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Continuing this over from the 'new edition' thread.

Current point of discussion is this data based on 7 recent GTs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ageofsigmar/comments/9cyiz0/tournament_results_for_factions_since_aos_2/

This could be skewed slightly by the way Nova worked, giving an advantage to Death. However, Nagash, DoK, and ID are definitely the strongest armies right now. KO need serious help. Lack of magic or answers to magic really hurts them in the current meta. They need better shooting and better saves on the boats so that the battalions see some play instead of just clown car. Seraphon win rate is low because a lot of people are playing sub-optimal lists. SCE is in a good spot, which is surprising due to their huge range of models and builds. I was expecting them to be an issue this edition but it's looking like they're fairly well balanced at the moment.

The issue is that things were only slightly more than two months out from 2.0 release-at best for Nova, and GTs generally require painted armies. So someone putting an army together to take advantage of of the new meta is unlikely to have had it ready. Compared to someone passionate and skilled with an army that has not changed much, while the aforementioned may still be adapting to the meta shift or even learning a new army entirely.

But it is still a valid point of data and I appreciate whoever put it together.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
The issue is that things were only slightly more than two months out from 2.0 release-at best for Nova, and GTs generally require painted armies. So someone putting an army together to take advantage of of the new meta is unlikely to have had it ready. Compared to someone passionate and skilled with an army that has not changed much, while the aforementioned may still be adapting to the meta shift or even learning a new army entirely.

But it is still a valid point of data and I appreciate whoever put it together.

Dunno how it works in AOS but in 40k side at least there are serious tournament goers who use painting service for this(that or super simple paint scheme) to get around that issue.

I am sure there are plenty who did manage to get a new army together/updated, but I feel that factor is significant enough to call any conclusions off this data into question. Some if these GTs were merely weeks after 2.0 launch, too.

I appreciate the data points. Its a great start. However, there is not enough data present to draw conclusions. You need more than a handful of events.

The only conclusive evidence i got was that recently a lot of people went out and bought undead armies and that stormcast are still popular to play.

auticus wrote:


The only conclusive evidence i got was that recently a lot of people went out and bought undead armies and that stormcast are still popular to play.

sigmarines will allways be popular no matter how many editions they make of them.
what annoys me is that every1 and their mother are collecting ghosts now they are a feature army. where were they 2 years ago? NH as a subfaction army existed from day 1.....

this has forced me to shelf my own NH indefenitely in order to look for something new. currently my toughts are playing around mono squig force or a dispossessed/ironweld force.
best

Thats always been a common thing unfortunately. If a new force comes out AND they are powerful, they will be latched on to and spammed by the community for a while until the next powerful new faction.

If they come out and have the power of a wet fart, they will largely be ignored (a good chunk of new AOS releases fall into this category)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Another issue with this data. I feel that its being put together in an effort to show that AOS is balanced because there are a lot of top placing armies in tournaments, which proves that AOS is balanced because the same army isn't winning events all the time. I feel this way because I read it on twitter and facebook daily, that the game is in a great place and is a ton balanced because the tournament scene isn't being dominated by the same army.

I find that fallacious for a few reasons.

#1 - already posted, not enough data to make that conclusion.

#2 - tournaments in wargaming are not proper "tournaments" in that the winner isn't the one that bested everyone else. It is common for the winners of tournaments to have the same win/loss record as multiple people in that event. It is possible for there to be multiple undefeated players in a tournament that never fought each other.

Tournament scoring is also often not entirely about performance of the army. It is possible to go undefeated in a tournament and not win the event because your painting or sports score was edged out by someone else.

An OP unbalanced army is still an OP unbalanced army. You can't go down to your FLGS and be like "look dude, I know I smashed your face in 2 turns and tabled you but my army isn't really that bad because Scott won the last tournament because his sports scores were higher than mine, so my army isn't that bad because it ddidn't win the tournament!" Your opponent that you constantly table because you are running a power alpha list isn't going to care that you only placed 5th at the last tournament because your sports and painting score got tanked, when you are pushing an extreme negative play experience by exploiting the bad balance in the game and he is not.

