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 auticus wrote:

Why would anyone actively encourage and support years of that?

Because many many people, especially if you look outside of online communities frequented by the most emotionally invested of us, don't actually care that much about balance. They want some cool minis and to chuck some dice about with friends.

Right. And gw has no incentive or care to make good rules because its fanbase simply doesnt care so long as their investment is safe.

Yup. That's capitalism. They create something I want to buy, I buy it. That's literally what "vote with your wallet" means.

Meaning everytime someone complains about the rules or bad balance or bad matched play, point them to the fact the community doesnt care and in fact warmly embraces those facets and gw caters to that, not balance or strong rules.

It can shut down long tangents faster. Believe it or not some people will find that very hard to believe or accept (that that is the reality)

 auticus wrote:
Meaning everytime someone complains about the rules or bad balance or bad matched play, point them to the fact the community doesnt care and in fact warmly embraces those facets and gw caters to that, not balance or strong rules.

It can shut down long tangents faster. Believe it or not some people will find that very hard to believe or accept (that that is the reality)

Yep basically. GW's success has shown that most of the players don't really give a gak about having good rules or well-balanced armies where one isn't totally busted. So you end up just pissing in the wind because the people don't want to hear how it's bad rules, just distracted by "ooh pretty models" as though that was the only thing that mattered.

I think to a lot of people pretty models and people to play with are the main things.

I swear, you are right on the verge of understanding what this forum has been trying to explain to you for 4 years.

Living in a competitive area, where rules should matter the most, it is very repellant and feels like living in the upside down.

Wait, wait, wait, I’m confused. Don’t you like casual play, where people bring what they like, don’t worry about crazy stuff, and you hate competitive play? Now it sounds like you’re against the “people buying what they like the look of, regardless of power”? I mean...it sounds like you ordered chocolate cake, got chocolate cake, and sent it back because you didn’t get chicken nuggets.

Have you made a single positive post about how awesome the StD models are? Cuz they’d great!!

 Stux wrote:

 auticus wrote:

Why would anyone actively encourage and support years of that?

Because many many people, especially if you look outside of online communities frequented by the most emotionally invested of us, don't actually care that much about balance. They want some cool minis and to chuck some dice about with friends.

This is not represented in my real-world experience. My biggest obstacle to recruiting new players is balance. The biggest complaint I hear from existing players is balance. The main reason I lose players from my leagues is balance. Because people want to chuck dice with friends, not pick up their models while one of those friends chucks the dice.

I posted somewhere around here last night how I liked the new chaos warrior models and was going to use them in my kings of war chaos warrior army. People like to either forget that I post the cool hobby stuff, or they don't read it but seem drawn to the other posts so think that I don't post anything positive about their little eco system. The new chaos warrior models are pretty solid. As are the knights. I don't care what their rules are because I will only be using them in a system I know I can get the most mileage out of them... and AOS is not that system. At least right now. I'm hoping a 3rd edition will check the boxes or some of the boxes that I need.

I play competitively in nearly every game that I play. The difference being in GW games you are basically forced to constantly buy new armies and change stuff around yearly. I play tournament standard tournament level games in every other game that I participate in and I don't have to rebuy and repaint entire collections every year to do so to remain competitive. I've been playing the same kings of war force for four years now and I can still do very well with it and its not even what their "meta" considers very good.

I like casual play except in my area casual play means some people are bringing what they like, and the other half only own groin stomping lists so they groin stomp the casual players and drive them off.

I like campaigns and run public campaign events except that because the rules are as poor as they are, you can't have actual campaign games where people show up bringing their cool models because 25-40% of our player pool are going to be bringing their nasty adepticon lists, so anything other than tournament play is going to break down in a week or two and people are going to be driven off because they are getting blown off the table by people that either don't know how to tone down, or only own one set of models... the competitive tournament powered models.

I've been pretty up front about that for the past many years of being here.

Exactly - huge imbalances are not fun to play with because in typical situations only one player in a pair gets it and if they win every game purely because their model is super overpowered then its not fun. Not for them because their wins are too predictable and easy; and not for their opponent(s).

