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If points costs aren't considered in play testing - it is worthless. Power is determined by cost.

There's no value in stringing up a community member over perceived play test slights. Take that gak elsewhere.

Lemondish wrote:
There's no value in stringing up a community member over perceived play test slights. Take that gak elsewhere.

While they may not be on topic for this thread, I don't think his own public statements are really 'perceived' so much 'his public statements'.

I think that you people are underestimating what it means to reach balance in a game with so many possible variables and interactions.

Just to give you an idea though, think about that other game with 1000 times more budget than this one, about the same age.
It has the same problems as far as list/deck building goes and are tackling it with an army of professionist and by gathering an amount of data every week that is greater than the whole history of 40K games ever played.

Yet what was the solution they found?" Screw balance! We are going to balance only around the strongest cards and the strongest comboes." Oh and even like this they had to cut up the format in tiers,else it was impossible to balance.
Oh and even like this, they keep breaking formats every time they introduce new cards!

Since MtG is a paragon for what it means to manage a game/hobby like a pro, i wouldn't call the decent results that GW is getting as amateurish. They have one tiny fraction of the resources of MtG, with a complessity that is smaller but not THAT smaller, and yet they are a doing a better work than wizard.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
(And a MUCH better work than Privater Press with WM/H, which only appeared as balanced initially, but only because they took the same stance as MtG "Everything is fine as long as every faction has something equally broken, internal balance is for losers")

The results aren't decent. There are many problems with the game that have existed since the beginning of the game. Nothing has be done to:
Limit allies
Balance points on obviously OP units (Infantry/spears/ect) - not to mention magic is by nature - horribly balanced with 95% of cards being unplayable.
Fix CP sharing and generation.

It is extremely inept in fact. With most balancing changing ether:
Fixing issues the wrong way (they don't actaully fix the problem - or make armies that wern't problematic unplayable(Grey knights for example) Or fix a problem that isn't even there (smite is not a problem - 30 point smiters were a problem).

No one wants to play MTG in 40k - they all their options to be playable. If that is the direction they are going. 40k will always be a joke.

 Xenomancers wrote:
The results aren't decent. There are many problems with the game that have existed since the beginning of the game. Nothing has be done to:
Limit allies
Balance points on obviously OP units (Infantry/spears/ect) - not to mention magic is by nature - horribly balanced with 95% of cards being unplayable.
Fix CP sharing and generation.

It is extremely inept in fact. With most balancing changing ether:
Fixing issues the wrong way (they don't actaully fix the problem - or make armies that wern't problematic unplayable(Grey knights for example) Or fix a problem that isn't even there (smite is not a problem - 30 point smiters were a problem).

No one wants to play MTG in 40k - they all their options to be playable. If that is the direction they are going. 40k will always be a joke.

Exactly, MtG is horribly balanced, and to reach that horrible balance it uses a staff bigger than the whole GW design team probably. But that is the "Industry standard", so on what basis can we tell that GW is not good at playtesting when the other examples existent (PP and Wizard, the other mini games simply do not have this number of factions/models) are doing worse than GW? Keep in mind that like you said, GW has an harder task than MtG, since they actually need to preserve internal balance.

Also, you really have no idea what you are talking about if you think that the only problem with smite where the 30 point psykers. Even with this huge nerf to smite spam, we STILL have smite spam lists (zoan spam and TS smiters), and they work really well.

Without the smite rule, smite spam would be the current meta, knights would actually be considered highly underpowered, especially Gallants who can't stay behind a screen. Elite wounds would be even less useful than now.

Death Hex, Doom, Warp Time, Word of the Phoenix - none of these powers should exist.

Audustum wrote:

Lemondish wrote:
There's no value in stringing up a community member over perceived play test slights. Take that gak elsewhere.

While they may not be on topic for this thread, I don't think his own public statements are really 'perceived' so much 'his public statements'.

Since he is the main villain in the conspiracy theories that many on this forum get off on. Anything he says is warped to re-enforce the perception that some armies are a persecuted minority. So Lemonondish is correct.