#3 - Tournaments are a slivered sub section of the game as a whole. What is considered soft at a tournament can still club baby seals with impunity down at the FLGS casual night. It still offers a negative play experience to someone not wanting to be involved in tournaments and trying to say that the game is balanced because in the slivered subsection there are multiple winners is still disingenuous because if you aren't playing tournament AOS but your opponent is, the imbalance in the game is going to offer you a sharp kick to the jimmy no matter how much your opponent tries to convince you that his force isn't that bad because he didn't win LVO with it, while your army is a balanced collection of stuff that looks cool but can't stand up to tournament level lists.

Tournament gaming still usually revolves around powerlisting. Powerlistting shatters game balance, thats the point of powerlisting. The game as a whole is more than just powerlisting tournament play. But you can't have a tournament list facing a casual list and expect a good game, so a game balanced at the "tournament level" is not an indicator that the game is in a great balanced place.

#4 - You can take an OP busted list, give it to 10 players, and its success will deepend on the quality of players. If 8 of those 10 players are bad players, that OP busted list will look like its not that bad if you are using that as your objective data, becuase those 8 players are going to play badly and make it look like the list isn't that bad. Conversely if I take an average tournament list and give it to 10 players, and 8 are really really good players, that average list is going to come off as a super great list. This is why you need a much larger set of data to work with.

There is still a massive gulf of difference between a casual list and a tournament list in AOS. That to me is where I feel that the game's balance is still very very bad. It can definitely be vastly improved on.

I like the NOVA tried to incorporate the realm of battle rules into the GT.. but they are very strong and I think tip the scales of power EVEN more in favor of magic heavy armies. It wouldnt stop me from attending an event.. but its a "rich are getting richer" sort of thing. Nagash lists with another set of lores to choose from makes him even more powerful then he already is.

There is some controversy on TGA about the scoring at NOVA. The results from the event were:
1. dave fields -- Khorne (4 bloodthirsters and 20 hounds with karanak, council of blood)
2. kaleb walters -- Tzeentch (LOC/Kairos/9 enlightened, 30 acolytes)
3. matthew barker (me) -- Nurgle (Glottkin, 20 blightkings and blight cyst)
4. rob kron -- Deepkin (21 eels, eidolon of sea and volturnos)
5. william soehaili -- (Nagash with dogs, reapers and bladegheists)

But painting was a MAJOR part of the overall winner. And there was no best general. The nagash list went undefeated and I think only missed out on 4 battle points out of 102 possible. For reference I got 81 battle points and had a major loss and a minor win. I got a perfect paint score though. Only 10 armies in the event (almost 100) did. Most got in the 14-16 range. Painting was weighted heavily and effected the placings quite a bit. If this event was battle points only.. I would have come in 9th-11th as opposed to 3rd. William soehaili would have won, instead of taking 5th.

So Does this data use the "winners" of the events? Because The Nagash list SMASHED FACE and is more representative of the meta.. even though the khorne tz, and Nurgle armies took 1,2,3. Or is this based soley on battle points for the events. Best Coast Pairings recently added a feature to toggle between overall winners and battle points only. No recent event has had a best generalship award. Not adepticon, bobo, NOVA, blood and glory....

There is definitely a wide gulf between a tournament list and a casual list, but isn't that the point? I don't necessarily take that as a mark against the balance of a game. That's a mark against taking a tournament list to a casual setting. I wasn't aware that painting weighed so heavily in tournament rankings, but that does go a long way towards explaining why some of the top armies are so different from what I was expecting. That's kind of a dumb way to score a tournament IMO. I would imagine they do that to encourage sportsmanship, but I think it would be just as easy to dock someone points for being a jerk.

Painting scores were a part of grand tournaments for many many many many years until the end of the 2000s when indy tournaments scrapped them. THey have recently made a return.

