kind of math that shows the majority of ranged units are overcost, please present it because I'd like to see it.

Your math sucks. Sorry. I don't know what parameters you used but they failed utterly to simulate reality. Ranged units in general perform extremely poorly outside of the well known standouts (Skyfires, Balloon Kharadron, Judicators, Kurnoths...ish, longgunners assuming fully buffed) If your finding are utterly inconsistent with the reality of the tabletop across literally thousands of competitive games that means that you made an error in your assumptions or missed a variable somewhere.


The ability to do math is great and very helpful to ballparking the value of a unit, it is not an absolute correct doctrine of power on the simple basis of their being too many variables to account for. So you do damage output, great. How do you Valuate range? Movement? Wounds? Bravery? Save? Footprint? Buff-ability? Ease of Use? Presumably you're using some sort of weighting systems for these (even a child would know better than to take raw DPS output and call that done) and if even one of these weights is off you could be orders of magnitude wrong in your determination of strength.

And then you have matchup strength. Even the best shooting units in the game are largely useless against vanguard wing. Any shooting units that can't do reliable mortal wounds will be totally unable to do ANY damage to a Stardrake+Fulminator list, Murderhost and Beastclaw raiders can touch the back board edge on the first turn with a bit of luck practically eliminating the shooting phase, Deepkin make shooting units a sad joke for the most part, DoK have the ability to make their entire army -1 to hit for all shooting units, etc, etc, etc. How are you accounting for the likelihood of running into these lists?

Doing the math on units doesn't give you some deep insider knowledge of the inner workings of the game. Every competitive player does very similar math, though most tend not to bother with clear underperformers the same way as you. The difference seems to be: 1. They're not quite as conceited about their ability to do simple statistical analysis and 2. They're better at it. You've been consistently wrong about the strength of units and armies since the first day the general's handbook dropped. You fall months behind the powercurve and cite 'competitive' tables that are clearly average to mediocre players with a competitive outlook as being the absolute best dipstick of power.

Ive been waiting a few weeks to back your attacks and you still havent.

Your recent claim was that nagash is present on high tournament tables and that im full of **** because i made the claim nagash isnt seen very often, which im still waiting on evidence for.

A solid half dozen times before that you cite some example of me being grossly wrong without citing an example and then when prompted for one you vanish, only to appear later with the same song and dance.

Your posts are filled with nothing but bait and attacks so erjack welcome to my ignore list, you wontf be getting a further response from me.

As to kan’s response above that i dont want to engage in discussion, thats also not true. But your recent commentary has also been inflammatory andattacking and there is no discussion to be had while the talk is tinged with attacks.

The math is the only thing we have with substance. Everything beyond that is simply conjecture. Its running in circles going “this is op because i feel it is” followed by “no its not because i feel its not”. Followed by a jackanape going “git gud”

Accusing me of disenginuity is the same as accusing me of lying to me, because its a form of willfully obscuring what i know to be the truth; deception. Which im in no way employing.

You and i also very clearly have different objectives and goals and so i again chalk that up to agree to disagree and go from there. My primary goals are immersion narratively. Give me an idea for a buff to shooting units that makes sense bd is logical and not gamey for the sake of gamey and ill definitely consider it.

Regardless though it doesnt matter since neither you nor i are on the design team or have influence to change their opinion or designs. So getting heated over opinions that cant change the game are pointless to me.

This thread has been thoroughly derailed. Lets get back on topic.

It would indeed be wonderful if we could stay on topic and more importantly adhere to rule #1 while we're at it.

This actually stems from GW having a very traditional wargaming approach combining with how many player's of their game want a common framework so they can play strangers.

Probably the biggest eye opening experience for me was when I got boxes of wargaming books and newsletters from the 1960s and 70s in an estate sale. As I read them over time I started to see pretty much every mechanic GW uses present in the rules that predate the drive towards complexity that happened in the late 70s and into the 80s. In the 80s, games like Starfleet Battles, Battletech, tons of historical games and many RPGs were driving the complexity way, way up.

GW didn't follow suit in all their games. Warhammer and 40k stuck with the simpler ideas of the 60s. Roll a dice for a model, roll to hit, roll to wound, roll a save. Simple move-shoot-charge turn structures.

One thing that's in all these old games is that the actual set up of the game is negotiable. The original designers of warhammer still play that way. You can still see that in their more current projects like Black Powder or Hail Caesar from Warlord Games.

Rick Priestly wrote a book a couple years ago entitled Tabletop Wargames: A Designers' and Writers' Handbook

Rick Priestly wrote:There are essentially three things to grasp about points values –

They don’t work
nevertheless we have to have them
even so they can’t really be reduced to a mathematical formula.

He also had something interesting to say in an editorial in Wargames Soldiers & Strategy magazine:

Rick Priestly wrote:When we are dealing with commercial rules and ranges of models, it is the duty of the army lists to structure forces in a way that enhances the commercial value of the range, whilst using the points values and the internal rules of the list itself to maintain a reasonable balance during game play. This is the most difficult aspect of list-writing for fantasy games. You have to respect the commerciality of the list (or livelihoods will be lost … starting with yours!) but the commercial value of the whole game relies entirely upon its appeal to the gaming public.

This army building framework is about commerciality.

One guy in our local group exemplifies this. He's getting into AoS and the first thing he did after narrowing down a faction was to prebuild a 1000 and 2000 point army list and then started buying towards having that. The rest of us are just buying whatever we think looks cool or whatever strikes as awesome in the fiction.

For many people, the points system supplies them with needed direction in collecting. But that's not really what this thread is about.

In the old wargames people played for decades without point systems. They negotiated their way towards putting models on the table, perhaps agreeing to use approximations of historical formations or actual battles as inspiration. Eventually the army list and points were born, but it took a large amount of commercialization to make that approach the dominant one.

So you have this points and army building system that was really just about an easy way to get a game set up. And it was also about a framework for collecting models so a range could be even more commercially viable.

Now take that environment and try to make the strongest list possible. Start viewing the points as a game resource that you spend in order to get the strongest army you can. Gamify the very setting up of the game itself.

That's where this strange imbalance seeking comes from.

And it's not bad!

It's just different. As it's now part of the game itself (making strategic choices about what goes into your army) it's safe to assume that people enjoy it.

I'm not a competitive magic player, but a friend is and he always comments about how wargaming players haven't yet embraced the variety of ways to play that magic players have. That it's okay for people to take different approaches as long as their priorities line up. I'll let him know about this thread and maybe he can comment further.

The real problems are when imbalance and broken game play happen by accident. When people who are not interested in this approach find a massive amount of synergy dumped on one side of their game.

While it might be tempting to say it's also a problem when two people who want different things from the game have the exact same negative experience, that's actually socially correctable. You can talk about what you want out of the game.

And the accidental breaking happens way, way less. To make a tournament level army you have to think very differently about your allegiance and allies and command abilities and spells and the tempo of a game and how it all interacts with expected scenarios.

This is even more so in 40k where you design your detachments around stratagems and command points to make the best possible army. People were not building the Allaitoc/Ynnari tournament list by accident. Nor do they spam mortars by accident. When you are gluing the wings onto your 3rd hive tyrant, you know what you are doing.

Exalted your post for the well thought out response. Thank you for the input.

I have that book by Rick Priestly. Its a great read. Probably one of my favorites particularly if you are interested in designing games yourself.

Simple.

GW cult of loyalty trumps everything else. You play the game that has opponents. If the cheese du jour is what is being played, that's what you buy in to. It'd be simple enough to vote with our wallets and lay our complaints out on the different media outlets, but it won't happen because GW players for decades have been acclimated to the paradigm shifts.

This is why I went retro, simpler to stick with a dead edition and recruit players.

auticus wrote:
Exalted your post for the well thought out response. Thank you for the input.

I have that book by Rick Priestly. Its a great read. Probably one of my favorites particularly if you are interested in designing games yourself.

It was a little scattered, but I think my post communicated what I wanted to say.

The Priestly book does a very good job of showing the practical considerations that come up when designing rules. Like how table sizes can directly impact how you pick your movement rates. The book has been criticized as a "how to design Warhammer based wargames" rather than wargames in general. I think it's a very fair criticism, but it also reflects just how relevant the book is to any conversation about Warhammer.

We are accepting of imbalance because if you want to make the strongest army possible in a game with a points system, you obviously should seek out as many things as possible that either are pointed too cheaply or give you synergy so you get more power for each point spent. The other option is to make intelligent predictions about what you might face. So if there's going to be lots of infantry, your ability to spill out lots of wounding attacks is important. But if there's going to be lots of stuff with great saves, lots of rend is where you want to be. Or wow you respond to the expected amount of magic and so on.

That is way harder to do than just finding where the points costs are too low and then building synergistic lists using that stuff.

The truly great tournament player will do both. They'll make the best meta call in terms of what they need in the army and do it using the most points efficient and synergistic way possible.

It's not how I enjoy the Warhammer games. But i get why people do. I am also amused when people sign up for this arrangement and then complain about it. As if the points system is supposed to somehow never allow differences in power level in the face of people intentionally trying to create them. A lot of the time this reflects a social problem rather than a game design problem. The game needs to appeal to a wide variety of players who take the competitive side of things to greater and less degrees of seriousness. So many of these instances where people have mismatches in army power levels are actually mismatches about the expectation of how the game should work in general. Then add in ego based denial where people might not be able to accept their loses (it must be the other person breaking things or their opponent must be "that guy" or WAAC or whatever).

The other reason this acceptance of seeking out imbalance is so popular online is that matched play is seen as the language of warhammer when talking with strangers. Most of the people on this forum will never, ever play eachother in person. So it's a natural place for competitive matched play type thinking to dominate.

So we're selecting for it as well simply as a result of it being an internet forum.

The issue comes in the 'accidental' department, where we see time and again that it is actually very easy to accidentally create one army woefully imbalanced against another. Take the 2nd edition starter set; players lining up equal points will inevitably create a stronger Stormcast list because of just one unit being so wildly off. It's easy for experienced players to look at it and go 'oh just eliminate this unit and it resolves things' but for newbies or even just casual players the situation will be very different. It may take them a half dozen really lop sided games to figure the issue out, if they are even able to do so then or even keep playing that long.

There's also a brushing over of the difficulty in resolving things socially. Even with reasonably decent social skills it's common to find players who may not be breaking the game but will be spamming strong units, enough to make their lists unfun in a casual setting. It's easy to SAY 'well explain things out' or 'play against someone else' but many times people understandably do not want to get into a social conflict just to enjoy the game even assuming the other party would listen. Further, many people don't have a choice. This isn't mtg where there's dozens of players around so it's easy to find a handful that fit your niche, for most players they are more or less stuck with what they have.

So while it's important to understand that there isn't a wrong way to play, it's also important to understand that balance concerns are very legitimate from a social and financial standpoint. GW has a vested interest in making their games reasonably well balanced because they sell better when that happens. Note that drops in popularity inevitably coincide with periods of poor game balance, and for AoS note that even a extremely basic and loose balancing system (GHB1) created an actual market for the game where as a lack of one had merely a trickle. Balance matters more than just being a personal preference; it affects the community, and it affects sales.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Some additional thoughts...

Balance makes wargames more appealing. How many people played wargames before points were a thing? How many people played AoS before points were a thing? Some people don't mind negotiating things out to get an approximation, but many (the majority) want to be able to work things up to the same point values and have those armies be about the same power to each other. And they aren't wrong for that. When balance is really bad then the point value stops being a decent metric and things move to points just being a framework for negotiating (with the added issue of some individuals using them as an excuse to power game against players that don't want to deal with it). But players don't negotiate because most players don't have that kind of time or energy in their lives--they go do something else.

Honestly, I think the Evocators aren't going to be as impressive once the Myrmourn Banshees make an appearance.

Them being able to unbind Empower and getting +1A for doing so while being able to do D3 damage at a -2 Rend sounds like a potential counter.

Yeah but thats like... one unit. If this game would be just two factions then yeah, having one faction counter the other with specific untis its ok.

But it is not that kind of game.

 Galas wrote:
Yeah but thats like... one unit. If this game would be just two factions then yeah, having one faction counter the other with specific untis its ok.

But it is not that kind of game.

Talking specifically about the starter set and Nighthaunt v Stormcast--y'know, the thing that we'll be hearing a lot of since it's going to be the two armies people grow out from?

Outside of that--simplest solution is going to be to shoot them or kill them with ranged attacks/spells--or any units that can resolve their attacks and flee.

Suggesting that one unit with a theoretical counter (that doesn't work since the evocators can just not cast then beat the banshees in melee anyways) is anything resembling a solution is ridiculous.