Meanwhile they still want to use the model because it looks awesome; possibly cost them a lot and took time to put together and paint. Slaanesh Keepers of Secrets are a prime example. I don't want to see GW slap a 200 point rise on them to balance them; I'd rather they addressed the actual root cause of the imbalance and let people keep taking 3 keepers if they want; just not become a huge winning benefit to them.


Improved balance improves sales; improves army diversity (which improves products sales overall). There's honestly not a downside to it save for the very minority group who want a super easy to win button.



Heck it doesn't even truly benefit GW to have "super OP new releases" all the time because people do spot the pattern and for those who are not the market for that product its a null release that could jeperdise them spending more.





That said AoS is improving and eh wait a sec this is the general chatter thread not the balance thread! Back back I say to the balance thread with your balancing points discussions! Bring on the Sphinx chaos cat worship!

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Stux wrote:

 auticus wrote:

Why would anyone actively encourage and support years of that?

Because many many people, especially if you look outside of online communities frequented by the most emotionally invested of us, don't actually care that much about balance. They want some cool minis and to chuck some dice about with friends.

This is not represented in my real-world experience. My biggest obstacle to recruiting new players is balance. The biggest complaint I hear from existing players is balance. The main reason I lose players from my leagues is balance. Because people want to chuck dice with friends, not pick up their models while one of those friends chucks the dice.

That is the same as my experience here.

Got to agree here: in my shop, new players pick a faction they like the look of and intend to play with it, then discover they're really underperforming (usually after having patiently and lovingly assembled and painted 1000 pts) when facing a regular faction and then lose heart and sell the army or wait for an update before playing. I've never seen this casual play because it doesn't exist here, people build lists they think are good and play against someone with the same mindset because nobody likes to lose or get trounced hard.

And it's the same thing for people buying an army they like the look and the gameplay of, then discover they're extra busted and watch helplessly as they're destroying every army facing them. It's not the player's fault, it's the rule team's.

What has me irked is that AoS was improving on balance for a long time but it feels like 2019 has stepped backward. LoN and DoK at their peak were not as strong as Slaanesh, Skaven, and FEC are now.

But anyways, I love that new cat. It's chaos but a different slice of chaos, instead of gribbly and mutated it's creepy and sinister. The too-long neck really sells it for me. Ogroid is cool too, pretty vanilla in a sense, but that is needed to make other stuff stand out both aesthetically and in gameplay. I dig the hemorrhoid crusher as well, especially with the two-tone skin.

 auticus wrote:
I posted somewhere around here last night how I liked the new chaos warrior models and was going to use them in my kings of war chaos warrior army. People like to either forget that I post the cool hobby stuff, or they don't read it but seem drawn to the other posts so think that I don't post anything positive about their little eco system. The new chaos warrior models are pretty solid. As are the knights. I don't care what their rules are because I will only be using them in a system I know I can get the most mileage out of them... and AOS is not that system. At least right now. I'm hoping a 3rd edition will check the boxes or some of the boxes that I need.

I play competitively in nearly every game that I play. The difference being in GW games you are basically forced to constantly buy new armies and change stuff around yearly. I play tournament standard tournament level games in every other game that I participate in and I don't have to rebuy and repaint entire collections every year to do so to remain competitive. I've been playing the same kings of war force for four years now and I can still do very well with it and its not even what their "meta" considers very good.

I like casual play except in my area casual play means some people are bringing what they like, and the other half only own groin stomping lists so they groin stomp the casual players and drive them off.

I like campaigns and run public campaign events except that because the rules are as poor as they are, you can't have actual campaign games where people show up bringing their cool models because 25-40% of our player pool are going to be bringing their nasty adepticon lists, so anything other than tournament play is going to break down in a week or two and people are going to be driven off because they are getting blown off the table by people that either don't know how to tone down, or only own one set of models... the competitive tournament powered models.

I've been pretty up front about that for the past many years of being here.

Fair enough to the first paragraph; I missed that post. Unfortunately, I don’t have the opportunity to delve further into the rest of the post, but it REALLY seems like the breakdown of the statements over the last page (barring this one) can be boiled down to “I don’t like competitive play for AoS. These models either are or aren’t competitive. They’re only good for casual games where there is a script.” Which sounds a lot like a complaint about getting exactly what is up the alley you profess to have in regards to AoS. That’s all.