For me, and my opinion, if the gulf between a power list and a casual list is don't bother playing, that is a thing where I feel the balance is very very bad because powerlisting is only 3-5% of the entire game.

The goal of game design, in my opinion, is to widen that bell curve a lot more than 3-5% viable.

People discuss the balance of the game with data like this, but many times they aren't ddiscussing casual vs tournament. They are discussing the game as a whole and saying the game as a whole is fine because tournaments have many different armies winning, but for the pointers I listed above I feel that that is wholly incorrect.

As a casual event organizer, this has always been a hot rage inducing point of contention between myself and the competitive guys that refuse to tone down and not club the baby seals (casual lists), but I only have this issue in 40k and sigmar.

For whatever reasons when we play other games like Middle Earth or Battletech or Saga, this issue never really arises.

 EnTyme wrote:
There is definitely a wide gulf between a tournament list and a casual list, but isn't that the point? I don't necessarily take that as a mark against the balance of a game. That's a mark against taking a tournament list to a casual setting. I wasn't aware that painting weighed so heavily in tournament rankings, but that does go a long way towards explaining why some of the top armies are so different from what I was expecting. That's kind of a dumb way to score a tournament IMO. I would imagine they do that to encourage sportsmanship, but I think it would be just as easy to dock someone points for being a jerk.

To be frank, I know me and several of my tourney buds would really enjoy not needing entirely different lists and even armies to take to events and do well. Not needing to figure out how competitive my opponent's list is before figuring out mine to match would be great. Plenty of times I have made a list ahead of time that I was excited about playing only to show up and realize it was too strong, the worst being when that realization comes two rounds in and the game is effectively over. It is not fun.


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 FrozenDwarf wrote:

auticus wrote:


The only conclusive evidence i got was that recently a lot of people went out and bought undead armies and that stormcast are still popular to play.

sigmarines will allways be popular no matter how many editions they make of them.
what annoys me is that every1 and their mother are collecting ghosts now they are a feature army. where were they 2 years ago? NH as a subfaction army existed from day 1.....

this has forced me to shelf my own NH indefenitely in order to look for something new. currently my toughts are playing around mono squig force or a dispossessed/ironweld force.
best

TBF, the Nighthaunts are in the starter. There were a good number of Khorne players back before the Blades battletome even though Khorne was bad. The ease of access for the models is a big factor. Also, Nighthaunt from before were effectively two 4-wound heroes and two unit options. The black coach was direct only and dated as all hell, the mourngul was FW and so direct only plus expensive plus required a bit of research to even realize it was an option.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
In other news, the other day I did a tourney practice game against a buddy building a Nagash list. He was playing this list for the very first time (and we were not using realm rules to simplify things, so limited spell casts) while I was playing Nurgle with which I have hundreds of games of experience. To my credit he did not table me until turn 5, and I was not far behind him in VPs. At the end of the game this is what I had killed (that was not brought back):

-Guardian of Souls

Fair and balanced!

So because you can’t beat your friend the game isn’t balanced? By all accounts I took a suboptimal nurgle list, came in third, (11th in battle points), which included a major win over Nagash, where I killed Nagash himself, all his skeletons, half the chainrasps and a couple characters.

No. Not because I can't beat my friend the game isn't balanced. I also don't consider your list all that suboptimal barring the exact technical term of the meaning to be that it wasn't the strongest nurgle list you could make. Its still quite strong.

Your tournament performance does neither to prove nor disprove the balanced state of the game overall, it proves you took a strong but not the strongest list of your faction and did well with it, which speaks to several different variables but none of which are indicators of the overall balanced state of the game.

I used to place in the top 10 of every GT I attended in the WHFB and 3.5 40k days. I was also always using strong lists that would club down any casual lists. That doesn't mean the overall game was unbalanced or fairly balanced. it means that I placed well in tournaments using strong lists.

