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Touche'. I mean, i'd like a comparable level of skill for a unit that is supposedly specialized in that one area. :-p

I don't want broken. But I do want units that aren't price similar to comparable 2 wound models when they only have a single wound. I am ok with Ghouls at 100pts (still a little high) and Skellies at 80pts as they replenish so in essence I'm paying for more than just the 10 wounds. With chaos you've got marauders that are similar at 60pts and Gor that are 80pts but have a better CC save, faster, and can run and charge (for a 20% discount vs. Warriors).

If they wanted dwarves to be more elite they needed to reflect it in their stats. As it is they are horde level rules wise but priced like elites.

 Hulksmash wrote:
I don't want broken. But I do want units that aren't price similar to comparable 2 wound models when they only have a single wound. I am ok with Ghouls at 100pts (still a little high) and Skellies at 80pts as they replenish so in essence I'm paying for more than just the 10 wounds. With chaos you've got marauders that are similar at 60pts and Gor that are 80pts but have a better CC save, faster, and can run and charge (for a 20% discount vs. Warriors).

If they wanted dwarves to be more elite they needed to reflect it in their stats. As it is they are horde level rules wise but priced like elites.

So much this. I actually just retired my TK, because they weren't "fun" in a meta that is locally just playing armies they enjoy for relaxed play.... and yet even in this quite casual environment Dwarves struggle to do anything. My wife's Saurus Guard, even beyond much greater access to much better buffs and supports, are overwhelmingly better "elite infantry" than literally anything I can field from Dwarves, at any point cost. As stated, you can totally price reasonable units that read, and perform as "elite".

In my mind, if priced accordingly, I imagine Dwarves to have devastating "toys" IE artillery, shooting in general, war-engines, etc... backed up by a costly, but ultra durable wall of guys tasked with working around their inherent slowness, by being a wall against attacks. At this point you still have competitive challenges in tournament scenarios tasking players with higher mobility, BUT at least their is a tactical/racial internal logic to how said army performs.

As it stands we have artillery being the only decent option (albeit still pricey and with only a couple of the options being worthwhile, and insta gimped if you take out one squishy support model), and everything else being some of the worst priced, performing models in all of AoS. :-p

Edit: Incidentally, as others suggest, slashing Dwarf points almost by half, instantly rectifies things, and at least fits them into the aforementioned internal logic.

Actually I don't really care for the defensive dwarf force. I feel like Dwarves developed their empire by marching forth and smiting their foes. Enemies at the gates makes for poor trade

I want to be able to build an offensive dwarf force so that my infantry aren't just a shield for my guns/shooters.

Until GHB2 shows up and (hopefully) fixes the issue, what I can suggest is for Dispossessed players to get permission from their groups to use PPC for their lists (it has better balance at the same scale, including lower costs for Dispossessed infantry). At this point I'm sure opponents will have seen how bad Dispossessed infantry is and are likely to be receptive to an alternative option. Opponents don't need to change their own lists either.

I play pretty exclusively in Tournaments locally because that's the most efficient use of my time with 2 daughters So while I appreciate the PPC I'm stuck waiting for the GHB2.

Well at least for tournaments Dispossessed have plenty of company in the 'armies that aren't viable' room

My group is all about General's Handbook, and isn't up for comps, even well made ones. So yes, even though our tournaments aren't full blood-thirsty, there's definitely a large swathe of "no chance" armies. :-p

Which is a shame because the fan comps did a great job and were updated to fix holes much faster than the GHB, which I am growing to dislike more every day barring succumbing to my old gamer-self and just chasing the meta again.

 auticus wrote:
Which is a shame because the fan comps did a great job and were updated to fix holes much faster than the GHB, which I am growing to dislike more every day barring succumbing to my old gamer-self and just chasing the meta again.

I'd have ripped my hair out months ago, to be sure

I've found that Order is the only one with a ton of poor to bad list possibilities. That's because dwarves and aelfs make up so much of Order and it was the largest alliance by a mile. Most issues stem from lack of synergy with things that don't have battletomes yet and point costs. You can still build some solid armies but Order is pretty pigeon holed into a Battletome army OR Freeguild.

Death has several viable ways to be played and some don't even take a morngul. Chaos has got a ton of play options whether dedicated or mixed. And Destruction actually seems to have very few poor choices and same as chaos dedicated or mixed seems to play very well.

I get that fan comps can fix things faster than GW. But unlike some posters I don't think anything is inherently broken at this point either and can be played around. I think the GHB is actually in a pretty good place outside of some order pointing issues (looking at Aelfs and Dwarves).

Oh well, hope to see the second one soon!

 Hulksmash wrote:
I've found that Order is the only one with a ton of poor to bad list possibilities. That's because dwarves and aelfs make up so much of Order and it was the largest alliance by a mile. Most issues stem from lack of synergy with things that don't have battletomes yet and point costs. You can still build some solid armies but Order is pretty pigeon holed into a Battletome army OR Freeguild.

Death has several viable ways to be played and some don't even take a morngul. Chaos has got a ton of play options whether dedicated or mixed. And Destruction actually seems to have very few poor choices and same as chaos dedicated or mixed seems to play very well.

