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Just feels like a lot of inconsistency. Like today, my Deepkin v Bonereapers. My scenery piece can do a mortal wound to something within 3 inches. The Bonereapers? 36. Mortek Guard are pretty much identical points costs to Namarti, which die in a stiff breeze. My opponent could more or less reroll everything, heal wounds and brought back whatever died to the table.

It’s not all that fun, really. Before that I had a game against Nurgle, much more balanced, a good scrap that went the distance and could have gone either way. As a relatively new player, it certainly feels like some of these new books are almost impossible to beat!

That comes back to the whole "balance is not needed to have fun" counter argument.

You are correct. Some of the books are impossible to beat unless you are fielding one of the impossible books. Thats GW game design for the past 12 odd years since 2007 or so and the first trifecta of modern gw game design (that being chaos demons, vc, and dark elves of that era)

And it splits the player base down the middle with some saying they don't care about that bad balance because they just want to smash their plastic men against each other and roll dice and drink beer, and the other half would like to know that every faction is viable and that a fun game can come out of it.

Bone reapers are one of the filth tier capable books, alongside slaanesh. So you are also playing a mid-tier book vs a filth tier book. You're going to struggle and just have to accept if you want to play mid-tier books that you'll have fun so long as you don't care about who wins or loses, or you only play other mid tier book opponents.

If fantasy army games are your gig, and you want a better balanced game then you need to look at Kings of War or Conquest. Otherwise you just have to go into it knowing what to expect and be ok with that.

That description ignores a lot of nuance, though. For example, the bonereaper book is A-tier with the petrifax subfaction but drops to B-tier without them, and Idoneth eel spam sits at B-tier as well. So simply saying Bonereapers>Idoneth is true in a sense but also misleading via oversimplification.

Same for it being standard imbalance for GW. Yes, GW is bad with balance but HOW bad has varied considerably from year to year. AoS has never been well balanced but there was a trend of improvement from GHB1 up until 2019, where we have seen a backslide to the point we are now which, IMO, is the worst balance AoS has ever had. And even then it is not so much the quantity of OP elements but the degree to which they are game-breaking.

For example, Stormcast Evocators on release were seriously overpowered; they did way more damage than their point cost accounted for on top of being a spellcaster. But any army could still deal with them, it just required a disproportionate amount to do so. Meanwhile, petrifax mortek guard are sitting at a 3+ rerollable save in melee. Unless an army has a reliable source of rend -2 or MW spam that cannot be dealt with. Most units are simply not getting through, even if you quadruple the points at them, because 3+ rerollable is saving 8/9 wounds against rend - and 3/4 even against rend -1. It becomes a 'list check' where the unit asks "do you have MW spam" and if the answer is no, you lose. And most armies don't. That is a much different situation to what we have had previously, it is tremendously discouraging and unfun.

I call the book filth tier because while its true there are b and even c tier lists that can be made with any book (i can make a c tier slaanesh build) you dont really see those very often.

Or at all depending on your local meta.

If 100 builds can be made but you only really see 10 of them, the discussion will often center on those 10, not the 90 others that are rarely seen.

For new players especially, they need to be ok with the filth builds, because i find those are what make up a good chunk of your random games and tournament games.

Thing is when one choice is head and shoulders better than the rest, Petrifex in this case, that's going to be the go-to choice because it's so much better and brings up the old "why shouldn't I pick the option that gives me the best chance of winning" argument from the sort of people that will never use anything but the best choice and how dare you suggest they "dumb down" their list.

I've just started Deepkin, mostly because I like the models, they are fairly good with the ability to scale up to pretty competitive (eels) and while I was interested in OBR the models just looked too ridiculous the more I looked at them.

Kinda having regrets seeing how good they are but I have to stick to my guns, especially since I'm sure there's a few people jumping on the bandwagon with OBR anyway.

There's a list of factions that got points updated in the faq, if anyone's interested.

 cole1114 wrote:
There's a list of factions that got points updated in the faq, if anyone's interested.

Spoiler:

Seems like the errata documents are still the same though...?

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 cole1114 wrote:
There's a list of factions that got points updated in the faq, if anyone's interested.

Spoiler:

Seems like the errata documents are still the same though...?