It is a well known state of the game that if you aren't fielding a tournament level list, which constitutes a very tiny portion of the game overall, that you will get tore apart and that there needs to be casual level and tournament level of the game, which other games for whatever reason manage to escape having as big an issue with but 40k and whfb/AOS have never seemed to be able to overcome (barring the 6th ed ravening hordes days of whfb)

I re-read my post, and I realize I came across as a huge fuckface. I'm sorry, Aut. Having a rough day irl. I consider glottkin suboptimal outside of a horde army. I bring him to most games because I have put so much work into converting him EXTENSIVELY.

Isnt the "to club a baby seal or not club a baby seal" part of the social contract we all sign up for when we waddle up to the table? If I am at a tournament and bring a casual list because I like the models, or the models in it I painted particularly well or just for funsies.. I need to know I will be facing WAAC armies. WAACs are not bad at a tournament where the point is to win the event.

If I bring a WAAC army to the local game store and ask around for a game and smash someones teeth in in 2-3 rounds.. thats a dick move. There is no need for that and if it prevents my opponent from having an enjoyable experience, then I have failed as an opponent. We all need to ensure our opponents are having a fun time. If we are at a tournament this still stands, but with the underlying expectation that the competition is going to be tough.

I wish events would start seperating the awards though. I REALLY think painting and sportsmanship should be rewarded. It also increases the look and feel of the vent with nicely painted armies. Rather then red team v blue team. I wish events Had the best general, best painted, favorite opponent and best overall awards as a standard. Overall would be a weighted score of paint, battle and sports points. Best sportsmanship would be a popular vote of their FAVORITE opponent at listed on the score sheet of the last round. If you include best death/destruction/order/chaos (or imperial/chaos/xenos - whatever 40k does) it might start to be to many awards. But I think the standard for need to be best general, painted, opponent, and overall to incentivize the four pillars of the hobby (which is my own opinion) of army list design, painting and modelling, being a good/fun opponent and the best combination of those three.

I'm sorry, Aut. Having a rough day irl.

No worries dude. Thanks for the clarification it is appreciated.

What I really really want is for an experience with AOS to be similar to my battletech or saga or middle earth experiences. That being, when I run a narrative casual campaign, and guys and gals show up there aren't super murder lists that I have to either weed out or try to match up with each other.

I'd like the bell curve representing the gulf between casual lists and tournament lists to be a little broader to lessen that chasm.

Part of the issue is as we illustrated right here, what I consider a casual and a tournament list will differ from what my opponent considers a casual or a tournament list.

We have a lot of guys here that consider a casual list to be still tournament viable, just not super optimal. But if I pair them up with a non tournament casual guy, thats a big negative play experience I've just created and we lose campaign players that way.

I'd like to see more painting and sports awards as well. I emphasize both awards in my campaign events.

To clarify, it was not that I lost one game. It was that the best I could do was not be tabled until round 5. There was no point in that game where I had path available to win. And this was not casual v competitive, this was two competitive lists going against each other. It was not good player vs bad player, but two experienced players with a skew in my favor since he had literally never played LoN or Nagash before. It was not just a loss, it was that I lost before we even set up the board.

I did kill other stuff, probably a solid 50 chainrasps and 20 reapers, plus putting about 16 wounds on Nagash. All of that was gone by the end, barring Nagash still had 7 on him.

To clarify a bit more; I am not mad about this, I knew full well what I was getting into. I helped him build the list after all! I am just raising the point that even at solely the competitive level the imbalance is massive, taking casual v competitive out of the picture entirely.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Wait, what was your Nagash player's list anyways? Do you know if he had a reason to bother with skeletons in a Nagash list, or is it just what he had painted?

Well I was at Nova with my suboptimal but pretty commissioned Stormcast (slightly modified vanguard wing). I opted for them over my own painted Night Haunt due to the event scoring. Had a good go of it and lost at least 1 game I shouldn't have but finished 3-3 with 21st in battle and 20th in overall.

