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The other day I had to fight a Stardrake that had a 1+ save with rerolls on the 1, a 4+ save against mortal wounds and healing. 40+ attacks from Orruk Brutes failed to do anything. An entire game spent attacking it did nothing. I am a little disappointed that this kind of thing can happen in the game. Am I a sore loser or is ok to be peeved at this kind of thing?

Wayniac wrote:

auticus wrote:
Yeah. Fortunately for me I've been using that house rule about forests blocking line of sight for years and years

But now you can show it's "official" and not some lame house rules that will teach people to play wrong

#truth!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Future War Cultist wrote:
The other day I had to fight a Stardrake that had a 1+ save with rerolls on the 1, a 4+ save against mortal wounds and healing. 40+ attacks from Orruk Brutes failed to do anything. An entire game spent attacking it did nothing. I am a little disappointed that this kind of thing can happen in the game. Am I a sore loser or is ok to be peeved at this kind of thing?

Those are negative play experiences. I definitely see that as a frustrating thing to face.

The git gud response is that you have to feed it chaffe and hope you have decent terrain to help bottleneck it but its a flying monster that has enormous table control aura.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
The other day I had to fight a Stardrake that had a 1+ save with rerolls on the 1, a 4+ save against mortal wounds and healing. 40+ attacks from Orruk Brutes failed to do anything. An entire game spent attacking it did nothing. I am a little disappointed that this kind of thing can happen in the game. Am I a sore loser or is ok to be peeved at this kind of thing?

You're not a sore loser, but context is important. Was it a relic? Mystic shield spammed?

Also, Brutes have at least 1 point of Rend so it would have been a 2+ for most attacks right?

Armor saves always fail on a 1 anyways. Just means you need to get to Rend 2 to make a dent.

And with the reroll you need an average of 36 wounds to even get through, let alone number of attacks

This is the kind of thing we needed Grav weapons for in 40k 7th. I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

Off hand I think one of the Metal Realm’s spells did a thing where it wounded you using you your save roll or something like that.

 EnTyme wrote:
I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

I mean, mortal wounds pretty much exist to cut through armor skew like this, they are the paper to this rock from a design perspective. Unfortunately realm artefacts, not known for their balance, get even more imba when slapped on really big heroes. (And yep, Ignax's Scales is in my top five as well, even without playing an army with a save over 4+. Negating mortal damage (i.e. anti-nasty single target weapons) against my big expensive monster hero on a 4+ instead of the 6+ of other items (or 5+ vs spells if you're lucky)? Yes please!)

Related: It's an interesting choice to make when selecting your god-tier realm artifact these days. There's a number of ways to go offensively - Blade of Judgement if you've got a weapon with a bunch of attaks or a way to manipulate to hit rolls or an in-built delivery system; Ghyrstrike if you've got a solid weapon to buff and want to push its probability or have to cut through a lot of debuffs; Anraheir's Claws or Blade of Endings if you just want more damage (choice depends on which buffs your dude has available); any number of shooting attaks if you want to have something to do in the shooting phase (Wraithbow for range; Rockjaws for dependability; Sunderblade for adding carnage to a beast that's already up close and personal). Then there's a handful of tactical / synergy options that are pretty great (healing, getting CP back, stopping spells or blunting their effect), if not as important to the livelihood of the bearer.

But let's say you want to go defensive and your base stats are just ok. Do you add armor, making yourself a target for mortal wounds? Add a save after the save, which has been FAQ'd to do nothing for mortals? Or add mortal protection, providing nothing against mundane damage? Do you straight up go untargetable in the shooting phase? Or in the fight phase? How about a blanket -1 to be hit in either of those? (Gryph-feather so good!) What about just going faster to make use of cover and dictate the terms of engagement? You've got a couple ways to do that too, with their own side effects. Or what about trying to tool for healing, on the assumption that whatever you take, you're still taking damage? You've got a few options there, with trade-offs aplenty (single use here, low heal there, situational procs here and here). There's more than a little meta surfing to do with this choice, and of course the tools your army brings to support this character will push some artefacts over others (including command traits if this is your general you're kitting out).

Anyway, some of the mental gymnastics I go through with AOS list design these days, especially since the rest of my lists are very samey, as they're pulling from both limited subfactions and my own model pool And also why I'm against banning realm artefacts at this point, as they add far more choice than I expected. There are some stunningly great choices, but I don't really feel like there's a clear Obvious Choice in any one category. Even when the Lens was still stupid good.