I get that fan comps can fix things faster than GW. But unlike some posters I don't think anything is inherently broken at this point either and can be played around. I think the GHB is actually in a pretty good place outside of some order pointing issues (looking at Aelfs and Dwarves).

Oh well, hope to see the second one soon!

What he said. The main issues with the game right now seem to be from some allegiances not being updated (yet). We'll see what happens if/when Steamheads are released what happens to the rest of the Duardin. I actually expect the see the Fyreslayers and Dispossessed show up in the same Battletome with (hopefully) some minor updates and rebalancing the way the existing Tzeentch and Stormcast forces were updated.

Yeah. Which makes the alternative chasing the meta.

So for example if you are a dark elf player or a chaos dwarf player or whatever, you're going to get the shaft until they decide to update your stuff which could be years. Or you can choose to chase the meta and buy an army that has an updated set of rules so you aren't feeling the warm caress of the shaft.

If you are playing an army with an updated set of warscrolls then the GHB is fine. I totally agree.

If not - then you are at the mercy of whenever they get around to it.

Also remember the GHB points also came from fan comp.

But unlike some posters I don't think anything is inherently broken at this point either and can be played around.

When you are playing a legacy army that has not yet been updated up against a "modern" force and your opponent is playing min/max style, there is a giant problem that cannot really be played around.

To bypass this and try to encourage new players, i actively discourage them from picking up legacy armies that don't have modern books. We've lost several players to that already, where they'll get high or dark elves (or hell even khorne bloodbound is pretty low on the power scale) and they go up against a sylvaneth or stormcast player playing min/max on them and stomping them off the table without any real counters. It is discouraging for them, and discouraging for event coordinators trying to grow out the game when they sit on legacy items like this and let languish for potentially years.

I think if you are going to play highly competitively, you are always going to be "chasing the meta", whether that is which faction you choose, or how you "min/max" or choose units within that faction. Though, certainly, it would be better if there weren't factions that were at such a large disadvantage that even in fairly friendly games that stand no chance of winning.

But remember, the people who designed the game don't see winning as part of the fun. Telling a story is the fun thing. If you play dwarves, and use points, then your story is always going to be about making a heroic last stand while badly outnumbered.

I agree with you. I run narrative campaigns. However, I live in a highly competitive area where people don't see a difference in tournament, casual game, or narrative campaign and build a min/max list regardless of what it is they are playing.

While telling a story is indeed also my primary directive in playing AOS, I don't know anyone who wants to willingly play the role of the army getting stomped into the mud.

No one wants to tell the story of the dwarf army that has a 99% chance of getting face rolled before the game begins because their opponent is fielding the latest LVO build. and they are playing dwarves (for example).

This is where my conflict and annoyance comes into play most harshly. I don't feel I should have to chase the meta if I want to play narrative campaign style games but because of my environment I do or I write in house rules to boost legacy armies, which I have grown to not like so much because the competitive guys usually fly off the handle at how they are being treated unfairly by having legacy armies receiving houserules to boost them because that would have influenced what they would have collected on their end if they had known and it had been "official".

Before GHB when I designed Azyr, I had the ability to change points as needed and no one griped because there were no "official points". Now that there are official points, I lost that ability to adjust on the fly and we're beholden to whenever GHB updates and how they decide to update as well as how often the legacy armies get updated.

There is a plus: I can write new spells and artefacts for armies that don't have them and that doesn't usually elicit any complaints. Its just when I adjust points.

Sadly the existence of skryrefyre kills the idea of nothing being broken before even going into more widespread issues like Kurnoths, Necropolis Knights, Beastclaw Heroes, etc.

Skyrefyre is bad with a double turn. That said it still isn't broken to me. There are a lot of ways to counter it and it's not excellent at scenario play honestly.

All the units you bring up are good but again not broken.

Then again that brings up the definition of broken. To me it's things that don't have a decent counter in the meta based on scenarios. They do so, not broken. But your definition may vary and they may be broken

@Auticus

I get your frustration on the end of having designed a solid point system. And I feel bad for people in your area possibly going hard on non-competitive events. That can lead to sourness. I've found locally that a few of us dominate the top tables. But we mitigate it with prize support going into a raffle if we win and by bringing more varied and toned down lists because we want our events to blossom. Unfortunately that does require there to be some level of ownership for the top players in an area to make work. But I've also found that generally 95% of people don't chase the meta. And luckily so far none of the d-bags have been the ones to do it

It does require some ownership yeah. Their thinking is that they want the region to stay highly competitive so to keep it that way you have to play that way all the time and players will either adapt and make the community stronger or will get frustrated and quit which is no loss to them.

Sorry man. That sucks. We're highly competitive but I only get the chance to play lots of games at actual tournaments due to life. Same with most of the other highly competitive fellows locally. So we make it a point to make sure that tournaments happen so we can get games in If that means tossing prize support and regularly changing armies we can and do.

Never understood the playing super hard all the time.