On topic...looking forward to getting rid of my old CWs to get these new ones!!

I spent over a decade of my life playing grand tournament level 40k and warhammer, top tenning one 40k and two fantasy grand tournaments and playing in over one hundred regional level qualifier or rtts.

I am most certainly not against the power gamer venues.

What i dont like is a combination of poor rules and competitive style players that want to play in narrative campaigns but wont stop bringing tournament powered lists to a campaign that is supposed to be for casual for fun lists because the bad rules encourage it.

So I've gotten to go through the bonereaper tome in detail now. Sticking by my earlier assessment that they are easy to lose with; there is a huge gulf between how the exact same list could perform if done poorly vs done well. I also said they have the tools to do well at tournaments and I now feel that was a bit of an understatement. This army turns into an immense cheese factory very quickly if the controlling player simply knows what they are doing, let alone if they are actually good at it. On the upside there is always a sort of vindictive fun in watching bandwagon/netlist players get slaughtered at tournaments because they don't know what they're doing.

Some things I noticed:
-Mortek Guard + Harvester is OP given merely competent positioning.
-Each artifact chart has a pretty clear 'best option' and these will be tapped since the army is going to want battalions.
-Immortis Guard siphoning damage from characters on a 2+ is rather absurd, especially combined with their battalion.
-The spell lore is really well designed IMO. It will be tough chosing spells because they are all good with strong tactical elements to boot. And none of them are mortal wound spam! Good job on this one GW.
-IMO, a good chunk of units are undercosted for what they do. Consider Necropolis stalkers; averaging out their stances the price makes sense, but realistically they will only ever use +1 damage & rend (with re-roll saves on occasion). When their basic weapon is rend -2 2 damage they suddenly hit above their point cost. Or the Harvester, which is ridiculously cheap considering how many points it can recycle.
-The free terrain feature is extremely strong, which buffs the allegiance overall.
-Bone-Tithe shrieker is auto-take.
-Petrifax Elite are the best sub-faction, but everyone already knows that.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
So I've gotten to go through the bonereaper tome in detail now. Sticking by my earlier assessment that they are easy to lose with; there is a huge gulf between how the exact same list could perform if done poorly vs done well. I also said they have the tools to do well at tournaments and I now feel that was a bit of an understatement. This army turns into an immense cheese factory very quickly if the controlling player simply knows what they are doing, let alone if they are actually good at it. On the upside there is always a sort of vindictive fun in watching bandwagon/netlist players get slaughtered at tournaments because they don't know what they're doing.

Some things I noticed:
-Mortek Guard + Harvester is OP given merely competent positioning.
-Each artifact chart has a pretty clear 'best option' and these will be tapped since the army is going to want battalions.
-Immortis Guard siphoning damage from characters on a 2+ is rather absurd, especially combined with their battalion.
-The spell lore is really well designed IMO. It will be tough chosing spells because they are all good with strong tactical elements to boot. And none of them are mortal wound spam! Good job on this one GW.
-IMO, a good chunk of units are undercosted for what they do. Consider Necropolis stalkers; averaging out their stances the price makes sense, but realistically they will only ever use +1 damage & rend (with re-roll saves on occasion). When their basic weapon is rend -2 2 damage they suddenly hit above their point cost. Or the Harvester, which is ridiculously cheap considering how many points it can recycle.
-The free terrain feature is extremely strong, which buffs the allegiance overall.
-Bone-Tithe shrieker is auto-take.
-Petrifax Elite are the best sub-faction, but everyone already knows that.

I can agree with most of this, but I don't think they will turn into a cheese factory. I just think everything costs a lot and the army is missing a lot of the key things we see at top tables like Always Strike first, mass mortal wounds, and multiple fight agains.

I also think there are really only one or two battalions worth taking. Some look good at first glance, like the shield corp, then you realize you can get a Boneshaper for 10 more points, which gives you the RD point and another usable character over an artifact. The Aegis immortal battalion is very good, but it's also 690 points minimum for it. You also really only want to take it if you are protecting a high value character like Arkhan, which at that point you have at least half your army in points.