Then 'shoot them or use gryph hounds'. Never mind if they deep strike, charge you, or just make saves with 3w and a 4+. Or you play one of the many armies without reasonable access to those solutions. It seems like you are just trying to disagree for the sake of it rather than come up with a sensible argument.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Suggesting that one unit with a theoretical counter (that doesn't work since the evocators can just not cast then beat the banshees in melee anyways) is anything resembling a solution is ridiculous.

You brought up the starter set and the idea that players will be able to create a stronger Stormcast list because of just Evocators.. My initial comment was specifically talking about the starter set and growing out of that.

Heavens fricking forbid I comment on a specific situation without making it abundantly clear, huh?

Then 'shoot them or use gryph hounds'. Never mind if they deep strike, charge you, or just make saves with 3w and a 4+. Or you play one of the many armies without reasonable access to those solutions. It seems like you are just trying to disagree for the sake of it rather than come up with a sensible argument.

This is assuming that they will have access to "deep strike" and that the Allegiance ability hasn't had its wording cleaned up in the Battletome due out with Nighthaunt's.

Anyways: In Order, everyone has access to the Gryph-Hound solution. Some can take other items(Khinerai Lifetakers can do it in combat, Heartrenders can do it after they shoot). There's probably more, but I have stuff to do and I don't want to waste my afternoon looking up more.
In Death, I don't know a unit off the top of my head that can do exactly this--but Hexwraiths can do this as part of Movement.
I don't know Destruction or Chaos well enough to comment.

None of those are solutions. They are all units that will get the snot beaten out of them in equal points vs evocators. And no, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that you clairfy context on the internet. And you still dodged that the banshees aren't a solution anyways. This is how it goes Kan, you raise invalid points to disagree for the sake of it, get called on them, raise further nitpicks that still do not validate your position, then eventually drop it only to start things up the next time.

Which is a shame, because it drowns out the numerous good things you have to say.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
None of those are solutions. They are all units that will get the snot beaten out of them in equal points vs evocators.

And this is the problem I have with calling, in my opinion, a specific unit out. Especially before we have the damn Battletome in hand.

And no, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that you clairfy context on the internet.

Fine:
SPECIFICALLY DEALING WITH THE CONTEXT OF GROWING A NIGHTHAUNT ARMY OUT FROM THE STARTER SET, I personally feel that Myrmourn Banshees are going to be a viable counter to Evocators being grown out of the same starter set using the same path.

Remember that the various "grow your army" things tend to be based around themes, and with the Sacrosanct Chamber? Who knows what the hell the next "suggested" items are going to be past the Easy to Builds.

And you still dodged that the banshees aren't a solution anyways. This is how it goes Kan, you raise invalid points to disagree for the sake of it, get called on them, raise further nitpicks that still do not validate your position, then eventually drop it only to start things up the next time.

A "solution" does not mean simply that in a 1:1 fight, they'll push the snot out of the Evocators. A "solution" is something that gives you a way to answer the problem: in this case, that Evocators are a heavy hitting melee unit that also has a single spell that they can cast, and will likely be getting spells cast upon them to beef them up.

With Myrmourn Banshees, they get to Unbind spells as though they're a Wizard and for every 4 Banshees, they get +1 to their Unbind roll. They start at 4 and go up to 12 in Matched Play--meaning they'd be at a +3 to their Unbinding Rolls, meaning it's very likely to be 13 hits(the unit champ gets 2 attacks) that deal D3 damage at a -2 Rend. They're also Summonable, meaning they can be affected by the Guardian of Soul's "Spectral Lure" spell.
Are they going to walk all over Evocators? Maybe. Maybe not. But they can do something Evocators can't, and that's come back from the dead while dealing D3 wounds every time they make a successful attack. And let's not forget that what Evocators have going for them against many other units(Rend and Mortal Wounds) is partially mitigated by the Ethereal special rule.

Which is a shame, because it drowns out the numerous good things you have to say.

Meh. I've been taking to just simply walking away from arguments now if I'm going to be honest with you. It's not worth the time or energy in many cases. I'd rather discuss things in a positive manner than just shout and tell people "NO YOU'RE WRONG!".

So toodles. Back to Idoneth painting!

 Hulksmash wrote:


Also explain to me how you stop a Slaan on a table with any kind of line of sight blocking terrain. He's generating about 120pts per turn with the astrolith bearer.

But how many points is a Slann's spellcasting worth? Because a Slann generating 120pts per turn is contributing almost nothing else to the game (constellation and a possible Command ability). What would the value of those three spells be in terms of points?

A Slann that survives the whole game and does nothing but summon for 5 turns is going to end up producing around 600 points worth of units, give or take. That may result in a victory. But so might a Slaan that cast 15 spells. A 40-strong Saurus Warrior unit with Starlight (attacks against it -1 to hit) and the 2nd Aqshy spell (+1 dmg on melee weapons) is going to do some serious damage.

Some excellent discussion in this thread. Thanks!

I had never really copped the dichotomy between designing lists for "balance" when you know everyone is going to seek out the imbalance. Very interesting! I think with some distance from everything it is easier to see that now.

But I think it is important to look at the ways in which Warhammer is not like Magic. In Magic, you do not have much attachment to the cards, generally. They are cheap game tokens, and you have loads of them. The way you buy them even encourages you not to get too attached to one particular colour of magic.

In Warhammer, people pick a faction and then spend hours and hours assembling and painting VERY EXPENSIVE miniatures before playing. The emotional and monetary investment in what you have bought is important. People pick their faction for a variety of reasons - aestethics, gameplay, faction background or "feel" or even just price.

But that faction identity is strong, and it is a major part of the success of Warhammer.

But what a new player does not know, and what none of us can know before a new edition drops, is that from a gameplay standpoint some of these factions (and choices within all factions) are "right", and others are "wrong". I was an Ork player from the end of second edition to the start of 6th. I identified strongly as an Ork player, and brought Orks to tournaments for years. It didn't matter that I knew other armies were more powerful, I slogged on. But I was often disatisfied and found it difficult to maintain my enthusiasm for the game when I would face obviously unbalanced match ups so often. I did not have the money to invest in a new army or the time to paint one up - I wanted to have a fair shot with my Orks. But for most of that period I just didn't. I see that it is the same nowadays for Ork players.

I played Orcs in Fantasy, and I would say for 5th to 8th when I played, it was a lot fairer in general, but that things started to get really badly out of hand by 7th edition and by 8th it was just depressing showing up to play. I faced Dark Elves, Demons and Undead constantly, and usually unpainted or slapped together ones against my fully painted Orcs and Goblins.

This emotional side to it, the attachment we have to the factions we chose, is a big part of what keeps us from really seeing the wood for the trees. You might play Seraphon for the power, or you might just like the look of the models.

I think WM/H did a better job with this for a long time - most factions had their own flavour of power, but you could for the most part make it work with whatever you brought. Seems like they eventually fell prey to imbalance as well thouugh.

You need a hug, buddy?

 Glane wrote:

 Hulksmash wrote:


Also explain to me how you stop a Slaan on a table with any kind of line of sight blocking terrain. He's generating about 120pts per turn with the astrolith bearer.

But how many points is a Slann's spellcasting worth? Because a Slann generating 120pts per turn is contributing almost nothing else to the game (constellation and a possible Command ability). What would the value of those three spells be in terms of points?

A Slann that survives the whole game and does nothing but summon for 5 turns is going to end up producing around 600 points worth of units, give or take. That may result in a victory. But so might a Slaan that cast 15 spells. A 40-strong Saurus Warrior unit with Starlight (attacks against it -1 to hit) and the 2nd Aqshy spell (+1 dmg on melee weapons) is going to do some serious damage.

Lets not forget that Slaan aren't the only spellcasters in a seraphon army. Slaan being a summoning battery to make a 2000 poiint game a 2600-2000 point game is going to be a very advantageous path to take. You aren't losing the ability to cast spells period, you're losing that one model's ability to cast spells to generate a 600 point lopsided game.

To me thats huge and a no brainer.

 -DE- wrote:
REMOVED - BrookM

Not sure if "Wake up, Sheeple!" or "Watch out, we got a bad ass over here!" meme is the appropriate response here.

How do you imagine fans demanding quality from GW would go?

But I was often disatisfied and found it difficult to maintain my enthusiasm for the game when I would face obviously unbalanced match ups so often.

I did not have the money to invest in a new army or the time to paint one up - I wanted to have a fair shot

This is why a lot of people that I know and enjoy playing with drop the game altogether after a couple of years.

This is one reason why I am always going on about balance and why I think its so important.

I think at this point the community has largely self selected people like me out, and the people left are those who are generally playing in clubs where they can gentleman everything that is a problem away. It seems that the market for that sort of game is bigger than the market was for old style Warhammer, which I am surprised by and find a shame.

I have recently been thinking of trying to get back into it, mostly due to playing some video games based in the universes. But when I look and see that there is no attempt at all to fix these sorts of issues I just sigh and turn away.

auticus wrote:


Lets not forget that Slaan aren't the only spellcasters in a seraphon army. Slaan being a summoning battery to make a 2000 poiint game a 2600-2000 point game is going to be a very advantageous path to take. You aren't losing the ability to cast spells period, you're losing that one model's ability to cast spells to generate a 600 point lopsided game.

To me thats huge and a no brainer.

If you're using a Slann as a summoning battery you're not making a 2000 point game a 2600 point game. You're playing a 1740 game that at best becomes a 2340 game. A Slann has to summon 260 points of stuff just to make his own points back. That's at least two turns worth of sitting around contributing nothing else to the battle. And that's just to break even.

Of course you can take other spellcasters in a Seraphon army. That's entirely irrelevant. A Slann sitting on his frog behind generating summoning points isn't contributing 3 spells a turn to his army's chances of victory. If you didn't summon with him, you'd have three more spells each turn to potentially cast. That's a big thing to give up, especially when we've all got new spells to play around with. What's the points value of tossing out a Banishment, Night's Touch or Inferno Blades on a key unit?

I don't see them having to get their own points back. If the slaan is generating 600 points in a game thats still 600 free points. Thats points showing up and popping objectives and reinforcing where needed for free.

Additionally spells like banishment can be cast by other casters. You're not losing anything by taking multiple casters. You're getting a summoning battery to bring in reserves that you dont' have to pay points for.

I heard this exact same argument in 2015 with AOS 1.0 to try and say summoning back then wasn't broken at all. I don't really buy it. Especially since I've seen what over a 25% bonus in free points does to a game if the other person is not doing the same.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

-To use the example of 500 points of summoning over a game, this isn't as simple as making it 2500 vs 2000, because those summons require mechanics that must be used properly and more importantly these summons only see use during a fraction of the game rather than the whole thing.

Another thing is to factor how much of points of 2000 goes to summon but not else. Albeit I don't know how the AOS new summon works but say you have to have ~200 pts model that does basically nothing else but summon. Okay 500 pts free. Great. Except in practice more like 300 pts. The 200 pts summoner would be doing very little other than summon. Might also give up on his other uses like regular spells so instead of dropping pile of mortal wounds to enemy instead summons own guys. Free points but less points removed from enemy.

auticus wrote:
I don't see them having to get their own points back. If the slaan is generating 600 points in a game thats still 600 free points. Thats points showing up and popping objectives and reinforcing where needed for free.

Additionally spells like banishment can be cast by other casters. You're not losing anything by taking multiple casters. You're getting a summoning battery to bring in reserves that you dont' have to pay points for.

I heard this exact same argument in 2015 with AOS 1.0 to try and say summoning back then wasn't broken at all. I don't really buy it. Especially since I've seen what over a 25% bonus in free points does to a game if the other person is not doing the same.

As of GHB 2017 (haven't seen the new points), that's a 240 point model you're effectively taking out of the game to generate those 600 points. A net gain of 360 points. Those points also have to be placed in range of the Astrolith banner. You're not free to place them anywhere you want. As stated, this is a strong ability, but not as game breaking as you're making it out to be. I really think this is the kind of thing we'll need to see in an actual battle before we can determine just how strong it really is.

They have abilities that let them teleport units. So yes they have to summon next to the standard, but then they can also teleport the unit after that. Unless that was changed.

Now I've not noticed the battle reps this weekend between groups that already have the rules and points mention summoning much, so that was good (that would seem to me that its not as bent since these are players that are intentionally trying to break the game to take to the next GT)

The thing being mentioned quite a bit is how lethal the new endless spells are combined with the spell portal to do a ton of damage, and that a lot of games seem to be like 40k now in that the game is over by Turn 2 on average because they upped the casualty count per turn.

auticus wrote:
They have abilities that let them teleport units. So yes they have to summon next to the standard, but then they can also teleport the unit after that. Unless that was changed.