Its an interesting dynamic. Its not everybody that plays this way but it only takes two or three guys to cause a pool of twenty-five players to do it, because no one wants to be called "meat" lol.

Well, I think you can have fun with a battle you can't technically win. You just try to come up with a different victory condition for yourself. Like, try to have your unit of slayers take out the biggest monster in the opposing army before going down. Or just survive for X turns, hold some part of the battlefield. Then if you accomplish your goal, you can feel like you succeeded even though you lost, and your opponent will be happy because they won (and probably confused at why you are so happy about doing some arbitrary thing, while losing so badly).

However, I do think it's going to be really hard to have a fun game if one person is playing to try to tell a story, and the other is just trying to win by choosing the best moves regardless of whether or not they are doing things that even make any kind of sense in the setting. I think that's the real problem. Both of those playstyle are fine, but not really compatible.

I have noticed, especially with Skryrefyre, that there are a lot of theoretical counters that simply don't play out on the tabletop--they don't work as advertised and/or don't work against any opponent except the kind they are designed to counter. Even then, IMO something can have a counter and still be broken. If the counter is something else that's broken there's an obvious issue there, but more so if the counters are simply a handful of specific units that's a problem---players have to either run those units or have no answer to whatever is broken. With the central idea of AoS being that a player can be reasonably competitive with any faction that 'breaks' the dynamic that's supposed to exist.

 Hulksmash wrote:
Skyrefyre is bad with a double turn. That said it still isn't broken to me. There are a lot of ways to counter it and it's not excellent at scenario play honestly.

I would be very interested to hear what counters you know of. Most of what I've seen people suggest is based off Gryph Hounds or hordes of models, both of which only work against an unskilled Skryre player who doesn't know how to do it right.

Most times it's deployment and chaff units. You don't need hordes of models but you do need to bring throw-aways and speed bumps. Not to dissimilar to WFB of old.

A lot depends on the skyfyre list (all warpfire or not), terrain, actual mission, etc, etc. All warpfire has a lot more counters that mixed ratling gun and warpfire.

Not going to argue that in pure damage output it's one of the meanest lists out there. But I don't think it holds up long term in a tournament setting. That's a personal feeling based on experience. Maybe I haven't run into a "skilled" skyfyre player yet as you say. Which is possible. Most of my local area isn't a huge skaven fan and the one or two times those lists have been trotted out we've stepped on them hard.

I ended up building it myself to see if the theory matched reality, it was only when I started playing it that I realized how easy it was to screw up on the tabletop. At any rate the idea build will be two units of full warpfire and one unit with shock gauntlets, the latter unit also has the army general with the lord of war command trait.


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I have run it against tournament lists (both in and out of actual tournaments) without much resistance, but not having gone to any large events I couldn't say for sure how it would do at a regional or national competition.

What I am honestly hoping for is that GHB2 does a mass update, even if its just points and giving command abilities/items, to the armies that don't have them. Something, anything to bring them more in line with the new releases so they don't fall completely by the wayside as GW moves forward while ignoring most of what came before this shift in battletome design. I'm at the point where I don't see any way that Death, for example, can even begin to compete with all the new things, and I'm not even talking compete as in competitive, I mean for regular casual games.

I see FEC perform perfectly well in a casual setting as well as malignants, though the latter has the Mourngul so doesn't entirely count.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I see FEC perform perfectly well in a casual setting as well as malignants, though the latter has the Mourngul so doesn't entirely count.

Do you know what the FEC lists run? Because I have been trying for the better part of a year and I get stomped in short order :(

Wayniac wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I see FEC perform perfectly well in a casual setting as well as malignants, though the latter has the Mourngul so doesn't entirely count.

Do you know what the FEC lists run? Because I have been trying for the better part of a year and I get stomped in short order :(

I see large units of horrors and a varghulf with the cloak of mists and shadows to disappear out of danger. Also the big monsters as hammers and ghoul kings buffing ghouls. Do quite well around my area.

I think it's fair to assume a large overhaul in points for the release of the 2nd GHB. Likewise, it's fair to recognize and forgive the massively unbalanced points system in the current GHB considering it's their first attempt at pointing and balancing this new game.

That said, yes, "legacy" units got shafted hard in that exchange. Take a look at Orruks vs Savage Orruks - both 100 points, more or less same survivability and damage output (circumstantially), except the SOs have an extra wound. That's huge.
So, even with that, Dispossessed Warriors are also 100 points, and they have comparable weapon stats to Orruks but have flat out worse banners, movement, survivability... match that up to SOs etc etc... same goes for the horribly expensive Sea Guard, Swordmasters... I could go on.
All that to say that old armies are totally being left behind in the power creep. I want to believe it's not intentional, but a part of me is thinking that GW is just trying to discourage players from using units they don't want to sell anymore.

Except Tomb Kings are top-tier OP.

As for FEC, start with running Ghoul Patrol. Make sure your general has master of the night for a command trait, and make your general the unit champion out of a 6-man unit of flayers/horrors instead of a hero that can be sniped. If you have a mounted ghoul king make sure he's on a Terrorgheist. Do those and you should be in a good spot for casual play.