Are Special Characters actually broken?

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**Blackie**

Celestine should cost around 250-300 points to be fairly priced, and she would still be a popular and effective choice in SoB armies. But probably too expensive for soups, which is the point of having her toned down.

**Melissia**

Blackie wrote:
Celestine should cost around 250-300 points to be fairly priced, and she would still be a popular and effective choice in SoB armies. But probably too expensive for soups, which is the point of having her toned down.

So what, exactly, would that do to help Sisters players' lack of choice here?

Celestine is still mandatory at 250-300 points, we'd just have a smaller army for her to support. And then the Canoness would still be a near-useless tax unit. And outside of the much-derided "soup", we have no other options.

This is the problem with special character discussions. You act like every army is Space Marines with 50 billion generics and 60 billion named characters. But that's simply NOT the case. It fething sucks that we HAVE to take celestine, but we basically don't have any other choice. If we don't take her, we take two canonesses. Canonesses can't take jump packs, have gakky weapon choices, and aren't really capable of supporting our best units outside of retributors. Okay? Why would we want to do that when we could take Celestine, who actually is capable of doing something to help our army that more other units wouldn't be better at?

**Kap'n Krump**

In truth, I think the worst part about special characters are auras that can buff entire armies. I think aura abilities should be able to benefit one or two units at most for special characters. But having one model buffing an entire army, and doing that over and over again, is pretty unfair.

Take the 'my will be done' rule for necron overlords. I think all aura abilities should work exactly like that. Exceptional units like the G-man or yarrick could do it 2-3 times.

**Breng77**

Jidmah wrote:
Breng77 wrote:
I think a lot of what I read here follows how I feel. SC are not necessarily broken, however they are very hard to cost correctly as such they tend to fall into 2 groups

1.) Obvious choices, that you would always take if you were going to take a specific role of HQ. Things like Ghaz vs Mega armor warboss, Azreal Vs Company master, Magnus/Mortarian vs any greater daemon.

2.) Horribly over costed junk, typically these are character versions of HQs you would rarely take anyway, unless they were cheap.

So, how do Kaptin Badrukk, Snikrot and Zagstrukk fit into this classification?

If you'd take some wisdom from WotC who have taken a little more than a decade to get their special characters ("Legendary Creatures") right, the simple solution is to make special characters not "Generic Dude +1", but simply unique.

You take Badrukk because he has a great gun, decent BS and ok armor. Nothing in the ork's arsenal can do that.

Snikrot is stat-wise actually worse than a generic warboss, but gets to deep strike, hide in cover and tear up enemies with his knives while reducing leadership. You don't take Snikrot instead of a warboss, you take Snikrot if you want a stabby murder ork.

Zagstrukk is a slightly better storm boyz nob with unique rules, weapons and abilities.

I think more characters need to be like those. Unique things that can be gotten nowhere else.

Broken special characters aren't any worse than broken generic HQs (jetbike council), broken heavy support choices(remember riptides?) or broken lords of war(wraithknight). Broken things need to be toned down.

Increasing points doesn't always fix problems. Some rules are simply too powerful to be costed properly. For example, increasing Roboute Guilliman's points pretty much equates to removing razorbaks and tacticals from his list. Is removing one razorback enough? Maybe two? At some point the list may no longer be able to simply torrent everything off the board, but that might be the very same point at which the chapter masters (named or generic) start being strictly better than the primarch, pretty much dropping him from play.
Previously there was an example of the Emperor being fair if he costed 1500 points. If his rules simply read "All IMPERIUM models cannot lose wounds", no amount of points would make that fair.

WH40k is about awesome things happening in games. Ghazghkull Thrakka fighting a duel with Eldrad Ulthran is awesome. Yarrik getting turned into a squig by Ol'Zogwort is awesome for all but the old kommissar. Mortarion duelling St. Celestine in the middle on an imperial gunline is awesome.
Warboss Dakkan and his Hyennas racing Captain Johnson's Bikers of the Imperial Fists for a relic? Autarch Ariyel getting run over by a leman russ, because he missed the impossible to miss melta-shot? Boss Manslaughter killing 10 imperials with his big choppa all by himself? Also great.