I really think the Army is going to be strong, and likely will influence the meta, but I don't think it's going to be oppressive like Slaanesh, FEC and Skaven have been. The army makes you pay for everything, and it forces you to make trade offs.

Also the army will often suffer in objective based games early on. This will mean that any mistake in the early to mid game is going to hurt their progress all the more. Make the wrong call on using abilities; deploy wrong; heck get one turn where the enemy rolls a few dice really well and tarpits a unit can be damaging to progress.

Even though they've got some fast units and options to speed them up; it all costs them in points and activation abilities during the game.

I can foresee them being an army which would win many games if they were purely run until everything on one side is dead; but losing because by turn 6 they are behind on objectives/points.

 Sasori wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
So I've gotten to go through the bonereaper tome in detail now. Sticking by my earlier assessment that they are easy to lose with; there is a huge gulf between how the exact same list could perform if done poorly vs done well. I also said they have the tools to do well at tournaments and I now feel that was a bit of an understatement. This army turns into an immense cheese factory very quickly if the controlling player simply knows what they are doing, let alone if they are actually good at it. On the upside there is always a sort of vindictive fun in watching bandwagon/netlist players get slaughtered at tournaments because they don't know what they're doing.

Some things I noticed:
-Mortek Guard + Harvester is OP given merely competent positioning.
-Each artifact chart has a pretty clear 'best option' and these will be tapped since the army is going to want battalions.
-Immortis Guard siphoning damage from characters on a 2+ is rather absurd, especially combined with their battalion.
-The spell lore is really well designed IMO. It will be tough chosing spells because they are all good with strong tactical elements to boot. And none of them are mortal wound spam! Good job on this one GW.
-IMO, a good chunk of units are undercosted for what they do. Consider Necropolis stalkers; averaging out their stances the price makes sense, but realistically they will only ever use +1 damage & rend (with re-roll saves on occasion). When their basic weapon is rend -2 2 damage they suddenly hit above their point cost. Or the Harvester, which is ridiculously cheap considering how many points it can recycle.
-The free terrain feature is extremely strong, which buffs the allegiance overall.
-Bone-Tithe shrieker is auto-take.
-Petrifax Elite are the best sub-faction, but everyone already knows that.

I can agree with most of this, but I don't think they will turn into a cheese factory. I just think everything costs a lot and the army is missing a lot of the key things we see at top tables like Always Strike first, mass mortal wounds, and multiple fight agains.

I also think there are really only one or two battalions worth taking. Some look good at first glance, like the shield corp, then you realize you can get a Boneshaper for 10 more points, which gives you the RD point and another usable character over an artifact. The Aegis immortal battalion is very good, but it's also 690 points minimum for it. You also really only want to take it if you are protecting a high value character like Arkhan, which at that point you have at least half your army in points.

I really think the Army is going to be strong, and likely will influence the meta, but I don't think it's going to be oppressive like Slaanesh, FEC and Skaven have been. The army makes you pay for everything, and it forces you to make trade offs.

I think there is a lot of room for cheese without hitting the very top end. I feel the aegis battalion isn't about protecting characters, it's about canceling damage. With that battalion you are free to put characters in front because the roll to intercept damage negates it on a 5+. Mortal wounds in particular can be cancelled by that, then assigned to the Archai for another 5+, then finally a 6+ from deathless warriors. Archai can also keep up with a fast character. Overall the battalion serves to spread damage out, allowing it to be subsequently healed.

I think battalions in general will be important. To start it is harder to wipe them off the board than a single hero, making for more reliable discipline generation. They also give another artifact, which is big since the first one will be taken up by the sub-faction requirement, and there are some really good artifacts on the generic charts. The ballistari and trident seem pretty lackluster but I can see a place for the others. The aegis would be my go-to though, the investment is fully worth it because the army just falls apart when characters die bar mortek+harvester blob.

Speaking of, that is what the big 3 are likely to have trouble with: mortek guard bubbling harvesters. Because half the dead guards will be coming back immediately--they will recover between abilities that allow for attacking twice. Skaven, on the other hand, will have trouble with their own casualties triggering the harvester. Also of note is that as it stands if a model dies while within 3" of multiple harvesters it triggers the ability multiple times, allowing for a single casualty to potentially regenerate more than one dude. I hope that get's errata'd away though.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Stux wrote:

 auticus wrote:

Why would anyone actively encourage and support years of that?