I don't know if it was changed or not, but:

Summoning happens at the end of the Movement Phase. Teleporting happens during the Hero Phase. It can also only be used once, unless you have "The Great Rememberer" trait on your Slann.

Now I've not noticed the battle reps this weekend between groups that already have the rules and points mention summoning much, so that was good (that would seem to me that its not as bent since these are players that are intentionally trying to break the game to take to the next GT)

The thing being mentioned quite a bit is how lethal the new endless spells are combined with the spell portal to do a ton of damage, and that a lot of games seem to be like 40k now in that the game is over by Turn 2 on average because they upped the casualty count per turn.

The issue is that, as NinthMusketeer mentioned elsewhere, you can't guarantee that this will work. If you get a double turn, then the other player can take advantage of it and throw your mirror of doom combo back at you since you don't get a chance to dispel the mirror.

Yeah I know you can't guarantee it'll work. I'm just saying I read about five battle reports over the weekend from five different groups and all five of those games ended in Turn 2 with concession tablings.

Without the ability to read all the rules myself though, we cannot discuss in full context, which annoys me that the rules are available to a chosen few for a couple weeks before everyone else, when I can't see what that accomplishes.

Hulksmash wrote:I dont' want imbalance personally but I do want armies to function differently. Which is a hard sell to get right honestly. I'm a personality list person. My lists generally don't contain a massive load of "da best" current units. They contain the stuff that works well for me.

Yea, same. Basically every game I play, I spend some time digesting the meta, keeping up on its shifts and overhauls, and then I find stuff I like, that either has or I can fit cool models to, and that isn't too aggressively in-meta, and I run that. I'm pretty drawn to bucking the meta, because Obviously Good things aren't that fun to play with for me, but I do it with full knowledge that I'll be punching above my weight against meta lists. Which is fine, because my goal isn't victory, it's to use models I like with rules that fit them and me well, and get in a few good scraps and have some beverages.

But even then, it's much more fun to use what you want in a game with balance, especially with internal balance. KOW continues to be the king of this for me, especially after playing GW games for so long. It's one thing that no faction is really superior to another, but even more impressive that all the units within a faction are playable. While there's some sense of in-meta picks (flying stuff is still good), that meta isn't as concrete as other games nor is it as constraining for army builds. You really can take whatever you want, assuming you know how to make an army.

jreilly89 wrote:I don't think GW's aim is really balance. It's to sell great models and a fun exciting system.

As I limber up and prepare to dive back into AOS (for a third time!) with a new Ogre army, I keep wondering why I'm doing it, as I'm fully aware that gak's not going to be balanced, that WAAC bois are going to be summoning their brains out and paying their way to victory (honestly one of the lamest parts of summoner metas is the pay-to-win aspect - see Ressers in Malifaux pre 2018's scenario tweaks, or the worst of them, AOS pre-GHB), and my armybook-less Gutbusters are automatically on the back foot without the fancy stuff other allegiances have.

So here's why:
1) Easy to get pickup games
2) Local events (KOW all require 2-4 hours of travel)
3) Fun + easy modelling
4) Dice-driven carnage
5) New edition has ratcheted up the cinematic and fantastical nature of the in-game experience, thanks to massive expansion of magic and mystical realms, which are the things missing from KOW and from what I can tell the things that WHFB had that KOW didn't pick up and do better
6) AOS2.0 has addressed enough NPEs to get me to consider it again

I'm simply going to continue to be ok with other players playing their armies like they want, as I play my army like I want. And I figure if the enemy wants to keep summoning stuff, it'll just give me more for my 'Guts to smash to pieces

- Salvage

I need to figure out how to adopt the mentality that its ok if I am fielding a middleweight list and my opponents are all fielding power heavy weight lists simply because the models I love aren't the current chosen ones of that particular edition.

I was spoiled for so many years, being an undead and chaos player because they were so OP and busted from 5th - 7th edition that I was just able to roll people with models I loved.

I'm starting a Thursday Night's Main Event (play on saturday night's main event from old wrestling days) once the new rules kick in where we will be focusing on how to learn to play through the imbalances and counters that the powergamers will be employing and hoping some fruit can be borne from that.

auticus wrote:
They have abilities that let them teleport units. So yes they have to summon next to the standard, but then they can also teleport the unit after that. Unless that was changed.

Now I've not noticed the battle reps this weekend between groups that already have the rules and points mention summoning much, so that was good (that would seem to me that its not as bent since these are players that are intentionally trying to break the game to take to the next GT)

The thing being mentioned quite a bit is how lethal the new endless spells are combined with the spell portal to do a ton of damage, and that a lot of games seem to be like 40k now in that the game is over by Turn 2 on average because they upped the casualty count per turn.

The teleport ability also comes with a 1 in 3 chance for that unit to be unable to do anything that turn, and as Kan said, it can only be done once per turn, and it triggers before the summoned unit can be placed, so the summoned unit will be out of position for at least a turn.

auticus wrote:
I was spoiled for so many years, being an undead and chaos player because they were so OP and busted from 5th - 7th edition that I was just able to roll people with models I loved.

As an aside, one of my buddies has started up an Oldhammer summer escalation league, using 7E rules. We talked a lot about choice of edition and problems with 7E, and eventually I asked what everybody is playing. Out of a dozen players it's mostly daemons, vamps and dark elves, with warriors, high elves and I think ogres rounding things out. Pretty much my experience of 7E

He was also a little crestfallen that I didn't want to play, but I don't often enjoy Oldhammer, and frankly I was thrilled to leave 7E behind when 8E dropped

- Salvage

Yep 7th edition was vampire counts, demons, and dark elves pretty exclusively for me since all I did was play tournaments then and those were the busted-three.

I too was happy for 7th to die. I'd play 6th again with ravening hordes though. And 8th is fun... provided you cap steadfast and do something about the "six dice Purple Sun for the win" crap.

 Boss Salvage wrote:

jreilly89 wrote:I don't think GW's aim is really balance. It's to sell great models and a fun exciting system.

As I limber up and prepare to dive back into AOS (for a third time!) with a new Ogre army, I keep wondering why I'm doing it, as I'm fully aware that gak's not going to be balanced, that WAAC bois are going to be summoning their brains out and paying their way to victory (honestly one of the lamest parts of summoner metas is the pay-to-win aspect - see Ressers in Malifaux pre 2018's scenario tweaks, or the worst of them, AOS pre-GHB), and my armybook-less Gutbusters are automatically on the back foot without the fancy stuff other allegiances have.

So here's why:
1) Easy to get pickup games
2) Local events (KOW all require 2-4 hours of travel)
3) Fun + easy modelling
4) Dice-driven carnage
5) New edition has ratcheted up the cinematic and fantastical nature of the in-game experience, thanks to massive expansion of magic and mystical realms, which are the things missing from KOW and from what I can tell the things that WHFB had that KOW didn't pick up and do better
6) AOS2.0 has addressed enough NPEs to get me to consider it again

I'm simply going to continue to be ok with other players playing their armies like they want, as I play my army like I want. And I figure if the enemy wants to keep summoning stuff, it'll just give me more for my 'Guts to smash to pieces

- Salvage

Hear, hear! I applaud and agree with this. Also, I too recently started up a Gutbusters army, so let's go Ogres!

auticus wrote:
I'd play 6th again with ravening hordes though.

This was my strongest suggestion to him from a 'so I hear you want to play a mostly balanced fantasy rank-n-flank Warhammer edition' standpoint, however his player base protested that there wasn't enough magic, magic items or army diversity. Such is the burden of balance (and our discussions shed some light on how KOW was probably developed and why they cut what they did).

More on topic, I agree with the comments about just giving non-summoners more points in a summoner-meta. Or didn't GW do that by dropping some points? I thought I read that that was why, for example, some nasty Destro stuff was receiving what at first look like undeserved price drops.

But anyway, point being that summoning as a concept is super themey for plenty of armies - undead, daemonkin and I guess seraphon (not lizardmen ported over, the actual light-powered lizardangels of AOS) in particular - as well as being pretty cool cinematically. It just sucks from a balance perspective. Oh, maybe worth noting that another way to balance things is to simply make summoned things worse or worse at winning. In MFX, for example, summoned things are typically less effective the turn they come in as well as not at full health, and this year's tournament rules also make them not score for at least some scenarios, which severely hampered some summon spam.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jreilly89 wrote:
Also, I too recently started up a Gutbusters army, so let's go Ogres!

Nice! Guts out, bro

- Salvage

auticus wrote:

Something I have read or heard a lot is the importance of points as a balancing mechanism. That they are required to hold interest in the game as they bring balance to the game.
Taking Age of Sigmar as the sample, but easily swapping out 40k as well, in actual reality on the table (where the rubber meets the road) we seek to actively break balance. Thats a given. Thats expected. When we talk about listbuilding we are talking about creating a powerful list that can win the game before the game even starts. This seems like a common goal with the community as a whole and also very expected.
I ask - why is this acceptable? Not even acceptable... why is this desired? Why is imbalance desired? Why do we see stated over and over how important points are for balance but then when imbalance is given, the community embraces it and extols its virtues to the heavens?

There’s a few things here.

Perspective is a thing. For a lot of people, ‘playing with points’ is all they know, and for the more extreme, its akin to a creed, or dogma. Just like religion, some people put blind faith in ‘points’, and cannot comprehend that others can find their ‘salvation’ in any other way that isn’t adhering to their dogma. Now, generally, I will defend points. They have their place. In a well crafted system, where variety isn't excessive, where a suitable amount of other load bearing structures in the game (I often point to WMH's multi-list formats, or multiple win conditions as examples of this) points are perfectly fine. Point based games work for the pragmatic side of 'pick-up-games' where frankly, they're kind of necessary and where the 'negotiation phase' of collaborative list building is simply too cumbersome or too much of a burden. (That said, a lot of things get sacrificed on that altar to make it work, and I don't necessarily think it's always worth it).thst said, points are not perfect. In fact, I'd argue they're kind of limited in what they can do, and most of that is really down to the limitations of the medium-i.e. Dice based ttg's are far more limited in terms of what you can acheive than, say, a computer game. That said. It doesn't matter how often you point to the faults, or the limitations of points of the medium- too many people are unable or unwilling to look beyond the dogma.

When ‘points’ is all you know, it’s kind of difficult to comprehend, other ways of playing that can work. I often wonder when I see what people say about their preference for points-based games, is it because of an actual preference (which would assume knowledge of, and experience with other ways of playing), or is it just because its all they know. And I don't say that to be mean - you need to have grown up in a particular kind of environment to appreciate and understand the narrative/points-less games and know they can work, and how they can work. Typically, you see a lot of this in historicals and that, and while there is an assumption that people typically get into wargames via 40k or whatever, I don't think this is always true - but I do think that there is a lack of cross-over in both these gaming cultures.

I think some posters hit the nail partly on the head, when they said people don’t want balance, they want the illusion of balance. It's about gaming the system. I think more than anything else, its partly this, but it’s also partly about adhering to an official ‘creed’. People don’t necessarily want points values that are accurate, they are more concerned with just having points values (ie the official company ‘line’) that 'are'. People want points values that are ‘official’ even if they’re wrong, so you can look at X, Y or Z and say this is good, bad or whatever, and game the system. I mean, we see it here on Dakka frequently enough, if we know unit X is broken, do many folks actually play it, and play 50points (or whatever) down to reflect what unit X should really cost? Nope, people will play unit X as it is, because that’s what the official rules say and will project and either say really, it's not their fault, they're doing nothing wrong, it’s actually the other guy’s fault for taking an underpowered list instead; or will blame the company for writing it that way, but shrug off their own role for actually taking the thing and say what they’re doing is perfectly legal (it's why I always say balance is a two-sided coin-developers may let a howler through the gate, but players are not without blame, since often, they're quite happy to bludgeon each other over the head with said howler too).
Gamers, for the most part are extremely conservative in ‘how’ they play, and in adhering to the officialdom (kinda like blind faith in an angry god – you follow the rules, not because they’re right, but because adherence to the rules is what’s important). Or in other words, gamers wont deviate or step out of their comfort zone, or ‘default’ mode of play and try other non-standard scenarios, or whatever- auticus, you yourself have seen this more than anyone.
A further point is when you have ‘officialdom’ as a shield, you can shrug off your own responsibility – kind of like the ‘ve ver just following ze orders’ defense of war criminals – for what you do and can blame someone else. It’s not your fault, it’s the games developer’s fault. Last point is while I enjoy the DIY approach to scenario-building and collaborative game building, there is a view out there that isn’t entirely wrong, where folks want to play a game ‘out of the box’, and don’t want to put in work of building their own games, the responsibility of balancing said games, and feel game developers should provide this instead. You can argue as well, when its you designing your own missions, the onus and responsibility is on you, and only you, and people don’t want the responsibility or the ‘shame’ for unbalancing their own games – which is generally A pretty reasonable position to have.