I am going to start off and say that Craftworlds shouldn't be balanced with Ynnari in mind and Ynnari should get its own point costs for each unit they can use as to balance their own damn faction. Army traits should also cost points. I am tired of my Saim-hann army being dragged to hell because Ynnari is too strong and Alaitoc are strong. If they keep balancing Craftworlds in that way then everyone has to be Ynnari/Alaitoc just to be able to play.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still perfectly fine with seeing a large number of low priced units (Infantry Squads, Fire Warriors, Ork Boyz if codex buffs them at all, Kabalites, Skitarii) go up a point, but the argument here seems to be specifically nerf the faction because the subfaction has the issue.

Exactly. -1 to hit abilities that are army wide should not exist. A completely different faction that takes another faction's point costs should not exist.

But DOOM shouldn't be as easy to cast for the insane buff it currently gives to all Aeldari shooting.

It's at average as its psychic value is 7. I can't tell how often that roll has failed and that is including rerolls. Too be fair I wouldn't mind Doom being limited to its faction only, ie. only Craftworld units get to use its reroll power and not Drukhari, Ynnari and Harlequins. This would stop the seer allying you are seeing now. Looking at last NOVA it would effectively mean no Craftworlds in the top 10 as most of them are taken for their psychic boost to other factions.

The psychic phase is fine. Its just that every army should have something to do in the psychic phase, and the ones who can't should get strong anti-psy to compensate.

Every army should have some form of countering in my mind as well. Necrons are an advanced army so why haven't they found technological ways to counter psychic powers. I wouldn't find it out of place to allow Crypteks to counter psychic powers. Same goes for Drukhari, as an advanced race that forbids psychic powers I feel like they should have a unit capable of blocking psychic powers(and detecting psykers fluffwise so they can kill them for their transgressions).

Relics SHOULD cost points

Definitely. Nothing should be free due to the inherent imbalance of free traits, warlord abilities, and relics.

-1 army traits are not wrong per se, they can be made to work.

The idea behind them is fine, they are a powerful defense trait against a certain type of attacks. Problem is that that "Certain type of attacks", right now are the majority of them, so those traits are overperforming. If those traits were changed to work at 24" range for example, there would be a much more meaningful choice to select them. Right now with 12", even those lists that don't gunline but try to close distances are affected by it. Yeah, i feel that they should be changed to 24", then they would be fine.

Necrons have psychic defense, the problem is that it's really bad. Gloom prisms are attached to a unit you wouldn't otherwise take and give you one deny with no way to make the roll more reliable.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Necrons have psychic defense, the problem is that it's really bad. Gloom prisms are attached to a unit you wouldn't otherwise take and give you one deny with no way to make the roll more reliable.

The other is a warlord trait.
Its not that Necrons don't have psy-defense, its just that its way worse than it should be. I mean, they are a race that fought the Old Ones and won. They should have way better defensive options than they do now.

The Necron psychic defense was always bad and this will not change I guess.
The problem for the Necrons is that the psychic powers have become deadlier, especially those which inflict mortal wounds.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Necrons have psychic defense, the problem is that it's really bad. Gloom prisms are attached to a unit you wouldn't otherwise take and give you one deny with no way to make the roll more reliable.

The other is a warlord trait.
Its not that Necrons don't have psy-defense, its just that its way worse than it should be. I mean, they are a race that fought the Old Ones and won. They should have way better defensive options than they do now.

Well they vritually destroyed by the Old Ones and had to sell their souls ot the C'tan to survive and eventually win..

They have some defences (usually fixed) but the Psyker and the Daemon are a potent weapon against the Necron - the latter destroying Tomb Worlds...

 Mr Morden wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Necrons have psychic defense, the problem is that it's really bad. Gloom prisms are attached to a unit you wouldn't otherwise take and give you one deny with no way to make the roll more reliable.

The other is a warlord trait.
Its not that Necrons don't have psy-defense, its just that its way worse than it should be. I mean, they are a race that fought the Old Ones and won. They should have way better defensive options than they do now.

Well they vritually destroyed by the Old Ones and had to sell their souls ot the C'tan to survive and eventually win..

They have some defences (usually fixed) but the Psyker and the Daemon are a potent weapon against the Necron - the latter destroying Tomb Worlds...

They still won though in the end though. Its likely that they didn't know about the Old One's psy-powers before, but when round 2 came along they had ways to deal with it. And you'd think that a race who's primarily threat were psykers and demons would specialize in developing counter measures. That's like arms race 101.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Necrons have psychic defense, the problem is that it's really bad. Gloom prisms are attached to a unit you wouldn't otherwise take and give you one deny with no way to make the roll more reliable.