Because many many people, especially if you look outside of online communities frequented by the most emotionally invested of us, don't actually care that much about balance. They want some cool minis and to chuck some dice about with friends.

This is not represented in my real-world experience. My biggest obstacle to recruiting new players is balance. The biggest complaint I hear from existing players is balance. The main reason I lose players from my leagues is balance. Because people want to chuck dice with friends, not pick up their models while one of those friends chucks the dice.

This is the thing though - an FLGS is still an echo chamber. You need to factor in all the people who buy stuff and occasionally play with a buddy, but don't hang out at the shop. I know loads of people like that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
For the record, I'm not saying I like that there's no balance, or that a casual game and balance are mutually exclusive. Of course you can have a game designed for casual play that has good balance.

What I am saying is if GW thought investing a lot of time and effort in creating a more balanced game would pay off for them in sales then I'm pretty sure they'd do it, or at least do more. I feel it's more likely they've reached an equilibrium point they're happy with.

I think its more likely that they hit a ceiling and didn't realise it was a balcony and they could go higher. Just look at the massive sales differences when they shifted from their old system of "One codex every few months and perhaps by the end of the edition "most" armies would have one" to their new attitude of "release index at launch and then complete all army codex within 1.5 years".

Their sales boomed so much (alongside re-releasing specialist games, many of which have somewhat if not totally tighter rules sets) that they have spent nearly £10million on a brand new factory in the UK to keep up with demand.


I think that the rules style that GW has is a result of the fact that they've a company culture and the same people writing rules for decades. So they achieve the same level of results each time because their method and staff leading it hasn't changed. Even now we still get reports from those who beta-test that GW doesn't send out the whole document, jsut a pre-designed list.
Again GW could make even bigger strides even if they just hired a more technical writer and ironed out many of the hazy wordings that they use so that, even if there is imbalance, at least the core rules read easily.

That they've also improved FAQ and Errata and are doing annual rules/points updates suggests to me that they are aware that improved balance does result in improved sales.

An "easy to learn, hard to master" sort of army that becomes cheese at the master level of play isn't necessarily bad. In fact, I'd argue that's pretty good design because the better you get with it, the better it is. The issue is everything else that has this rollercoaster balance where one release is well balanced, then the next two are insanely OP to anyone who reads the book for 5 minutes, then slightly weaker but not terrible, etc. and the fact that with so many armies have one power build and everything else is pretty much garbage that hurts you more than it helps if you are "foolish" enough to prefer unit A to unit B or actually want a themed army rather than simply taking the best options.

The worst part is that the AOS rules team is NOT the same as the 40k rules team anymore. They are made up of a lot of the big-name UK tournament players, at least some of them (Ben Johnson springs to mind as a well known one). So it's either:

1) The rules writers want to write balanced rules but don't have the time due to release dates (e.g. Here write rules for these 10 boxes we're releasing in 3 months)

2) The rules writers don't know how to write good rules (lack of experience, whatever) but are trying and often go with "this sounds cool" without enough testing.

3) The rules writers don't WANT to write good rules to reward "system mastery" like in Magic where over time you learn what's good and what's bad and know what combos to stack. In effect, they are designing the game so the competitive people can get a kick out of finding that "uber" combo.

There was a WD article where Jervis was talking a little about their design process, and he stated that first, they're shown a model and have to come up with stats based on that; he didn't indicate if there was a thought process from the model team on what it was meant to be (e.g. "We came up with the idea that these are skeleton constructs created by Nagash rather than just raised from graves so they have similar design to the Morghast") or just "Here's this model we came up with, you figure it out" but I'm afraid it seemed the latter. So that's the first and most important problem: The rules team are seemingly just handed models that have been developed without their input at all, and possibly without any sort of goal or background ideas in mind, and have to come up with a way that it "fits" into the game story-wise as well as with rules that fit how the model looks, regardless of how that affects the game.