That said the field was funny and genuinely affect by several factors. Realm rules mean Nagash had more usefulness than normal. Scoring meant a lot of people probably brought something less than optimal like me because it was finished and pretty. Edition change had a lot to do with that last part I'm pretty sure.

Judging by the lists themselves there the spread is solid. There were quite a few Nagash around and not all did well. There were quite a few Seraphon but they looked mostly like the max out summoning style and so didn't do that well. Daughters of Khaine were murdering a lot of people. But Gutbusters were stomping people and there were some fun other interesting lists.

It's one data point but I liked what I saw for the most part. Liked even more that above tabletop standard painting was the norm in AOS. In 40k I'd have been army showcase with my army. In AoS I was slightly above average.

Oh, and one more thing. I loved Nova's scoring because I feel like people did bring other stuff because of the painting and sports. And the sports score wasn't wasted as quite a few people got hit with it after discussing with other players there.

Not surprised, but disappointed, to see Stormcast so popular. Practically giving away starter stormcast armies and constant updates and powerful rules will probably force a factions popularity. Wonder if some of the factions that got squatted for low sales would fair if they got the same love SC has got.

Another post claimed KO weakness, which I disputed, but this limited sample size suggests that might be the case. I thought they'd be great in a Nagash heavy meta. Can blast him off the table first turn.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

auticus wrote:


The only conclusive evidence i got was that recently a lot of people went out and bought undead armies and that stormcast are still popular to play.

sigmarines will allways be popular no matter how many editions they make of them.
what annoys me is that every1 and their mother are collecting ghosts now they are a feature army. where were they 2 years ago? NH as a subfaction army existed from day 1.....

this has forced me to shelf my own NH indefenitely in order to look for something new. currently my toughts are playing around mono squig force or a dispossessed/ironweld force.
best

Nighthaunt as a subfaction army might have existed from day 1, but now they're a fleshed out army.

With regards to Overlords, the biggest thing they need is the ability for them to fire while embarked upon their ships.

A lot of the top lists seem to be spamming behemoths with minimum battleline and no or little in the way of support, any thoughts on that?

 lord_blackfang wrote:
A lot of the top lists seem to be spamming behemoths with minimum battleline and no or little in the way of support, any thoughts on that?

Honestly - business as usual. Minimal "core tax" has always been a thing. Since Grey Knights came out in 5th edition 40k, I've found a good number of players I know focus on low model count, and thats one of AOS' design ethos... being able to field an "army" of a handful of models by maxing out on big monsters.

By spamming out big monsters and keeping your model count low, you are able to better sell off the army and buy the new over powered army and get it painted in minimal time.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
A lot of the top lists seem to be spamming behemoths with minimum battleline and no or little in the way of support, any thoughts on that?

I think that was due to the pack and scenarios. 2 of the 6 missions were scored by heroes, wizards or behemoths and only one had more than 3 objectives.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
A lot of the top lists seem to be spamming behemoths with minimum battleline and no or little in the way of support, any thoughts on that?

Since GHB1 there has been a skew towards elite being better. Units with strong size-scaling abilities always being exceptions. Nowadays this meta is not at all as strong as it was, but it is still there to a certain extent. Horde unit discount and point changes have alleviated things in a lot of areas. However, as Auticus touched on even in an even playing field people will tend towards elite because it is easier to put the army together and play with it in a practical sense.

I once came up with an awesome Clan Pestilens list and thought "wow I could make this for tournaments and do really well! Wait... no way I am building, painting, and playing with 130 plague monks." Then there is the issue of literally running out of time during games at tournments.


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mikosan wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
A lot of the top lists seem to be spamming behemoths with minimum battleline and no or little in the way of support, any thoughts on that?

I think that was due to the pack and scenarios. 2 of the 6 missions were scored by heroes, wizards or behemoths and only one had more than 3 objectives.