- Salvage

 EnTyme wrote:
This is the kind of thing we needed Grav weapons for in 40k 7th. I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

Shyish Reaper is the one that immediately comes to mind.
After you move, you roll a dice for each model that it moved over and if the roll is equal to or greater than the model's Save then they suffer a mortal wound.

I mean yeah, it's 1MW...but that option is there.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
The other day I had to fight a Stardrake that had a 1+ save with rerolls on the 1, a 4+ save against mortal wounds and healing. 40+ attacks from Orruk Brutes failed to do anything. An entire game spent attacking it did nothing. I am a little disappointed that this kind of thing can happen in the game. Am I a sore loser or is ok to be peeved at this kind of thing?

You are entirely justified; that is an unfun experience and I encourage you to send GW an email stating as such. GW wants AoS to be a big thing but to do that they need to be better. That means we need to inform them of issues like this because the people they use for playtesting are (as has been made abundantly clear through three GHBs) insufficiently skilled at the task.

I remember seeing that Chamon spell now. That would probably be my go-to against something like this. How effective would the list actually be though? It kind of sounds like my 60-wound Archaon list. Not really a strong list, just annoying to play against. I generally save it for those waffles who run the broken list of the month.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:
This is the kind of thing we needed Grav weapons for in 40k 7th. I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

Shyish Reaper is the one that immediately comes to mind.
After you move, you roll a dice for each model that it moved over and if the roll is equal to or greater than the model's Save then they suffer a mortal wound.

I mean yeah, it's 1MW...but that option is there.

I understand what you are suggesting, but consider that your army has been decimated by a 16w monster and someone else suggests a Nighthaunt-specific endless spell that does at most 1 mortal wound per round. It's a slap in the face.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:
This is the kind of thing we needed Grav weapons for in 40k 7th. I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

Shyish Reaper is the one that immediately comes to mind.
After you move, you roll a dice for each model that it moved over and if the roll is equal to or greater than the model's Save then they suffer a mortal wound.

I mean yeah, it's 1MW...but that option is there.

I understand what you are suggesting, but consider that your army has been decimated by a 16w monster and someone else suggests a Nighthaunt-specific endless spell that does at most 1 mortal wound per round. It's a slap in the face.

He was talking about mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them.
That's one. Sure, it isn't going to do diddly against a Stardrake by itself--but that doesn't change that it's a mechanic in the game that lets you turn a model's save against them.

As of right now, we only have a few and they tend towards being on the low side from damage as far as I am aware.

For me, chaos mammoths love star drakes.

But yeah, the playtesters are all tournament players, and tournament players are all playing extreme rock paper scissors.

The problem with that is that casual games are often not playing at that extreme and as such the game testing is highly skewed toward one avenue of play.

It's also not really casual to build a combo piece like that star drake. That is someone taking a tournament appropriate choice and bringing it to a non-tournament game. Just like if someone brought the 66 attack unit of plague drones they talked about on Stormcast ep #26.

Ah, just to be clear, we were playing a ‘warm up’ game to test out our tournament lists so I was expecting something like this. Although...it has found it’s way into friendlier games in the past. An entire army of Overlords shooting over 3 turns not putting one scratch on a couple of concussors. Staunch Defenders is the bane of me.

Maybe I should send a letter. I love AoS but GW is falling into the trap of going over the top with everything again. It’s regrettable to see the game boiling down to how many mortal wounds you can throw out and withstand.

auticus wrote:
For me, chaos mammoths love star drakes.

But yeah, the playtesters are all tournament players, and tournament players are all playing extreme rock paper scissors.

The problem with that is that casual games are often not playing at that extreme and as such the game testing is highly skewed toward one avenue of play.

I would accept that they were balancing around tournament play if tournament play had even a rough balance. It doesn't. It is dramatically worse than casual play; even the power lists from different armies are not on par with each other. Casual is better than tournaments by virtue of things averaging out, but even then it is only balanced in a relative sense; I originally typed 'good enough' there but for many would-be players it is not. The people GW has playtesting are not doing their jobs competently. And I do not say that lightly; I would say it to them directly if I could. If AoS is to expand, and I mean really expand, it needs to do better.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:
This is the kind of thing we needed Grav weapons for in 40k 7th. I'm sure there are mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them, but I can't think of one for the life of me.

