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I've seen a lot, and I mean a lot, of people complaining about their army and when questioned about it they support themselves by comparing their units to Scatterbikes and Wraithknights. This puzzles me as I always thought everyone had these units (along with some others, Flyrants, Riptides, Decurion Necrons) pegged as being far to powerful and thereby above the level people would consider balanced. I can understand people want to be on top but comparing your balanced units to unbalanced units then complaining when they don't stack up doesn't seem constructive to me. We should talk about bringing the over preforming units down, not everyone else up. This is called the power creep, where models get better and better until every new unit is more powerful than the last removing all skill from the game.

Do you agree we should compare units to the 'meta' (read: over preforming) units because they are seen so often or should we compare against to more middle of the road codexes? Is the power creep a good thing?

Game is so borked anyways, it hardly matter what we use as a baseline for adjustment.

Nuke from orbit, hit reset.

And no, power creep at this scale is not good. An argument could be made that minimal power creep is healthy to keep an ever so slightly shifting of balance and power, but in general should be avoided in any significant amount.

Overperforming units become the new normal because that's what will slowly take over the meta. This is why everyone is compared to Jordan or Babe Ruth.

I an ideal theoretical world, we should balance around the average. If we use the top end as a benchmark, we just get rampant scale creep and escalation.

From a practical standpoint, we need to judge by what’s on the table. In a competitive environment almost everything you see is going to be the lean, mean, overpowered stuff. So when talking about balance, that’s the de facto standard.

40k right now is a number of different games kinda mashed together. The casual game is OK, as long as everyone is on the same page. Some with the competitive game. The question is where you draw the lines.

It really doesn't matter what point you pick. Low power, high power. The goal is to not publish any bad units. Even units that are slightly more efficient are okay, because that can be fixed by meta. But gross advantages in efficiency are unacceptable.

Take a look at the spectrum of codexs power level they released since season started. I'll be generous and not include the remaining 6th edition hold overs.

You have orks/BA one end and eldar on the other. That is a very wide gap and makes trying to find any kind of average measurement very difficult. That pretty much leaves the only metric left to compare to the gold standard in power and go from there, especially in a competitive setting.

To be the best you need to beat the best.

HoundsofDemos wrote:
Take a look at the spectrum of codexs power level they released since season started. I'll be generous and not include the remaining 6th edition hold overs.

You have orks/BA one end and eldar on the other. That is a very wide gap and makes trying to find any kind of average measurement very difficult. That pretty much leaves the only metric left to compare to the gold standard in power and go from there, especially in a competitive setting.

To be the best you need to beat the best.

That's why Cy Young sets the benchmarks, not average pitchers.