If your joy of a game plummets simply for the reason that some of the models are named by GW instead of you, maybe something is wrong with you, not with special characters.

From a balance standpoint those characters fit into "overcosted trash", you don't take snikrot to be a stabby murder ork, he is bad at that, you take him to drop on an objective and abuse the character targeting rule and his 3+ coversave. If you want stabby murder deepstrike orks 7 Kommandos do the job better than snikrot does. You generally don't take the other 2, but when you take Zagstruk it is simply for fearless stormboyz no other reason.

IF all we care about are special characters doing awesome things make them narrative only models, if we care about balance, being undercosted and OP or overcosted trash makes them bad for balance..

**Melissia**

You realize his argument was they aren't really overcosted trash, they're designed for specific uses that you'd otherwise not be able to get out of an Ork army.

**Jidmah**

Melissia wrote:
Jidmah wrote:
I think more characters need to be like those. Unique things that can be gotten nowhere else.
The problem is, why take a generic if you can take those?

If you apply that logic to the entire codex, you need to take a generic Big Mek for a KFF or a SAG. You need to take a Warboss for the Waaagh! rule and having an S12 PK on a bike. You need to take a weirdboy to cast and deny psychic powers.
The only real offenders for orks are Thrakka and Grotsnik, because Thrakka is a MA warboss +5. He simply outperforms even two of them. Grotznik is a better pain boy for almost no additional cost, though in his case an additional pain boy might still make sense.
If Thrakka didn't offer the Waaagh! special rule and some other bonus instead, running a warboss next to Thrakka would make sense again, like his leftennants in the supplement that shall not be named.

The advantage of unique characters to a game designer is to allow things to exist once on the battlefield that would be totally bonkers if spammed. For example, putting Pask in every single one of your tanks.

Take Sisters. The only reason to take their generic characters is because you have to to fill up HQ slots. A Canoness is little more than a tax, with basically no good weapon options (her best one is an S6 eviscerator, but Celestine does that far better being able to move quicker, hit harder, and take damage better),

How is this even related to the discussion?. If Celestine was a generic Angel HQ, the Canoness would still serve no purpose. If the Canoness were a special characters, she would still be a terrible one. The issue is the Canoness having terrible rules, not special characters existing.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Breng77 wrote:
From a balance standpoint those characters fit into "overcosted trash",

Except two of those have been part of high-placing ork lists, so they cannot be overcosted trash. You're bending your own argument.

you don't take snikrot to be a stabby murder ork, he is bad at that, you take him to drop on an objective and abuse the character targeting rule and his 3+ coversave.

So, you're saying he serves a unique purpose, that no other character can fulfill?

I guess he is not used as intended, but that seems to be tradition for this model. In all his incarnations he has never been able to replace a warboss, nor has a warboss ever been able to replace him. This is good design.

If you want stabby murder deepstrike orks 7 Kommandos do the job better than snikrot does. You generally don't take the other 2, but when you take Zagstruk it is simply for fearless stormboyz no other reason.

Ah, I see. So Zagstrukk is only taken because of his unique rule that buffs stormboyz, not because he is better than warbosses, big meks or weirdboyz.

IF all we care about are special characters doing awesome things make them narrative only models, if we care about balance, being undercosted and OP or overcosted trash makes them bad for balance..

I wonder, did you actually read my post?

Unique Characters differ in no way from any other model in the game, except you can take less of them. Heck, the developers don't even have to worry about people spamming them. If anything, unique characters are easier to balance.

GW needs to design unique characters to not just be an upgrade of existing generic choices - in that case at least one of them is always going to be useless. If generics can do things characters cannot (relics!) and vice versa, special characters will work fine alongside generic character choices.