 EnTyme wrote:

auticus wrote:
They have abilities that let them teleport units. So yes they have to summon next to the standard, but then they can also teleport the unit after that. Unless that was changed.

Now I've not noticed the battle reps this weekend between groups that already have the rules and points mention summoning much, so that was good (that would seem to me that its not as bent since these are players that are intentionally trying to break the game to take to the next GT)

The thing being mentioned quite a bit is how lethal the new endless spells are combined with the spell portal to do a ton of damage, and that a lot of games seem to be like 40k now in that the game is over by Turn 2 on average because they upped the casualty count per turn.

The teleport ability also comes with a 1 in 3 chance for that unit to be unable to do anything that turn, and as Kan said, it can only be done once per turn, and it triggers before the summoned unit can be placed, so the summoned unit will be out of position for at least a turn.

I would point out you can easily teleport the Standard and then summon off of him with people in position. It's a 1/3 chance he doesn't go anywhere but even if he's decently deployed it still a reasonable distance and not to terribly out of place.

I'd also argue that the slaan doesn't need to get back 260pts to be worth it for summoning. I no joke used him now to:
a) try to dispel 3 times per turn
b) to use great remember to move 2 units.
c) to summon under the current system as I left off about 200pts for rando summons to fill holes in my lists

Once in a while he would cast something but it was pretty rare as he was normally hiding. So I'm looking not only as a gain of whatever he can summon but the added bonus of about 40+ pts because I never fielded the standard before but will now. I'm pretty happy with that.

 Hulksmash wrote:

I would point out you can easily teleport the Standard and then summon off of him with people in position. It's a 1/3 chance he doesn't go anywhere but even if he's decently deployed it still a reasonable distance and not to terribly out of place.

So you teleport the Standard and redeploy him. He has a 1/3 chance of being unable to move or do anything during your turn, meaning that when Movement happens--he's stuck wherever you placed him.
Which means I can kill him when my turn rolls around.

Or it means that I deployed poorly and actually gave you room to be able to put something in place for summoning.

 Da Boss wrote:

Spoiler:

Some excellent discussion in this thread. Thanks!

I had never really copped the dichotomy between designing lists for "balance" when you know everyone is going to seek out the imbalance. Very interesting! I think with some distance from everything it is easier to see that now.

But I think it is important to look at the ways in which Warhammer is not like Magic. In Magic, you do not have much attachment to the cards, generally. They are cheap game tokens, and you have loads of them. The way you buy them even encourages you not to get too attached to one particular colour of magic.

In Warhammer, people pick a faction and then spend hours and hours assembling and painting VERY EXPENSIVE miniatures before playing. The emotional and monetary investment in what you have bought is important. People pick their faction for a variety of reasons - aestethics, gameplay, faction background or "feel" or even just price.

But that faction identity is strong, and it is a major part of the success of Warhammer.

But what a new player does not know, and what none of us can know before a new edition drops, is that from a gameplay standpoint some of these factions (and choices within all factions) are "right", and others are "wrong". I was an Ork player from the end of second edition to the start of 6th. I identified strongly as an Ork player, and brought Orks to tournaments for years. It didn't matter that I knew other armies were more powerful, I slogged on. But I was often disatisfied and found it difficult to maintain my enthusiasm for the game when I would face obviously unbalanced match ups so often. I did not have the money to invest in a new army or the time to paint one up - I wanted to have a fair shot with my Orks. But for most of that period I just didn't. I see that it is the same nowadays for Ork players.

I played Orcs in Fantasy, and I would say for 5th to 8th when I played, it was a lot fairer in general, but that things started to get really badly out of hand by 7th edition and by 8th it was just depressing showing up to play. I faced Dark Elves, Demons and Undead constantly, and usually unpainted or slapped together ones against my fully painted Orcs and Goblins.

This emotional side to it, the attachment we have to the factions we chose, is a big part of what keeps us from really seeing the wood for the trees. You might play Seraphon for the power, or you might just like the look of the models.

I think WM/H did a better job with this for a long time - most factions had their own flavour of power, but you could for the most part make it work with whatever you brought. Seems like they eventually fell prey to imbalance as well thouugh.

Good post. Thing is as you said you were facing lots of Dark Elves, Demons and Undead. Sadly I would say most of these people didn't play these armies because of the "passion" like you had, but had the spare time, and money and played these armies to win.

Sadly GW new this, and people who played Fantasy and 40K, knew people would not quit but just spend more money to "keep up with the Joneses". So lots of times, espeically at tournements, lots of people play to win and only win and others play because they are jocks with plastic toy soldiers. This made GW money until recently. I really wished people would play an army because they loved them. I don't know anyone doing the "flavour of the month" army but I do feel pitty for them when they do so.

After all these are man dollies, toys and we "PLAY" so we should be doing this for fun. Only if GW would actually make balanced rules and balanced units then people would play for the passion of what they like, like how Games Workshop claims we should play. I just find it sad that it's the company that inspires this for sales but yet claims we should play for fun. Sadly fun doesn't keep up the sales, after all if you have everything, you don't buy anymore. So we will always have this imbalance as long as we are playing GW rules.

With AoS I just buy what I think would make a cool army.

To me it makes sense with Nagash leading a giant army of undead, so that's what i'm making. Lots of skeletons, lots of skeletons, Nagash, and some more skeletons. And the new Nighthaunt stuff, because, hey why not.

I don't even own a general's handbook, and I won't be buying it in 2018 unless it has some content besides points. It's been my experience that generally in AoS points don't create a fair game.

In 40k though I have far more competitive games at 2000 points. Maybe this is because Tyranids are a decent army, but it seems like there's a lot of decent armies. In general 40k is more balanced that Sigmar, at least in my experience.

I can't recommend the General's Handbook enough to be honest. They're doing a great job adding new content in there. The Sky Battles bit alone looks awesome.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
None of those are solutions. They are all units that will get the snot beaten out of them in equal points vs evocators.

And this is the problem I have with calling, in my opinion, a specific unit out. Especially before we have the damn Battletome in hand.

And no, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that you clairfy context on the internet.

Fine:
SPECIFICALLY DEALING WITH THE CONTEXT OF GROWING A NIGHTHAUNT ARMY OUT FROM THE STARTER SET, I personally feel that Myrmourn Banshees are going to be a viable counter to Evocators being grown out of the same starter set using the same path.

Remember that the various "grow your army" things tend to be based around themes, and with the Sacrosanct Chamber? Who knows what the hell the next "suggested" items are going to be past the Easy to Builds.

And you still dodged that the banshees aren't a solution anyways. This is how it goes Kan, you raise invalid points to disagree for the sake of it, get called on them, raise further nitpicks that still do not validate your position, then eventually drop it only to start things up the next time.

A "solution" does not mean simply that in a 1:1 fight, they'll push the snot out of the Evocators. A "solution" is something that gives you a way to answer the problem: in this case, that Evocators are a heavy hitting melee unit that also has a single spell that they can cast, and will likely be getting spells cast upon them to beef them up.

With Myrmourn Banshees, they get to Unbind spells as though they're a Wizard and for every 4 Banshees, they get +1 to their Unbind roll. They start at 4 and go up to 12 in Matched Play--meaning they'd be at a +3 to their Unbinding Rolls, meaning it's very likely to be 13 hits(the unit champ gets 2 attacks) that deal D3 damage at a -2 Rend. They're also Summonable, meaning they can be affected by the Guardian of Soul's "Spectral Lure" spell.
Are they going to walk all over Evocators? Maybe. Maybe not. But they can do something Evocators can't, and that's come back from the dead while dealing D3 wounds every time they make a successful attack. And let's not forget that what Evocators have going for them against many other units(Rend and Mortal Wounds) is partially mitigated by the Ethereal special rule.

Which is a shame, because it drowns out the numerous good things you have to say.

Meh. I've been taking to just simply walking away from arguments now if I'm going to be honest with you. It's not worth the time or energy in many cases. I'd rather discuss things in a positive manner than just shout and tell people "NO YOU'RE WRONG!".

So toodles. Back to Idoneth painting!

I'll be honest, I was procrastinating on reading this because I thought it was going to be a lot of nitpicks I'd have to go through one by one. I shouldn't have, because you threw a tantrum instead. So first off, context. The context of your initital statement wasn't clear, you could have said 'whoops, I forgot context' (I certainly have had to do so in previous discussions) but instead you decided to get angry about it. So right off we have emotion dominating your position.

Next, the issue at hand. You still sidestepped that banshees do nothing to even things out, first you expanded things out to the whole armies to dodge that they obviously don't work one on one. But that opens them up to having one dispel vs three wizards on the stormcast side. You bring up that they can be brought back via spell, laughable since the stormcast have three units to potentially dispel that with plus one which has a once per game auto-dispel and you were mere sentances previous arguing one dispel as a counter to three casters. Finally you went on to suggest that 'well we aren't sure' as a means to insure yourself against counter argument, when really its just that you have yet to prove the validity of your position in the first place and attempting to use that as a cop out.

Last but not least you say you want to discuss things in a positive manner, despite you making plenty of comments involving criticism or complaints that your models aren't strong enough in previous discussions (which there isn't even anything wrong with doing). Then comes suggesting I am simply saying 'you're wrong' when I have been very specific about my arguments and raising evidence to suppprt them, hypocritical given that you are unable to back your arguments with evidence and even went to far as to say 'well I don't care about the math' which is the epitome of just saying 'you're wrong because I say so.'

Grow up dude.

@frozenwastes and deadnight - some good points and good reads in your posts, both of you mostly cover my POV on the matter, but I would like to add one angle, that hasn't been covered yet.

Lets assume for one moment, that by some strange turns of fate we actually get a well enough balanced AOS or 40K and GW starts to adhere to this balance with every new release. By "well enough balanced" I mean something reasonably achievable, that is that in a strict competetive and well defined format every faction has equal amount of choices on the entire bell curve and that either every faction has access to every major strategy or every major strategy is equal to any other. Now let's follow a newbie just starting his journey with Warhammer. At first there is quite a lot to explore - many factions to choose from, many major strategies to learn about and utilise and that is great. But then such a newbie hits a wall of experience, because by the very nature of ballanced systems, you must be trully competent to win a game against a skilled enemy and pretty much everyone that started the game earlier than you is more skilled. Moreover, as the game is ballanced and there are hundreds of thousands people on the internet trying to crack it, we can safely assume, that the entire meta is pretty much solved already - every small discrepancies pinpointed, every, even small exploit named and foundable, strongest netlist builds are easily available and there is nothing new to discover on competetive level anyomore - one can only memorise more on-the-table moves and tactics, exactly as is with chess. The game is purely skill driven (but with a significant luck factor because of dice) and... stagnant. Once you bought a competetive army there is no reason beside aesthetics to ever change faction and buy new models. There is no arms race by design, there is no new hotness, if you are poor strategist (and by definition, a skill based game has it's own, well defined bell curve of players population skill level) there are no prostheses to aid you in winning even occasionally and now there is absolutely nothing to blame for your personal failures as balance of the game is common knowledge...

I don't really think that such vision would suit a large portion of the community nor that it would atract more people than what we have now - a permanently shifting and updating meta that cannot be permanently solved and will never become stagnant, so people of any skill level have plenty to do within game system untill they are either bored or frustrated by it enough to drop out.

Of course the question of "where exactly on the scale defined by such two extremities GW products lie" remains open and it is pretty much the unspoken underlying question of all balance related threads on dakka. But we all know that drill well enough.

There is also one other reason that so many players like and demand biased listbuilding stage - for many, many players time spent on analysing sources, making draft lists, mathhammering them, changing, discussing options etc is how they interact with the rules part of hobby the most - not by playing actual games (most polls on the subject show that most people struggle to get averages higher than a dozen or two games a year), but imagining and designing armies. That is because of two reasons - one, mathhammering lists is solo activity, exactly same as building kits or painting minis, you can do this without social skills. Even discussing, especially on the internet, requires no or minimal social skills. And two - armies are costly and painting is time consuming, so if you are in only for the win and not collecting a larger-than-a-list collection of minis, then you better do your research carefully.

nou wrote:
There is also one other reason that so many players like and demand biased listbuilding stage - for many, many players time spent on analysing sources, making draft lists, mathhammering them, changing, discussing options etc is how they interact with the rules part of hobby the most - not by playing actual games (most polls on the subject show that most people struggle to get averages higher than a dozen or two games a year), but imagining and designing armies. That is because of two reasons - one, mathhammering lists is solo activity, exactly same as building kits or painting minis, you can do this without social skills. Even discussing, especially on the internet, requires no or minimal social skills. And two - armies are costly and painting is time consuming, so if you are in only for the win and not collecting a larger-than-a-list collection of minis, then you better do your research carefully.