He also said they have a formula for determining things, but I'll be honest I don't believe this due to how fluctuating the balance is. A formula should be preventing that, not encouraging it. There's also the fact that I don't think the design team has nearly enough time to actually playtest things properly, and from everything I've read I seriously doubt they are giving more than a cursory look at the sort of lists you can build with it, instead letting that be one of the things that comes up later as people play with the army. That might not be wholly their fault due to time constraints, but it's still bad design to test units and not see what sort of combos you can build, especially when most of the "broken" combos are found almost immediately after the book releases, if not from scrutinizing the previews.

 Overread wrote:
I think that the rules style that GW has is a result of the fact that they've a company culture and the same people writing rules for decades. So they achieve the same level of results each time because their method and staff leading it hasn't changed. Even now we still get reports from those who beta-test that GW doesn't send out the whole document, jsut a pre-designed list.
Again GW could make even bigger strides even if they just hired a more technical writer and ironed out many of the hazy wordings that they use so that, even if there is imbalance, at least the core rules read easily.

That they've also improved FAQ and Errata and are doing annual rules/points updates suggests to me that they are aware that improved balance does result in improved sales.

I think you are right about this.

Personally I think they could go further and just have the points online and update them on a bi-monthly basis. Basically make the game more dynamic than once a year point update.

It has been interesting to follow the honest wargamer as of late. With the exception of the mutant that HoS is, there is a lot of weird mixing with the rest of the factions. I would even say that GW is moving in a positive direction(again, HoS is the exception).

It's too hit or miss, that's the thing. HoS, FEC, skaven to a lesser extent are all pretty high on the power curve,while Free Cities and Orruks are more middling. There's no real consistency and the outliers tend to skew things in a bad way because they are so punishing against everything not at their level.

the AOS tournament scene does seem to be better than the 40k one though, for the most part. You still have the issue of armies having one viable tournament build, which is problematic because while that in and of itself isn't bad, it usually comes at the cost of the other choices being pretty bad.

At the power level, sure. Only in that at the power level there are more armies with a power build instead of a trifecta and thats it.

They continue to generate a minefield of trap units and continue to allow the one or two bulls to run amuk at all times.

The trap units being so plentiful and there not being rules to restrain powerbuilders in a casual environment are what kill it for so many.

 auticus wrote:
At the power level, sure. Only in that at the power level there are more armies with a power build instead of a trifecta and thats it.

They continue to generate a minefield of trap units and continue to allow the one or two bulls to run amuk at all times.

The trap units being so plentiful and there not being rules to restrain powerbuilders in a casual environment are what kill it for so many.

Trap units tend to afflict armies that have too many units to begin with. This is also evident in 40k that has a plethora of armies that are old and bloated with units.

Perhaps the worst army in this is Stormcast. So many units and sometimes multiple options within the same unit. Easier to screw it up than not. I would say BoK faces a similar issue at a smaller scale with their mortal counterpart.

I also think one of the biggest issues and a big issue to the hobby, in general, is that you often get communities which will only play a certain points (usually 2000 because "tournament standard") and refuse to do anything else (often because they've only bought a specific 2k list rather than build their collection up).

This is extremely detrimental to new players because nobody wants to be told they need to drop $500+ on models before they even play the first game because nobody wants to play 1000 point games or, god forbid, even what are basically open play games with say a Start Collecting and another unit or hero, the sort of thing that a new player is likely to buy when starting their army so they can actually learn how to use the army gradually as they play them and add units which they feel best suit their playstyle or shore up their weaknesses.

In fairness GW marketing Warcry, Killteam and Underworlds as well as games like Blackstone I think has broken "some" of the "we only play at 2K" attitude. There is a wealth of options that, whilst some were present in the past (killteam has been around for ages; they were within the main game and not marketed so often a newbie wouldn't even know they were out there as options.

Plus many gamers appreciate faster games like Killteam and Warcry when they've not got a whole evening to play; or when its to fill in that 30-40 min gap before their friend gets to the club etc...


I think that that has helped a lot in the growth of the games; certainly for games like AoS where in the past the Old World fantasy game really was a 2K or bust situation where the 1K and 500 point options "sort of" worked but were often not all that ideal nor interesting