The other is a warlord trait.
Its not that Necrons don't have psy-defense, its just that its way worse than it should be. I mean, they are a race that fought the Old Ones and won. They should have way better defensive options than they do now.

Well they vritually destroyed by the Old Ones and had to sell their souls ot the C'tan to survive and eventually win..

They have some defences (usually fixed) but the Psyker and the Daemon are a potent weapon against the Necron - the latter destroying Tomb Worlds...

They still won though in the end though. Its likely that they didn't know about the Old One's psy-powers before, but when round 2 came along they had ways to deal with it. And you'd think that a race who's primarily threat were psykers and demons would specialize in developing counter measures. That's like arms race 101.

Also I don't feel lore is a justification for this kind of thing. The game needs a semblance of balance and counter play for every matchup, regardless of how that matchup would go down in the lore.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Same reason I think rules like 'Death to the False Emperor' are garbage incidentally. An army shouldn't get a significant advantage in specific matchups which isn't reciprocated.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

They still won though in the end though.

Sure, they 'won'. Nothing says winning like going to hide for millions of years...

Spoletta wrote:
I think that you people are underestimating what it means to reach balance in a game with so many possible variables and interactions.

This comes down to a question of what balance is.

You can go for a situation where any 2000 points should approximately equal any other 2000 points - which is highly unlikely without having every unit be the same - or you have a system where there is a meta and the meta sort of keeps things honest.

So in say MTG you can try to play the meta. If control is strong right now, you can assume it will be popular at any tournaments, and therefore build an anti-control deck. You hope to run into control decks and you have a high chance of winning.

40k has a meta, but its never really been rock/paper/scissors. Instead its tier lists of power. You don't really have aggro, or control. You have mathematically good, and mathematically bad.

Maybe someone can disagree with me - but I don't think there is a counter-list to Imperial Soup. Or Eldar Soup. Or (moving down a little) even Chaos Soup, Tau or mono IG (beyond perhaps those two lists previously mentioned). These are just objectively better than the alternatives. You get more power for your points, so you push the odds of winning in your favour. This is pretty much how every edition has gone. This tier list changes every time GW changes the game (adding new models, changing old rules) but its still there. Its a problem to solve - the meta acts as a gatekeeper (thy must kill a 3++ Castellan to win a tournament) rather than something encouraging counter picks and evolution.

With that in mind a system where every codex has a power build would probably be balanced enough. Yes, like Warmachine it might mean internal balance is shot, and every Tyranid list looks like X, every Necron list looks like Y etc - but that surely beats every Necron list being "did not appear in this tournament".

In terms of internal balance - basic maths and some iteration (mainly to take into account movement abilities) could get most units to within a rough power range. You don't need to consider a million possible army combinations, because most units do not buff any other by their presence and are available as strict like for like replacements. If they are not good on paper its highly unlikely they will be good on the table.

My concept of balance is "Any list built with a rationale has decent chances to compete".

Honestly it's not like we are far from that. Souping right now is covering a situation that isn't half bad as far as general balance goes. Without souping we would see a lot of different lists in the competition.

The meta top dogs would probably be DE, IG and CWE, but wouldn't be at unreachable levels for other factions.

 Crimson wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

They still won though in the end though.

Sure, they 'won'. Nothing says winning like going to hide for millions of years...

Are there still old ones? No? Then they won.
They lost against the Eldar though. Turns out wasting time and resources fighting gods when the creations of your dead enemy are still alive is a really bad idea.

First time they fought the Old Ones they lost
Then they made a pact with the C'tan and became machines.
They fought the Old Ones again. This time they won and hunted them to extinction, forcing the Old One's creations to go underground.
Then they reigned the galaxy for a bit, during which time the C'tan began to fight amongst themselves.
Then the Necrons turned on the C'tan, and right after they enslaved them the Eldar, which have been gathering their forces, saw their chance and attacked the necrons. The necrons went into hibernation to recover.

The necrons won the war against the Old Ones. They even call it a victory in the codex.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
No, the psychic phase is fine in practice and is better than the old "at the start of ..." powers we had. Putting the powers in a chart is fine too, the thing I see is that we really should be paying points for powers. But by that logic, warlord traits should cost points too. And so should relics. And so should all wargear given to a model.