And this right here is why I walked away from pre-GHB AOS. It wasn't angst over the death of the Old World, it wasn't some sense of betrayal by GeeDub, it wasn't really all the negative play experiences in the game itself (tho there were and still are plenty). It's that AOS couldn't sustain a hobby for me. It was just a game that used my old Warhammer minis. I had no way to scheme up new armies, thus I had no way to design, buy and implement them either. AOS had no life off the table, and that tabletop experience was largely shruggable in those frontier days of wound balancing and whatnot (where my Ogres did very, very well )

And this is also why I came back once official points dropped. The game had something for my mind to grind on again ... until I tried KOW and was hooked.

- Salvage

nou wrote:
@frozenwastes and deadnight - some good points and good reads in your posts, both of you mostly cover my POV on the matter, but I would like to add one angle, that hasn't been covered yet.

Lets assume for one moment, that by some strange turns of fate we actually get a well enough balanced AOS or 40K and GW starts to adhere to this balance with every new release. By "well enough balanced" I mean something reasonably achievable, that is that in a strict competetive and well defined format every faction has equal amount of choices on the entire bell curve and that either every faction has access to every major strategy or every major strategy is equal to any other. Now let's follow a newbie just starting his journey with Warhammer. At first there is quite a lot to explore - many factions to choose from, many major strategies to learn about and utilise and that is great. But then such a newbie hits a wall of experience, because by the very nature of ballanced systems, you must be trully competent to win a game against a skilled enemy and pretty much everyone that started the game earlier than you is more skilled. Moreover, as the game is ballanced and there are hundreds of thousands people on the internet trying to crack it, we can safely assume, that the entire meta is pretty much solved already - every small discrepancies pinpointed, every, even small exploit named and foundable, strongest netlist builds are easily available and there is nothing new to discover on competetive level anyomore - one can only memorise more on-the-table moves and tactics, exactly as is with chess. The game is purely skill driven (but with a significant luck factor because of dice) and... stagnant. Once you bought a competetive army there is no reason beside aesthetics to ever change faction and buy new models. There is no arms race by design, there is no new hotness, if you are poor strategist (and by definition, a skill based game has it's own, well defined bell curve of players population skill level) there are no prostheses to aid you in winning even occasionally and now there is absolutely nothing to blame for your personal failures as balance of the game is common knowledge...

I don't really think that such vision would suit a large portion of the community nor that it would atract more people than what we have now - a permanently shifting and updating meta that cannot be permanently solved and will never become stagnant, so people of any skill level have plenty to do within game system untill they are either bored or frustrated by it enough to drop out.

Of course the question of "where exactly on the scale defined by such two extremities GW products lie" remains open and it is pretty much the unspoken underlying question of all balance related threads on dakka. But we all know that drill well enough.

There is also one other reason that so many players like and demand biased listbuilding stage - for many, many players time spent on analysing sources, making draft lists, mathhammering them, changing, discussing options etc is how they interact with the rules part of hobby the most - not by playing actual games (most polls on the subject show that most people struggle to get averages higher than a dozen or two games a year), but imagining and designing armies. That is because of two reasons - one, mathhammering lists is solo activity, exactly same as building kits or painting minis, you can do this without social skills. Even discussing, especially on the internet, requires no or minimal social skills. And two - armies are costly and painting is time consuming, so if you are in only for the win and not collecting a larger-than-a-list collection of minis, then you better do your research carefully.

It's a very interesting and valid point you make here, but it sidesteps the reality that the situation will never get to that level of balance, nor is anyone expecting it too. What people ask for is a stronger effort to work towards that, because the best thing to do is get as close as we can even while knowing we will never get there.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'll be honest, I was procrastinating on reading this because I thought it was going to be a lot of nitpicks I'd have to go through one by one. I shouldn't have, because you threw a tantrum instead. So first off, context. The context of your initital statement wasn't clear, you could have said 'whoops, I forgot context' (I certainly have had to do so in previous discussions) but instead you decided to get angry about it. So right off we have emotion dominating your position.

I don't see how my post immediately following yours could have made the context any more clear, but I guess I'll have to keep that in mind for the future.

Next, the issue at hand. You still sidestepped that banshees do nothing to even things out, first you expanded things out to the whole armies to dodge that they obviously don't work one on one.

I feel it's a bit more natural that I should talk about whole armies rather than individual units. The whole point of my mentioning the Banshees is that when you compare what Stormcast are getting from their Easy to Build sets(bulking out the Sequitors to 2 5 model units with Greatmaces mixed in or a single 10 model unit loaded with 4 Greatmaces and some more Castigators plus a Gryph-Hound) versus the Nighthaunt (a whole new unit in the form of the Banshees and bulking out the Glaivewrath Stalkers with the ability to retreat and charge again during their next turn).

I'll expound on that a bit further down.

But that opens them up to having one dispel vs three wizards on the stormcast side.

Three Wizards on the Stormcast side, but one is conditional. Evocators are Wizards only while they are "2 or more models".

Sorry if that seems nitpicky, just making a specific point.

You bring up that they can be brought back via spell, laughable since the stormcast have three units to potentially dispel that with plus one which has a once per game auto-dispel and you were mere sentances previous arguing one dispel as a counter to three casters.

If that's the argument you were getting out of my statement, I'm going to have to clarify this quite a bit.
My argument is not that the Banshees are going to specifically be dispelling/unbinding and thus they'd be a counter--but rather that Stormcast players are going to learn to watch where they cast if Banshees are nearby. Adding an additional attack to a model that deals D3 damage per attack and unbinds a potentially key spell in the process would mean that after the first couple of times it happens to a Stormcast player, those who learn from mistakes will catch on and start making sure Banshees either get addressed by being shot or not casting key spells near them--it becomes similar to how I think the Gryph-Hound will make Nighthaunt players placing new units down(assuming they get an option to do so) become wary of that particular unit.

At this point, my statements should best be described as looking at things from the lens of someone who is a supercasual player. I'm looking at this particular circumstance in the vein of "if I were someone just starting the game with Soul Wars and following a proscribed order based upon things from the same visual and keyword appeal".

Finally you went on to suggest that 'well we aren't sure' as a means to insure yourself against counter argument, when really its just that you have yet to prove the validity of your position in the first place and attempting to use that as a cop out.

That's not really the reason why I did it, but okay. We're seeing a lot of language being clarified in new books(you've pointed it out yourself with regards to Idoneth and the "wholly within" thing) and we're also seeing some very specific things being addressed(Seraphon teleport being during Hero phase and their Summons being at the end of Movement as an example). As far as I'm aware, nobody has seen how the Stormcast Eternals book is handling their Deep Strike mechanics in the new edition. That's the whole reason I made a mention of it--As far as I'm aware, we have not seen the mechanics for them.

For all I know? The Stormcast Eternals book is going to be done similar to Legions of Nagash where we have a bunch of sublists present and each one will have its own 'style' of stuff.

Think it's deflection if you want, but that isn't the intention. Not trying to pick a fight with regards to it, simply trying to point out that we're not seeing the whole of the picture as far as I'm aware.

Last but not least you say you want to discuss things in a positive manner, despite you making plenty of comments involving criticism or complaints that your models aren't strong enough in previous discussions (which there isn't even anything wrong with doing). Then comes suggesting I am simply saying 'you're wrong' when I have been very specific about my arguments and raising evidence to suppprt them, hypocritical given that you are unable to back your arguments with evidence and even went to far as to say 'well I don't care about the math' which is the epitome of just saying 'you're wrong because I say so.'

I'd like to apologize if you thought I was specifically accusing you of running around doing that. That wasn't my intent. I was simply trying to state that I, personally, have taken to just walking away from arguments rather than just engaging in shouting matches. I don't enjoy being disagreeable all the time.

My statement regarding "not caring about the math" is specific to points values and calculations of that nature. It's great for crunching lists and the like, but what is or isn't actually worth their point values is not really doable unless you start by zeroing everything out and working from that.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

nou wrote:
@frozenwastes and deadnight - some good points and good reads in your posts, both of you mostly cover my POV on the matter, but I would like to add one angle, that hasn't been covered yet.

Lets assume for one moment, that by some strange turns of fate we actually get a well enough balanced AOS or 40K and GW starts to adhere to this balance with every new release. By "well enough balanced" I mean something reasonably achievable, that is that in a strict competetive and well defined format every faction has equal amount of choices on the entire bell curve and that either every faction has access to every major strategy or every major strategy is equal to any other. Now let's follow a newbie just starting his journey with Warhammer. At first there is quite a lot to explore - many factions to choose from, many major strategies to learn about and utilise and that is great. But then such a newbie hits a wall of experience, because by the very nature of ballanced systems, you must be trully competent to win a game against a skilled enemy and pretty much everyone that started the game earlier than you is more skilled. Moreover, as the game is ballanced and there are hundreds of thousands people on the internet trying to crack it, we can safely assume, that the entire meta is pretty much solved already - every small discrepancies pinpointed, every, even small exploit named and foundable, strongest netlist builds are easily available and there is nothing new to discover on competetive level anyomore - one can only memorise more on-the-table moves and tactics, exactly as is with chess. The game is purely skill driven (but with a significant luck factor because of dice) and... stagnant. Once you bought a competetive army there is no reason beside aesthetics to ever change faction and buy new models. There is no arms race by design, there is no new hotness, if you are poor strategist (and by definition, a skill based game has it's own, well defined bell curve of players population skill level) there are no prostheses to aid you in winning even occasionally and now there is absolutely nothing to blame for your personal failures as balance of the game is common knowledge...

I don't really think that such vision would suit a large portion of the community nor that it would atract more people than what we have now - a permanently shifting and updating meta that cannot be permanently solved and will never become stagnant, so people of any skill level have plenty to do within game system untill they are either bored or frustrated by it enough to drop out.

Of course the question of "where exactly on the scale defined by such two extremities GW products lie" remains open and it is pretty much the unspoken underlying question of all balance related threads on dakka. But we all know that drill well enough.

There is also one other reason that so many players like and demand biased listbuilding stage - for many, many players time spent on analysing sources, making draft lists, mathhammering them, changing, discussing options etc is how they interact with the rules part of hobby the most - not by playing actual games (most polls on the subject show that most people struggle to get averages higher than a dozen or two games a year), but imagining and designing armies. That is because of two reasons - one, mathhammering lists is solo activity, exactly same as building kits or painting minis, you can do this without social skills. Even discussing, especially on the internet, requires no or minimal social skills. And two - armies are costly and painting is time consuming, so if you are in only for the win and not collecting a larger-than-a-list collection of minis, then you better do your research carefully.

It's a very interesting and valid point you make here, but it sidesteps the reality that the situation will never get to that level of balance, nor is anyone expecting it too. What people ask for is a stronger effort to work towards that, because the best thing to do is get as close as we can even while knowing we will never get there.

I know thats my desire anyway.

What I'm seeing in v2.0 are some cool things, and then things like unmitigated summoning coming back and still keeping that divide between play these few armies over here if you want a good game or play a different army and likely get demolished. I don't feel that is good for keeping a community together; for my experience that does quite the opposite.

auticus wrote:

I know thats my desire anyway.

What I'm seeing in v2.0 are some cool things, and then things like unmitigated summoning coming back and still keeping that divide between play these few armies over here if you want a good game or play a different army and likely get demolished. I don't feel that is good for keeping a community together; for my experience that does quite the opposite.

I'm inclined to disagree with you in regards to summoning being "unmitigated", based upon what the GHB scans show. They all tend to be that the summon happens at the end of the Movement phase, meaning any tricks the Hero phase would bring are invalid.

As far as I'm aware you can still charge, and now spend command points to re-roll failed charges (and a 9" charge with re-roll has a 49% of success, so ... not super horrible if you are summoning offensively)

Defensively you don't need them to do anything except claim objectives.

Unmitigated being you are getting 25% or more of your points extra for free forcing your opponent to either bring a lot of mortal wounds, or their own summoning to be able to have a good game.

Forcing the two design paradigms of spam mortal wounds, or play something that can summon 25% or more of starting points value to compete and have a good game.

auticus wrote:
As far as I'm aware you can still charge, and now spend command points to re-roll failed charges (and a 9" charge with re-roll has a 49% of success, so ... not super horrible if you are summoning offensively)

Defensively you don't need them to do anything except claim objectives.

And here's the crux of the issue: If the enemy is playing the same objectives game as you are...they won't be leaving the objectives empty, so you can't summon there.