Shyish Reaper is the one that immediately comes to mind.
After you move, you roll a dice for each model that it moved over and if the roll is equal to or greater than the model's Save then they suffer a mortal wound.

I mean yeah, it's 1MW...but that option is there.

I understand what you are suggesting, but consider that your army has been decimated by a 16w monster and someone else suggests a Nighthaunt-specific endless spell that does at most 1 mortal wound per round. It's a slap in the face.

He was talking about mechanics in the game that let you turn a model's save against them.
That's one. Sure, it isn't going to do diddly against a Stardrake by itself--but that doesn't change that it's a mechanic in the game that lets you turn a model's save against them.

As of right now, we only have a few and they tend towards being on the low side from damage as far as I am aware.

Fair point, I misunderstood.

I agree, the playtesting needs to get its head out of its own ***. The problem with GW playtesting is its always needed to get its head out of its own ***.

auticus wrote:
I agree, the playtesting needs to get its head out of its own ***. The problem with GW playtesting is its always needed to get its head out of its own ***.

I think right now it's more that playtesting isn't so much in GW's ***, but in certain tournament player groups' ***.

That said, it's surprisingly hard to do really thorough playtesting. Especially when the playtest group is relatively small compared to the player base (and this will usually be the case for all but the most niche games). Regardless of how much is caught, there will always be zero-day exploits as soon as 20,000 more sets of eyes are on things.

Now, I'm not "excusing" it, and agree that there are things that are seeming to slip through that really make you scratch your head. Just saying that, from personal experience, it's harder than it seems.

I will at least give credit that GW is doing errata and FAQs again, and that (even if they're slower or different than what many may think is needed), they're better than when I dropped GW originally 15 years ago.

They're better than the 40k faqs too.

GW is learning and improving
But they are still not there were they once were regarding rules writing/game design

Of course they had more or less build up from scratch and re-learn doing things after the "no FAQ" and and " never doing any kind of testing" policy


But playtesting to be worth it must be done right.
Not knowing how exactly GW is doing it makes it difficult to say how they could improve it, but the general impression from the outcome is, that the playtester have too much influence on the end result. While testers should only report battle reports with different lists/settings they get from the designers and lists they write on their own, it seems that the Testers report only back what units they think are too weak or too strong without knowing the full set of rules or how the rules should actually work.

Playtesting is not easy and there is room for improvement no matter how GW is doing it.
But one thing they need to get done is to write good rules. No matter how good your testing is, it is useless if the testers are not using the rules how they are meant to be because of bad writing or changes after release

I was OK with the 'they're learning/re-learning' sentiment... But it has been years and we are on the third GHB now. I can't think of a factor that would excuse balance upsets of this severity. Maybe there is one, I don't know.

But... Maybe a different perspective is that more people should volenteer. I mean, if GW sent every new warscroll to Auticus just for him to do numbers and send it back withput anything more than a few efficiency scores things would imprpve dramatically. I guess I'm wishlisting, it's just... It would be nice if they got some people from outside the inner circle involved to shake things up because their current approach has some big holes. And it's a shame to see how much potential and really great content is tarnished by games that are rendered unfun due to imbalance.

If they posted an open letter to this site looking for playtesters I’d volunteer. I’ve had much experience having my ass kicked by imbalanced armies. I am after all, an Overlords player.

I've already been told so many times that math can't balance the game that I've given up on the community lol.

In fact I seriously think that the gw design team intentionally unbalances the game as part of their design ethos because there is a large chunk of the community that loves imbalance so that listbuilding can be more prominent.

When we had community comps before GHB that was one of the biggest complaints I fielded. Everything is too balanced, its "boring".

The other issue with playtesting, and I speak from 25 years as a game designer myself, is that the concept of what is and is not unbalanced will differ from person to person.

The larger your playtester base, the more conflicting complaints you will get. I know Azyr comp at its peak we had about 100 or so testers sending input on the regular, and it was common for one person to say "Unit X is WAYYY too powerful for its cost" and then another person underneath that would say "Unit X is WAYYYYY overcost and needs to come down in points!"