And then we basically end up going back to 3rd edition's means of doing things.

take me home, country road. Points for powers makesenss because some powers are objectively worse than others. Warlord traits could be free I suppose if there weren’t obvious winner and loser traits, but relics should also cost points.

I don't think relics should go back to points for pretty much every reason in this thread the GW struggles to keep up with balanace in a competitive meta. Adding points won't change some relics better than others. Their solution of them being has the same effect that certain relics will be chosen over others.

Just look at 7th if you need an example of horrible relic pointing. The black legion relics went for upwards of 75-100pts for one use, horrible, relics.

 buddha wrote:
I don't think relics should go back to points for pretty much every reason in this thread the GW struggles to keep up with balanace in a competitive meta. Adding points won't change some relics better than others. Their solution of them being has the same effect that certain relics will be chosen over others.

Just look at 7th if you need an example of horrible relic pointing. The black legion relics went for upwards of 75-100pts for one use, horrible, relics.

So because GW is bad at assigning point values you shouldn't add point values to them at all leaving ultimate bad value of them all(free) instead? Yep makes sense...

Charging points for Relics or free Relics is a moot point discussion because you'll always end up with 1 or 2 that are good, and the rest being useless by comparison. When was the last time you saw a DG list use the Plague Skull on a character? Imagine charging 25 points for that.. lol

They are getting better at it overall compared to previous editions to be fair

Spoletta wrote:
My concept of balance is "Any list built with a rationale has decent chances to compete".

Honestly it's not like we are far from that. Souping right now is covering a situation that isn't half bad as far as general balance goes. Without souping we would see a lot of different lists in the competition.

The meta top dogs would probably be DE, IG and CWE, but wouldn't be at unreachable levels for other factions.

I'd rather see Tau, Orks and Necrons continue to get bent over (or buffed) rather than make most of the Imperium and Chaos sub factions get put into the garbage bin by killing soup. The current meta at least has top table representation from Eldar, Chaos, Imperium and Nids, even if they're all the souped versions of those factions.

Mono CWE and DE would run absolutely wild without Chaos and Imperium soup to keep them in check as mono Guard can't even touch Alaitoc without doing silly gimmick 13 Hellhounds gak and mono-marines can't stand up to any flavor of Eldar.

 NurglesR0T wrote:
Charging points for Relics or free Relics is a moot point discussion because you'll always end up with 1 or 2 that are good, and the rest being useless by comparison. When was the last time you saw a DG list use the Plague Skull on a character? Imagine charging 25 points for that.. lol

They are getting better at it overall compared to previous editions to be fair

Maybe if the other relics would cost more than 25 pts you would have more reason to take it. But when it's free there's no point in not taking the best one possible.

Why would you take grot if you could get ork boy for same price?

 NurglesR0T wrote:
Charging points for Relics or free Relics is a moot point discussion because you'll always end up with 1 or 2 that are good, and the rest being useless by comparison. When was the last time you saw a DG list use the Plague Skull on a character? Imagine charging 25 points for that.. lol

They are getting better at it overall compared to previous editions to be fair

But GW now adjusts points bi-annually, so they could address some relics being better than others by addressing points. And sure, GW is bad at assigning points, but then you can apply the same logic to whole game and just play without points altogether like in early AOS...

 Marmatag wrote:
Death Hex, Doom, Warp Time, Word of the Phoenix - none of these powers should exist.

Death hex and Warptime are kinda hard to pull off every time. Also, I've run into situations where DH is useless, and Warptime is only really good in the first couple of turns.

 chimeara wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Death Hex, Doom, Warp Time, Word of the Phoenix - none of these powers should exist.

Death hex and Warptime are kinda hard to pull off every time. Also, I've run into situations where DH is useless, and Warptime is only really good in the first couple of turns.

Warp Time is also significantly less powerful with the big FAQ. Not being able to Warp Time from deep strike lowers it's utility a lot. Still good, but I think it's in an ok place now. And I never play chaos, my main opponent does hah!

Well, I would not be fond of paying for relics or psychic powers.
I'd keep the game as simple as possible.
Technically, one could penalize OP relics or powers if any.