Unmitigated being you are getting 25% or more of your points extra for free forcing your opponent to either bring a lot of mortal wounds, or their own summoning to be able to have a good game.

You're not really getting them "for free" though. You're having to accomplish something in order to get them.

It's like the difference between the Starsoul Mace and the Evocators' trick. Starsoul Mace--point and boom, Mortal Wounds. Evocators? It happens at the end of you having actually engaged in Combat.

What do they need to roll for the summon?

 LunarSol wrote:
What do they need to roll for the summon?

They don't.

To give an example, here's the Seraphon:

The Slann sacrifice casting in order to perform 'Celestial Conjuration'. When you do so, you get 3 points towards it. When your Hero phase ends, if your General is a Slann you get an additional Celestial Conjuration point and if you have a Saurus Astrolith Bearer, you get an additional D3(reads as not stackable).

When you have 6 or more Celestial Conjuration points, you get to summon units from the list onto the battlefield.
If you get lucky with a single turn, you might be able to summon 10 Skinks, 3 Skink Handlers, a Razordon, or a Salamander. It looks like it's going to require either multiple turns OR multiple Slann and/or some hot dice to get summons off easily and early

@Kan at this point I'm tired, vented out, forgotten whatever point I was trying to make, and sorry I got so mean about things in the first place. Apologies.

auticus wrote:
As far as I'm aware you can still charge, and now spend command points to re-roll failed charges (and a 9" charge with re-roll has a 49% of success, so ... not super horrible if you are summoning offensively)

Defensively you don't need them to do anything except claim objectives.

Unmitigated being you are getting 25% or more of your points extra for free forcing your opponent to either bring a lot of mortal wounds, or their own summoning to be able to have a good game.

Forcing the two design paradigms of spam mortal wounds, or play something that can summon 25% or more of starting points value to compete and have a good game.

I don't think summoning will be a big issue. I think specific parts of it will be.

For example, Maggotkin summoning isn't bad at all in balance terms because they aren't bringing in that many points until later in the game and even then we aren't talking a 25% increase. A full half of their allegiance is given over to getting this summoning in place of something like the Idoneth shoot only the closest target or DoK 6+ ward save. But there's the exalted GUO at 30 contagion points when it should be 35, and there's the issue of a 1500 (or worse, 1000) point army summoning just as much as a 2000 point army.

Khorne and FEC aren't really strong in summoning, while Seraphon have to give up spells (and having faced some tough Seraphon lists I can think of times I'd prefer them getting free models over casting). Tzeentch I'm iffy on because they don't have to give anything up to get summoning on top of a tremendously strong allegiance ability already, but word is their points are going up as compensation for that. Legions of Nagash is more of a problem because they don't have to give up much of anything to get their allegiance. The whole idea behind grand alliance allegiance being weaker is because they get a wide variety of choices, but Legions still get almost everything while also getting a huge benefit for theoretically restricting themselves. Each legion should only have a subset of Death available to them, not the majority of it.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
What do they need to roll for the summon?

They don't.

To give an example, here's the Seraphon:

Spoiler:

The Slann sacrifice casting in order to perform 'Celestial Conjuration'. When you do so, you get 3 points towards it. When your Hero phase ends, if your General is a Slann you get an additional Celestial Conjuration point and if you have a Saurus Astrolith Bearer, you get an additional D3(reads as not stackable).

When you have 6 or more Celestial Conjuration points, you get to summon units from the list onto the battlefield.
If you get lucky with a single turn, you might be able to summon 10 Skinks, 3 Skink Handlers, a Razordon, or a Salamander. It looks like it's going to require either multiple turns OR multiple Slann and/or some hot dice to get summons off easily and early

If you have both an astrolith bearer and a slaan general (has to be your general to perform celestial conjuration) then you're getting 10+d3 per turn. Odds are 66% in your favor of summoning 100-140pt unit or 2 of the level 6 things per turn. That means odds are solid that by the end of turn 2 you could add a siginificant monster to your army. And that doesn't take the engine of the gods into account either. Seraphon and their summoning is going to be fairly ugly honestly on boards with terrain to hide the slaan and astrolith.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
@Kan at this point I'm tired, vented out, forgotten whatever point I was trying to make, and sorry I got so mean about things in the first place. Apologies.

No worries man. I know I can be a bit of a chore to deal with sometimes, it's why I've tried to just start stepping away when I feel like I've gotten too involved in the discussions. Even good-natured conversations over valid things can turn ugly fast when both people have a vested interest.

I don't think summoning will be a big issue. I think specific parts of it will be.

For example, Maggotkin summoning isn't bad at all in balance terms because they aren't bringing in that many points until later in the game and even then we aren't talking a 25% increase. A full half of their allegiance is given over to getting this summoning in place of something like the Idoneth shoot only the closest target or DoK 6+ ward save. But there's the exalted GUO at 30 contagion points when it should be 35, and there's the issue of a 1500 (or worse, 1000) point army summoning just as much as a 2000 point army.

Khorne and FEC aren't really strong in summoning, while Seraphon have to give up spells (and having faced some tough Seraphon lists I can think of times I'd prefer them getting free models over casting). Tzeentch I'm iffy on because they don't have to give anything up to get summoning on top of a tremendously strong allegiance ability already, but word is their points are going up as compensation for that. Legions of Nagash is more of a problem because they don't have to give up much of anything to get their allegiance. The whole idea behind grand alliance allegiance being weaker is because they get a wide variety of choices, but Legions still get almost everything while also getting a huge benefit for theoretically restricting themselves. Each legion should only have a subset of Death available to them, not the majority of it.

I still have to read Legions of Nagash to really get a feel for their stuff, but I definitely feel like Tzeentch is(shocker...) going to be on the strong end of things again.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hulksmash wrote:

If you have both an astrolith bearer and a slaan general (has to be your general to perform celestial conjuration) then you're getting 10+d3 per turn. Odds are 66% in your favor of summoning 100-140pt unit or 2 of the level 6 things per turn. That means odds are solid that by the end of turn 2 you could add a siginificant monster to your army. And that doesn't take the engine of the gods into account either. Seraphon and their summoning is going to be fairly ugly honestly on boards with terrain to hide the slaan and astrolith.

I'm, personally, going to wait for clarification as to whether or not it's supposed to be 3 points per spell or if it's just "you can't cast anything".

I'm leaning towards the latter just based upon the way that Nurgle is built but I could very well be interpreting the design ideas wrong.

 Hulksmash wrote:


If you have both an astrolith bearer and a slaan general (has to be your general to perform celestial conjuration) then you're getting 10+d3 per turn. Odds are 66% in your favor of summoning 100-140pt unit or 2 of the level 6 things per turn. That means odds are solid that by the end of turn 2 you could add a siginificant monster to your army. And that doesn't take the engine of the gods into account either. Seraphon and their summoning is going to be fairly ugly honestly on boards with terrain to hide the slaan and astrolith.

One thing that does concern me is the interaction with the new Endless Spells. Sit a Slann on a Balewind and they get +1 spell. Put the Chronomatic Cogs down next to him and he gets another +1. That turns into 16 points per turn then with an average roll on an Astrolith Bearer that's 18 points per turn. Sit Kroak up there and it's 21 points, but whether that's worth the extra points investment is questionable.

 Glane wrote:

 Hulksmash wrote:


If you have both an astrolith bearer and a slaan general (has to be your general to perform celestial conjuration) then you're getting 10+d3 per turn. Odds are 66% in your favor of summoning 100-140pt unit or 2 of the level 6 things per turn. That means odds are solid that by the end of turn 2 you could add a siginificant monster to your army. And that doesn't take the engine of the gods into account either. Seraphon and their summoning is going to be fairly ugly honestly on boards with terrain to hide the slaan and astrolith.

One thing that does concern me is the interaction with the new Endless Spells. Sit a Slann on a Balewind and they get +1 spell. Put the Chronomatic Cogs down next to him and he gets another +1. That turns into 16 points per turn then with an average roll on an Astrolith Bearer that's 18 points per turn. Sit Kroak up there and it's 21 points, but whether that's worth the extra points investment is questionable.

Now that IS a problem. Though tbf chronomantic gears are a notable problem on their own.

 Glane wrote:

 Hulksmash wrote:


If you have both an astrolith bearer and a slaan general (has to be your general to perform celestial conjuration) then you're getting 10+d3 per turn. Odds are 66% in your favor of summoning 100-140pt unit or 2 of the level 6 things per turn. That means odds are solid that by the end of turn 2 you could add a siginificant monster to your army. And that doesn't take the engine of the gods into account either. Seraphon and their summoning is going to be fairly ugly honestly on boards with terrain to hide the slaan and astrolith.

One thing that does concern me is the interaction with the new Endless Spells. Sit a Slann on a Balewind and they get +1 spell. Put the Chronomatic Cogs down next to him and he gets another +1. That turns into 16 points per turn then with an average roll on an Astrolith Bearer that's 18 points per turn. Sit Kroak up there and it's 21 points, but whether that's worth the extra points investment is questionable.

Those extra regular points cost more points though. And unlike the normal set up of slaan plus astrolith (which are both already taken in a lot of lists) now you're talking more, and putting your slaan on display. You'll get more hiding him.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

nou wrote:

Spoiler:

@frozenwastes and deadnight - some good points and good reads in your posts, both of you mostly cover my POV on the matter, but I would like to add one angle, that hasn't been covered yet.

Lets assume for one moment, that by some strange turns of fate we actually get a well enough balanced AOS or 40K and GW starts to adhere to this balance with every new release. By "well enough balanced" I mean something reasonably achievable, that is that in a strict competetive and well defined format every faction has equal amount of choices on the entire bell curve and that either every faction has access to every major strategy or every major strategy is equal to any other. Now let's follow a newbie just starting his journey with Warhammer. At first there is quite a lot to explore - many factions to choose from, many major strategies to learn about and utilise and that is great. But then such a newbie hits a wall of experience, because by the very nature of ballanced systems, you must be trully competent to win a game against a skilled enemy and pretty much everyone that started the game earlier than you is more skilled. Moreover, as the game is ballanced and there are hundreds of thousands people on the internet trying to crack it, we can safely assume, that the entire meta is pretty much solved already - every small discrepancies pinpointed, every, even small exploit named and foundable, strongest netlist builds are easily available and there is nothing new to discover on competetive level anyomore - one can only memorise more on-the-table moves and tactics, exactly as is with chess. The game is purely skill driven (but with a significant luck factor because of dice) and... stagnant. Once you bought a competetive army there is no reason beside aesthetics to ever change faction and buy new models. There is no arms race by design, there is no new hotness, if you are poor strategist (and by definition, a skill based game has it's own, well defined bell curve of players population skill level) there are no prostheses to aid you in winning even occasionally and now there is absolutely nothing to blame for your personal failures as balance of the game is common knowledge...

I don't really think that such vision would suit a large portion of the community nor that it would atract more people than what we have now - a permanently shifting and updating meta that cannot be permanently solved and will never become stagnant, so people of any skill level have plenty to do within game system untill they are either bored or frustrated by it enough to drop out.

Of course the question of "where exactly on the scale defined by such two extremities GW products lie" remains open and it is pretty much the unspoken underlying question of all balance related threads on dakka. But we all know that drill well enough.

There is also one other reason that so many players like and demand biased listbuilding stage - for many, many players time spent on analysing sources, making draft lists, mathhammering them, changing, discussing options etc is how they interact with the rules part of hobby the most - not by playing actual games (most polls on the subject show that most people struggle to get averages higher than a dozen or two games a year), but imagining and designing armies. That is because of two reasons - one, mathhammering lists is solo activity, exactly same as building kits or painting minis, you can do this without social skills. Even discussing, especially on the internet, requires no or minimal social skills. And two - armies are costly and painting is time consuming, so if you are in only for the win and not collecting a larger-than-a-list collection of minis, then you better do your research carefully.

It's a very interesting and valid point you make here, but it sidesteps the reality that the situation will never get to that level of balance, nor is anyone expecting it too. What people ask for is a stronger effort to work towards that, because the best thing to do is get as close as we can even while knowing we will never get there.