Really though without designer commentary we have no idea what their design goal is. They seemed to really really embrace the loose point costs that intentionally made monsters too cheap to encourage people to take them despite being imbalanced (which is what SCGT was before it became official points) and again to conclude, I firmly believe that the gw team intentionally imbalances things to make listbuilding more prominent because listbuilding exercises are what drive a lot of sales.

If everything is really balanced, listbuilding becomes less and less important... and "boring" to a lot of people.

auticus I think list building and boring is only present if every unit ends up balanced to a point where there's no variety or such present. I think if the armies are balanced, but where individual units have very distinct and specific roles and then the objectives vary game to game then the list building becomes more a case of asking questions and answering them with what choices the player makes.


I'd also say that the kind of person who wants a super-powered list is possibly not the best to work toward for a wargame. It's a mentality better suited to far faster games like Magic t he Gathering where you can play out multiple matches in very short spans of time so if you've got a supercombo it might not happen every time. Meanwhile in wargames the time commitment to just getting to the table (building etc...) let alone the setup time and play time means that a balanced game is far more fun for both players. Sweeping half the army off a table in one or two turns is not fun - sure its neat hte first time or so for the attacker, but its no fun to play against and in truth not super fun for both players when the win is so easily established when there was so much prep time.




I do agree with your point regarding balance viewpoint variation. Even if the player doing the balance testing is of a known good skill level the variation in their opponents and local scene cna vary a lot. One might be playing those of less skill and thus sees a lot of units being overpowered; whilst another might be going up against much harder fights and thus the models appear too weak.

I do agree further that without background understanding we can't really guess what GW's long term goals are, nor really what their exact testing method even is. I'd also say that online often amplifies calls of imbalance way more so than reality experiences for the majority of players.


Terrain is also a huge element - maths can balance the game up to a point; but if one player has basically an open field whilst another has a dense chock-a-block city ruin then the experiences and what works in balance for both is going to have some variation. Granted part of that is going to also be player skill so terrain can amplify both weakness and strength in a players skill relative to their opponenet.s

My original goal, and all of my games that I have ever written have had the same goal, was that 2000 points = 2000 points.

That is what is seen by a lot of people as "boring". That is what the most common complaint against Azyr was (not azyr the list builder that GW decided to call their product, Azyr the comp that came before that). That 2000 points = 2000 points. It was an eye-opening moment for me as a designer.

That if I list build a 2000 point list, that regardless of what you build, so long as its 2000 points, that we have comparably powered armies.

This is seen as bad game design by a whole lot of people because it minimizes list building's importance, since 2000 points is 2000 points. The point of list building is to take 2000 points and make it 4000 points (or a number greatly higher than the origin)

GW caters to that design ethos. The problem with that is you can never have proper balance because you are intentionally mucking up the balance to make listbuilding more important.

But isn't the effect just the opposite? Imbalance means everyone just copies the same spam list from the net, removing the list building phase entirely once the tryhards publish The One True List.

When you have something that’s an obvious auto take because it’s so op, then everyone takes it, and list building becomes utterly utterly pointless. Balance breeds variety.

One of the last discussions that I had on the TGA forums before I was banned for being overly negative toward the design of the game was this exact topic and there were a great many posters that heavily disliked the concept of 2000p = 2000p.

I think what they are going for, and this is just a pedestrian guess based on what I know of the designers and the talking heads that post on twitter that are known to be playtesters and buddies of the designers, is intentional imbalance, but removal of all really broken elements (like kroak was on release).

They are quick to address the REALLY REALLY broken things, but everyone over there cheers loudly the imbalance other than that. Thats part of "gittin gud", being able to identify what is good and what is not good.

You'd think that all that does is encourage netlisting but apparently that's not an issue because if you aren't a good player then netlisting will get you nowhere.

I strongly oppose the sentiments that were shared with me before my banning in this regard, because to me this is just GW trying in a way to emulate magic the gathering design by having little timmy, spike, and johnny builds, which I also don't agree with in the first place since all that does is put johnny and spike at each others' throats when they have to share a table at the FLGS.

I think that this type of design and intentional imbalance to cater toward listbuilding has been so prominent over the past 25 years of game design in popular games that its now expected to exist to the point that if it doesnt' exist, that people have a negative reaction over its absence.

I don’t think I know anyone that wants a game to be unbalanced because balanced is boring.