Also a factor.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I am sure there are plenty who did manage to get a new army together/updated, but I feel that factor is significant enough to call any conclusions off this data into question. Some if these GTs were merely weeks after 2.0 launch, too.

Just to play the devil's advocate on this point, I've seen someone I follow on YT buy, build, and paint 2000 point armies in a month or less to take to an tournament using ITC rules where he placed 2nd. May have been some easy paint jobs, but I've seen it. Not only that, but they had time to make their regular YouTube content as well as buying, building, and painting a brand new 2000 point army.

So, it's not overly difficult for those players out there who are highly competitive (like this guy is) to buy a new army, assemble it, and have it painted in time for a GT or other competitive event within just a couple of weeks to a month... especially depending on the number of models that were brought to the table.

SG

 ServiceGames wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I am sure there are plenty who did manage to get a new army together/updated, but I feel that factor is significant enough to call any conclusions off this data into question. Some if these GTs were merely weeks after 2.0 launch, too.

Just to play the devil's advocate on this point, I've seen someone I follow on YT buy, build, and paint 2000 point armies in a month or less to take to an tournament using ITC rules where he placed 2nd. May have been some easy paint jobs, but I've seen it. Not only that, but they had time to make their regular YouTube content as well as buying, building, and painting a brand new 2000 point army.

So, it's not overly difficult for those players out there who are highly competitive (like this guy is) to buy a new army, assemble it, and have it painted in time for a GT or other competitive event within just a couple of weeks to a month... especially depending on the number of models that were brought to the table.

SG

I am sure there are plenty who did manage to get a new army together/updated, but that does not discount it being a significant factor.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I once came up with an awesome Clan Pestilens list and thought "wow I could make this for tournaments and do really well! Wait... no way I am building, painting, and playing with 130 plague monks." Then there is the issue of literally running out of time during games at tournments.

Unless AOS is seriously slower than the "reroll by the bucketloads and FNP forcing rolling 2-3 dice at a time for dozens of guys" 40k movement trays should make time less of issue. I can play at least 234 model ork horde in 3h.

Painting I hear you having just recently painted 79 grots to add to 20 I already had. And I'm perfectionist enough to do all with edge highlighting. Albeit still just 4 stages at most but still. Plus eyes and nails...

Small elite armies are rather practical but looks silly for me. Fantasy should be about ranked battles. Not few individuals running around. Wish warmaster was still around(and high elves would be suitably nerfed).

Abilities depending but a rough average of 3 attacks each 4+/4+ re-roll all hits and wounds but really the pile-ins are what eats time, at least for me. 40k is a lot more forgiving with melee range, AoS each weapon has a (usually 1") range so proper positioning can make a big difference in the number of models getting to attack, doubly so on a unit with 25mm bases. This is fun tactically in a general sense but when scaled up can get very time consuming.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I once came up with an awesome Clan Pestilens list and thought "wow I could make this for tournaments and do really well! Wait... no way I am building, painting, and playing with 130 plague monks." Then there is the issue of literally running out of time during games at tournments.

This is where you look up tips on Speed/Fast Painting. I am somewhat in the same boat. I'm trying to paint Death Guard with a wife and a two year old son. I can choose to paint to what I consider to be above tabletop and enjoy the hobby or choose to paint to just at tabletop and enjoy playing the game. I'm choosing the former as my closest LGS is 45 minutes away.

Anyway, Skaven speed painting...


.

 ServiceGames wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I once came up with an awesome Clan Pestilens list and thought "wow I could make this for tournaments and do really well! Wait... no way I am building, painting, and playing with 130 plague monks." Then there is the issue of literally running out of time during games at tournments.

This is where you look up tips on Speed/Fast Painting. I am somewhat in the same boat. I'm trying to paint Death Guard with a wife and a two year old son. I can choose to paint to what I consider to be above tabletop and enjoy the hobby or choose to paint to just at tabletop and enjoy playing the game. I'm choosing the former as my closest LGS is 45 minutes away.

...I do know how to speed paint, yes.