Have you been here on Dakka when 8th ed 40K happened and half of the community praised the Indices phase and whished the game would forever stay static and contained with only incremental annual refinement of point costs to "prevent bloat and eventually achieve true balance" while the other half cursed Indices 8th for blandness, sameness and general lack of depth? There are at least some strong minorities that would want a chess-like TTGs. But that is a just a sidenote, because the point I was trying to make is that in the grand scheme of things it is apparently better from GW business standpoint to mantain an ever shifting landscape of rules and fluctuating power curve that have mantained the flow of players and money for 30+ years than try to achieve static balance - if the opposite were true then we would most certainly have near-perfect balance soon after GW went public. I agree however, that GW fails to mantain their imbalance healthy and in result have to deal with a lot of black PR from frustrated players that they could do better to avoid. My previous post was from more theoretical "game design theory" POV in the response to OP question rather than defense of exact GW practices. I have rage quit 40K myself after 2nd-to-3rd transition and I've split ways with "officialdom" again after 8th kicked in and forked away into "myhammer" (but not because of balance issues but because general game design decisions that just don't suit my needs anymore). If I were to describe myself through paraphrasing OP "Nowadays I'm very accepting of the fact, that the game I so love will never stay long in a place I wish it to stay".

Balance will always be under continual erosion. New releases won't have their points locked down on perfect values, new editions and allegiance updates will mess with balance, etc. No one wants GW to just stop releasing new stuff, accordingly no one wants truly static balance. People want dynamic balance where new things are released and updates are made but things are also re-balanced to fit that. And GW games sell more when they are balanced, because the purchases made by players chasing the meta are dwarfed by the purchases from players who otherwise avoid the game entirely.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Balance will always be under continual erosion. New releases won't have their points locked down on perfect values, new editions and allegiance updates will mess with balance, etc. No one wants GW to just stop releasing new stuff, accordingly no one wants truly static balance. People want dynamic balance where new things are released and updates are made but things are also re-balanced to fit that. And GW games sell more when they are balanced, because the purchases made by players chasing the meta are dwarfed by the purchases from players who otherwise avoid the game entirely.

Oh, I agree with what you write here about realities of dynamic and practically achievable semblance of balance in a living game. I just disagree with "no one wants..." part. I just looked up your dakka activity areas table and I see that you do not frequent 40K side of the board that much - there are lengthy, repeatable and heated balance discussions there, with quite a lot of people wanting not only to stop GW to release new factions but even cut existing range in half, trump codices and generally make 40k a more contained game in the sake of their conception of "true" balance.

Now, I think I've reached my personal limit of time involvement in this thread, so thank you for your time and responses. Cheers!

So an article on warhammer community popped up where the person they were interviewing basically came as close to shouting 'SUMMONING META' as he could without outright stating it. TBF also talked a lot about command points, which I'd say is the bigger change overall but one that is reasonably even in how it affects armies.

Fortunately my friend is also rather wary of summoning. We'll give it a try before deciding, if it's something we'd like to see in our games. Nothing that was previewed so far made me less anxious or more enthusiastic about entire mechanic or even idea of it.

Rule of 10%: The first 10% of points worth you add to your army (150 for a 1500 point battle, 200 for a 2000 point battle, etc) is free. After that, pay reinforcement points.

I watch the designers on twitter and they are close knit with a lot of the tga guys. Summoning Meta is definitely a thing, by design, and its a thing that I have to say 9 out of 10 people hugely embrace. It went from "we'll just wait and see I'm sure its not going to be *that* bad" to "well ok it will be that bad but thats just the direction the game went and thats good, free models are good, you just need to learn how to combat free models"

Just like so many embrace non intuitive rules and some get downright hostile about keeping the rules abstract.

If there's anything AOS has taught me is how very different the games and gaming community's wants and desires are from 30, 20, even 10 years ago.

For my money and experience, once an army has exceeded roughly 20% of the point value of the game and the other has not, the game becomes severely lopsided. I will continue to use sudden death cards for armies that summon more than that to keep games interesting.

We're starting a thing called Thursday Nights Main Event (taken from the old WWF Saturday Nights main event) where we will be playing strictly by the book though. I plan on posting some text driven battle reports to give my own feedback.

auticus wrote:
I plan on posting some text driven battle reports to give my own feedback.

Holla! I look forward to them. Admittedly one of my other main drives for getting back into AOS is having some more games to report on, and AOS is both easy and fun to write about - detail light, action heavy, generally short

Unrelated: Does anybody know what the Umbral Spellportals or Chronomantic Cogs cost? In a vague sense? I'm having trouble seeing how they help the game from a comp perspective, especially competitively. The Cogs are an auto-include for anybody with a wizard (so everybody), and I have yet to see the value (to the game) of the Spellportals, besides wombo-combo with an endless spell that actually hurts things (which also seem to be the most expensive ones) or to just erase any concept of offensive spell ranges. I guess the first one is expensive to set up, and both require casting two spells to matter? So just hammer down on the Portals / Cogs or force them to cast them outside that mega 30" unbind?

So maybe I talked myself out of that, as long as you bring a thing that unbinds, but still not a fan of #obviouslygoodthings that just become #alwaystaken

EDIT: Nevermind I found what I needed ...............

VAGUE EDIT #2: Wow did DOT jump up in points O_O

- Salvage

 Boss Salvage wrote:

auticus wrote:
I plan on posting some text driven battle reports to give my own feedback.

Holla! I look forward to them. Admittedly one of my other main drives for getting back into AOS is having some more games to report on, and AOS is both easy and fun to write about - detail light, action heavy, generally short

Unrelated: Does anybody know what the Umbral Spellportals or Chronomantic Cogs cost? In a vague sense? I'm having trouble seeing how they help the game from a comp perspective, especially competitively. The Cogs are an auto-include for anybody with a wizard (so everybody), and I have yet to see the value (to the game) of the Spellportals, besides wombo-combo with an endless spell that actually hurts things (which also seem to be the most expensive ones) or to just erase any concept of offensive spell ranges. I guess the first one is expensive to set up, and both require casting two spells to matter? So just hammer down on the Portals / Cogs or force them to cast them outside that mega 30" unbind?

So maybe I talked myself out of that, as long as you bring a thing that unbinds, but still not a fan of #obviouslygoodthings that just become #alwaystaken

EDIT: Nevermind I found what I needed ...............

VAGUE EDIT #2: Wow did DOT jump up in points O_O

- Salvage

Those two spells are 60 pts each. At that price, the portals will be auto-include for most armies, and I would imagine the cogs will be as well. My Slaughterpriests are definitely going to get even more use this edition. Their unbinding is just too important now.

I agree. They've created some false decisions again, where you are foolish to not take certain options because they are so cheap to use.

 Boss Salvage wrote:
VAGUE EDIT #2: Wow did DOT jump up in points O_O

In fact, so much so that my schemes to run Omniscient Oracles isn't really possible in normal games. That package starts at 2250 pts now, up from 1710

NM, I just have to use Acolytes. Game on.

- Salvage, kicks a rock and shakes the quadruple LOC out of his shopping cart fills his cart back up with big magical chickens

 Boss Salvage wrote:

 Boss Salvage wrote:
VAGUE EDIT #2: Wow did DOT jump up in points O_O

In fact, so much so that my schemes to run Omniscient Oracles isn't really possible in normal games. That package starts at 2250 pts now, up from 1710

NM, I just have to use Acolytes. Game on.

- Salvage, kicks a rock and shakes the quadruple LOC out of his shopping cart fills his cart back up with big magical chickens

I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar to the Rule of Three from 40k. I'm definitely not buying anything until I see the rulebook.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

auticus wrote:
I agree. They've created some false decisions again, where you are foolish to not take certain options because they are so cheap to use.

I mean, I was already taking two for the Gore Pilgrims battalion. Only thing that's changed is I now have more reason to take a third.

I assumed because it's specifically dictated by a battalion (Kairos + 3 LOC) that it would still be a thing, even if AOS is piggybacking on 40k changes. Oh duh, it's also still only 3 LOC, 4th is the specialest chicken

- Salvage

Seeing more of the points there are definitely some false changes in play points.

Oooh... Cannons for Ironweld went down 20pts a piece? Well, their essential BFF Lord Ordinator went up 40pts... so you're likely in the same spot you were before, etc...

I'm definitely excited to keep on chipping away at my big Assorted Dwarf Bros. hobby project, but I definitely expect they got even worse in the age of magic and summoning. :-p

 Boss Salvage wrote:
I assumed because it's specifically dictated by a battalion (Kairos + 3 LOC) that it would still be a thing, even if AOS is piggybacking on 40k changes. Oh duh, it's also still only 3 LOC, 4th is the specialest chicken

- Salvage

Ah. Didn't realize you intended to build one as Kairos. I don't know for a fact that the Rule of Three is coming, I just wouldn't be surprised. In either case, you'd be good if one was built as Kairos.

nou wrote:

Have you been here on Dakka when 8th ed 40K happened and half of the community praised the Indices phase and whished the game would forever stay static and contained with only incremental annual refinement of point costs to "prevent bloat and eventually achieve true balance" while the other half cursed Indices 8th for blandness, sameness and general lack of depth? There are at least some strong minorities that would want a chess-like TTGs. But that is a just a sidenote, because the point I was trying to make is that in the grand scheme of things it is apparently better from GW business standpoint to mantain an ever shifting landscape of rules and fluctuating power curve that have mantained the flow of players and money for 30+ years than try to achieve static balance - if the opposite were true then we would most certainly have near-perfect balance soon after GW went public. I agree however, that GW fails to mantain their imbalance healthy and in result have to deal with a lot of black PR from frustrated players that they could do better to avoid. My previous post was from more theoretical "game design theory" POV in the response to OP question rather than defense of exact GW practices. I have rage quit 40K myself after 2nd-to-3rd transition and I've split ways with "officialdom" again after 8th kicked in and forked away into "myhammer" (but not because of balance issues but because general game design decisions that just don't suit my needs anymore). If I were to describe myself through paraphrasing OP "Nowadays I'm very accepting of the fact, that the game I so love will never stay long in a place I wish it to stay".

The primary issue is just the transition time. It's cool when everyone is on even footing. Indexes were cool because it was the first time in forever everyone was on the same page. 6 months later, there were definite haves and have nots. Now we're just about to where people are on the same page again, and as someone who pined for the Index months, I'll admit the game has become more interesting now that there's a large diversity of armies making proper use of the CP system. I think if we had gotten something akin to Chapter Approved to start, it wouldn't have been nearly as painful, but there's really nothing that makes not getting access to the "real game" until a year after your friends less frustrating.

On that note, I'm very curious if the Sigmar CP system will evolve as much as the 40k one did once Battletomes start seeing release.

The 40k system really does not work.

They have FOCs, but reward you for breaking them. Imagine if you could just add any wars roll battalion from your corresponding grand alliance into your list without breaking faction. It's pretty much that. You just see the most cynical guard or cultists or deldar battalions to get some nice strats and cp

You can't view summoning as imbalance based on points while also discrediting points as a balancing mechanism. Either points are pivotal to balance and we can proceed, or they're not, and we have to discuss why summoning is a bad mechanic in the context of unit versus unit balance. I would still argue that ranged units are more powerful than melee. Unless there are summonable archers, gunners, or something with ranged mortal/regular wounds, i don't think the core balance will be that affected.

It's also worth noting that summonable units are seeing a price increase in points. For instance, when you buy a squad of Pink Horrors, you're paying for the Pinks, the Blues, and the Brimstones, with a slight discount for all 3.

40k just has a bad definition of "faction" as a result of continually trying to sell players the same Imperium models over and over again. Sigmar has similar things as a result of the handful of models from abandoned factions that haven't been dropped from the game entirely.

At this point we can just wait and see. I'm seeing a concerning narrative shift from GW from 'we want summoning to be fun but balanced' to 'you summon or you build to counter summoning'.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
At this point we can just wait and see. I'm seeing a concerning narrative shift from GW from 'we want summoning to be fun but balanced' to 'you summon or you build to counter summoning'.

How?

Look at the points increase of Pink Horrors. Yes they split, but you're paying for it outright.

The cost of "free stuff" units is going up.

Speaking from a fun standpoint, it isn't fun for me to have half of my legion abilities utterly useless in 1.0. For instance, as Legions of Nagash, I get the ability to revive fallen squads. Great. Only i have to pay points for it, making it essentially worthless.

 Marmatag wrote:
You can't view summoning as imbalance based on points while also discrediting points as a balancing mechanism. Either points are pivotal to balance and we can proceed, or they're not, and we have to discuss why summoning is a bad mechanic in the context of unit versus unit balance. I would still argue that ranged units are more powerful than melee. Unless there are summonable archers, gunners, or something with ranged mortal/regular wounds, i don't think the core balance will be that affected.

It's also worth noting that summonable units are seeing a price increase in points. For instance, when you buy a squad of Pink Horrors, you're paying for the Pinks, the Blues, and the Brimstones, with a slight discount for all 3.

That's the goofy things about points. They're really just a stat like any other that helps determine a models viability. Players put absolute faith in points to determine a models value, but at the same time don't want things that are the same points to be interchangeable. Free points is kind of an interesting extension of this. Take a model that's probably worth 40 that can be summoned, but got priced 30. People take lots of them in their list but summon other things that cost 40 instead of them. Devs update them to cost 50. People stop taking them in their list but start summoning them while other players complain they are getting more "free points". Realistically as a summoning option, absolutely nothing changed.

To be honest, the splitting of pink horrors being build into them its how it always should have been.

For people without blue and brimstone, just give them two different point costs, with or without splitting.

I agree that paying points for summoning or similar habilities in the list building phase was stupid. The failure of GW is not being capable of making summoner armies balanced agaisnt non summoner ones.

Good summoning is Pink Horrours or Poxwalkers. X unit summons Y unit. Bad summoning is "Summon whatever unit allready in the game you want". Its impossible to balance that.

In all kind of games, summons are special units linked to special summoners for a reason.

 Marmatag wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
At this point we can just wait and see. I'm seeing a concerning narrative shift from GW from 'we want summoning to be fun but balanced' to 'you summon or you build to counter summoning'.

How?

Look at the points increase of Pink Horrors. Yes they split, but you're paying for it outright.

The cost of "free stuff" units is going up.

Speaking from a fun standpoint, it isn't fun for me to have half of my legion abilities utterly useless in 1.0. For instance, as Legions of Nagash, I get the ability to revive fallen squads. Great. Only i have to pay points for it, making it essentially worthless.

Uhm, pink horrors are one tiny instance within summoning that is irrelevant to the issue as a whole. It's not what I was referring to.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
At this point we can just wait and see. I'm seeing a concerning narrative shift from GW from 'we want summoning to be fun but balanced' to 'you summon or you build to counter summoning'.

This was pretty much what the Ben & Ben show stated. You spam summoning, and if you don't want to do that then you have to output a lot of damage to control it. Control vs aggro.

It went from "wait and see, summoning won't be that bad" to "spamming summoning is as intended, its one of the new cornerstones of the game, and you counter it by spamming mortal wounds and doing tons of damage"

Now also...I've only read/seen about five battle reps now but all five ended by Turn 2 so summoning wasn't as big a deal since the game was over so fast.

Well I have Nurgle with plenty of extra daemons and I have alpha strike Skryrefyre so personally I'm in a good spot at least

I'll wait and see, because as much as the internet histeria wants it to sell it, for example I bought into the "omg warhammer 40k is so letal, everything is dead turn 2!" and then this past weekend I played in a 64 player tournament, with a ton of very competitive lists, and no game ended before turn 3, with games going up to turn 4 and 5 without a problem.


I know, anecdotal evidence, but since January I have played in ... 10-12 tournaments , some more competitive than others, but in all of them games did go to turn 3-5 without a problem.

I think the round 1-2 ending games are going to be more for tournaments or when two players have different power levels in their armies (for whatever reason). It's a shame that there will still be a huge disparity between a decent army and an optimized one but I'm not thinking it will be too much worse than now, or that much better.

Or in other words, tournaments will still be a crapshow, casual games are getting a lot of fun things to play with, and mismatch of army power levels will remain a problem holding AoS' popularity back.

I mean I played in a 64 player tournament for 40k two weeks ago and there were tons of turn 1 surrenders and devastation that made further turns pointless. It was only in the later rounds that some of the top tables went to full length

auticus wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
At this point we can just wait and see. I'm seeing a concerning narrative shift from GW from 'we want summoning to be fun but balanced' to 'you summon or you build to counter summoning'.

This was pretty much what the Ben & Ben show stated. You spam summoning, and if you don't want to do that then you have to output a lot of damage to control it. Control vs aggro.

It went from "wait and see, summoning won't be that bad" to "spamming summoning is as intended, its one of the new cornerstones of the game, and you counter it by spamming mortal wounds and doing tons of damage"

Now also...I've only read/seen about five battle reps now but all five ended by Turn 2 so summoning wasn't as big a deal since the game was over so fast.

And any game that sees a double turn will have an accelerated conclusion.

 Marmatag wrote:

auticus wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
At this point we can just wait and see. I'm seeing a concerning narrative shift from GW from 'we want summoning to be fun but balanced' to 'you summon or you build to counter summoning'.

This was pretty much what the Ben & Ben show stated. You spam summoning, and if you don't want to do that then you have to output a lot of damage to control it. Control vs aggro.

It went from "wait and see, summoning won't be that bad" to "spamming summoning is as intended, its one of the new cornerstones of the game, and you counter it by spamming mortal wounds and doing tons of damage"

Now also...I've only read/seen about five battle reps now but all five ended by Turn 2 so summoning wasn't as big a deal since the game was over so fast.

And any game that sees a double turn will have an accelerated conclusion.

Not necessarily in the way one might expect though.

Just because it was never a thing in 40k, will we see a rise in people taking units to disspell summoning? Units like the Cygor intrigue me because while not a Wizard, they can dispel two spells a turn, dealing a Mortal wound to the caster and healing a wound every time they do.

Quite possibly. It would be even more interesting if summoning hadnt been separated from spellcasting in so many instances.

I think unbind abilities will see popular use now and I think the semimeta of magic (aside from endless spells) has been effectively -dispelled- by the 30" unbind range. Endless spells are a different beast but from what I see the only problem there is the cogs and the portals costing half what they should.

I won't be surprised to see new units released with a "banishment" mechanic that allows them to remove xd6 models from the game that were previously summoned. The thing that people seem to be forgetting about the new summoning mechanics is that they can be balanced after the fact pretty easily. The number of summoning points a given army generates can be adjusted as can the number of points needed to summon a unit. I have no doubt that there will be some serious balance issues when 2nd drops, but I also know that GW is willing to make tweaks to their games these days.

The problem will be living with those serious balance issues for an entire year. Thats a lot of potential players run off if its as bad as feared :(

 EnTyme wrote:
I won't be surprised to see new units released with a "banishment" mechanic that allows them to remove xd6 models from the game that were previously summoned. The thing that people seem to be forgetting about the new summoning mechanics is that they can be balanced after the fact pretty easily. The number of summoning points a given army generates can be adjusted as can the number of points needed to summon a unit. I have no doubt that there will be some serious balance issues when 2nd drops, but I also know that GW is willing to make tweaks to their games these days.

I am hoping they will recognize them, what I find concerning is they seem to be surrounded by the gaming equivalent of yes-men.

I don't understand why you'd pick on summoning without first seeing how it works, whereas we know exactly how the double turn works, and it's an awful mechanic.

We kind of know how it works though. AOS before reinforcement points was wrecked from free points summoning.

I know enough to know that in any game where one side can summon in over 20% or so of the starting point size and the other can't that the game is often a foregone conclusion.

Much like how the double turn can easily dictate game over.

 Marmatag wrote:
I don't understand why you'd pick on summoning without first seeing how it works, whereas we know exactly how the double turn works, and it's an awful mechanic.

I'd say the biggest reason is that we know how the double turn works--but we also know that there's a downside to taking it with the new Endless Spells being in play.

The only real (practically speaking--aside from killing the things that are part of the mechanics) counter that Summoning has is Gryph-Hounds and Shooting.

auticus wrote:
The problem will be living with those serious balance issues for an entire year. Thats a lot of potential players run off if its as bad as feared :(

It just took a couple month for GW to nerf flier spam in 40k. I don't see why they couldn't do the same thing for AoS balance issues. They make balance passes far more than once a year. We get a big FAQ twice a year, and they've already shown a willingness to create beta rules in those. The GHB is where they make a big sweeping balance pass, but they have made smaller changes in between them.

The next big FAQ for Age of Sigmar is in July, so we'll only see fixes for the most egregious problems. The next big FAQ afterwards would be in January 2019.

July is definitely a bit awkward given 2.0s launch. Still Anything found since the books went to print being fixed isn't the worst thing.

I think you missed what I'm saying. The big FAQs and GHB aren't the only places we'll see balance changes made. We'll definitely see balance changes in those, but 40k has shown that GW will make changes outside of them if they feel it necessary. See the flyer nerf and the first set of beta rules.

 EnTyme wrote:
... but 40k has shown that GW will make changes outside of them if they feel it necessary. See the flyer nerf and the first set of beta rules.

The flyer nerf came before the FAQ schedule and the first set of beta rule were a part of the big FAQ.

The problem I see with endless spells, is the non-predatory ones are really good. Balewind/cogs/mirrors don't hurt you for going first. I just played around on a game, and my opponent took 3 endless spells, all non-predatory. It didn't matter to him if he went first or second, because what was it going to do?

 Boss Salvage wrote:

 Boss Salvage wrote:
VAGUE EDIT #2: Wow did DOT jump up in points O_O

In fact, so much so that my schemes to run Omniscient Oracles isn't really possible in normal games. That package starts at 2250 pts now, up from 1710

NM, I just have to use Acolytes. Game on.

- Salvage, kicks a rock and shakes the quadruple LOC out of his shopping cart fills his cart back up with big magical chickens

I quite enjoyed this post as well as the lively discussion in this thread! Certainly seems like AoS 2.0 has people excited... I'm very interested to see what you guys think of it once you've tried it out

Carnith wrote:
The problem I see with endless spells, is the non-predatory ones are really good. Balewind/cogs/mirrors don't hurt you for going first. I just played around on a game, and my opponent took 3 endless spells, all non-predatory. It didn't matter to him if he went first or second, because what was it going to do?

Yup. It's a strangely common thing in gaming (video games, RPGs, wargames...) that the direct-damage stuff costs way more than the buff/debuff stuff even when the latter is far better. A discussion about that could be a thread in itself really.

Carnith wrote:
The problem I see with endless spells, is the non-predatory ones are really good. Balewind/cogs/mirrors don't hurt you for going first. I just played around on a game, and my opponent took 3 endless spells, all non-predatory. It didn't matter to him if he went first or second, because what was it going to do?

Mirrors absolutely do hurt you for going first--if you've set them up to be effective for you during your turn, then I can make use of a Predatory Spell and your Mirrors.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ghaz wrote:
The next big FAQ for Age of Sigmar is in July, so we'll only see fixes for the most egregious problems. The next big FAQ afterwards would be in January 2019.

Spoiler:

There was a comment made offhandedly that there are Warscroll changes on the way, but they wouldn't be done via General's Handbook--so not sure what to make of that.

I think it was Ben Johnson who said it a few weeks ago on the Twitters.

RiTides wrote:I quite enjoyed this post

Glad I could entertain RT

Kanluwen wrote:

Carnith wrote:
The problem I see with endless spells, is the non-predatory ones are really good. Balewind/cogs/mirrors don't hurt you for going first. I just played around on a game, and my opponent took 3 endless spells, all non-predatory. It didn't matter to him if he went first or second, because what was it going to do?

Mirrors absolutely do hurt you for going first--if you've set them up to be effective for you during your turn, then I can make use of a Predatory Spell and your Mirrors.

The Mirrors being usable both ways is what's keeping me from raging out too hard over them. Sure, you can invest a lot into going hyper-aggro through Turn 1, but you best be prepared for retaliation. It's probably the main reason I'd consider taking the Purple Sun, to slam it through a cheeky enemy Mirror in the name of vengeance and chaos. That and it's a giant spiny purple skull.

- Salvage

 Ghaz wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:
... but 40k has shown that GW will make changes outside of them if they feel it necessary. See the flyer nerf and the first set of beta rules.

The flyer nerf came before the FAQ schedule and the first set of beta rule were a part of the big FAQ.

The first set of beta rules was announced (and became more or less the way everyone played) shortly after the FAQ schedule was announced. The FAQ showed us the final form of those rules. I anticipate this is the way we'll see it. Players will point out an unintended interaction between rules or some other point of imbalance. GW proposes a fix in the form of a beta rule. Players begin using the beta rule and give GW feedback. When the next FAQ drops, GW makes tweaks to the rule based on feedback and the rule becomes official. In any case GW will make changes as necessary. They realize that major imbalance is bad for the game (and for sales). That's the point I'm trying to get across. The exact timeframe of those changes is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the first "big FAQ" is released one month after the edition launches or six. GW is not limited to making balance changes in the FAQs and GHB. They have shown a willingness to make balance changes outside of those.

This is why I freely houserule in my campaigns. I don't have to wait for changes. I implement them immediately once an imbalance is found to be driving players out from frustration.

And not always but often our houserules have some kind of official adaption later on anyway (for example the look out sir being brought back and shooting through terrain getting penalized is something we've been doing the past couple years now) so it seems to even itself out.

Oh, we use plenty of houseruling, too. I'm just trying to remind people that when imbalances inevitably show up, we don't have to wait until a new edition comes out for them to be fixed.

Thats true, which is good. Waiting years to have things rectified is infuriating.