The new FAQ is dated 16th which is today. Might be that they accidentally released this pdf ahead of the rest because so far we do not have any updates on the WH Community site.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Regarding balance I feel the biggest issue GW has is that they really have a bad time balancing their sub-factions and/or manage to ignore them outright overall.

Way too many books have that one or two sub-faction that are a must take and can be problematic how much they boost the overall faction. I felt this as a FEC player who just like playing Morghaunt and played that sub-faction. Then, after a few months, I tried Blisterskin and it felt like I had activated the hyperdrive on my army. Same goes for my Craftworld army. If I don't play Alaitoc I am handicapping myself in battle.

GW made it easy for themself:

Here you have the rules for a faction, there are a lot of possibilities that are equal strong and people can decide to use them based on fluff/background alone

but we also included one option that is much stronger than everything else, so you should not use it unless you want to be "that (WAAC) guy".

And if you see one using that option, you should call him out as "that guy" and not blame us for including that one option in the first place.

And people fall for the trap, complain about WAAC players, complain about people not talking about the other weak options and so on and also start defending GW as they can do nothing about those people who just use the rules as provided

Its the cycle of life. This particular forum and the tga forum both have aided in changing my mindset on what the average GW player wants in a game though. The past few years have been more enlightening for me in that subject matter than the 17 years that came before it when I first started talking about warhammer on AOL chat rooms with my dialup in the late 90s. It has been enlightening for me both as a player, as an event organizer, as one that has to choose which set of games to put focus on, and as a game designer myself.

 kodos wrote:
GW made it easy for themself:

Here you have the rules for a faction, there are a lot of possibilities that are equal strong and people can decide to use them based on fluff/background alone

but we also included one option that is much stronger than everything else, so you should not use it unless you want to be "that (WAAC) guy".

And if you see one using that option, you should call him out as "that guy" and not blame us for including that one option in the first place.

And people fall for the trap, complain about WAAC players, complain about people not talking about the other weak options and so on and also start defending GW as they can do nothing about those people who just use the rules as provided

Not always so cut and dry though.
There’s a difference between a naturally strong army and someone who will min/max that army.
It also heavily depends on the surroundings you are playing in.
If you are in a tournament there’s no complaining, everyone is expecting to min/max to push for the win.

In friendly games or pick up games it’s generally frowned on.
This isn’t always a case of the army, it’s the player.
If you wish to push an army to top tournament level in friendly games then you will likely get some hate for it.
I can’t see how someone can blame the book here instead of the person making out on the best possible units.

Now, this isn’t defending GW, it’s pointing out that a player is using the best possible list in a friendly environment.

The books are hardly balanced by any means, but min/maxing an army will always make this worse.

Agreed - powerful armies are powerful however at some point if you are playing games within a fixed group of people a general level of skill and army power will display itself. At that point it becomes a social thing - do you weaken your army or take a handicap so that when you play Dave who always loses the game is more evenly balanced (account for player and/or army power variation); or do you keep beating Dave until he stops playing you.


It's a symptom of smaller game populations. If you've only 5 people in the club then yeah any power variation is going to be very obvious and regularly an issue. If you've 50 in the club that turn up each week chances are you'll have a greater potential spread of player skills.


Groups that don't recruit new players can also suffer this issue and within age brackets as the age of the gamer gets older the skill base typically increases. This is reflected by the fact that most get into hobbies like wargaming at a younger age so the older the player the more potential experience they've had.

Exactly what I meant

It is not GW's fault to make Gristlegore stronger, but the players fault for not ignoring it (even if he likes the fluff).

I guess there was no possibility for GW to do anything about it but calling people out (instead if doing a better job in the first place)

GW already did a very good in getting people into believing that not the bad rules are the problem but the players who use them.

And if it is that clear to everyone what is over the top and should not be used in friendly games, why was it impossible to spot for GW before printing it.

I didn't relieve any blame from GW.

GW still has fault when they produce imbalances within the power structure of the game itself.

The fact that player skill is also a contributing factor doesn't reduce any blame to be portioned toward GW. GW should very much work better to produce a smoother power curve in their game without armies like Slaanesh suddenly appearing super powered compared to other armies.



Player skll should, in theory, be the greater component when two armies have two well made lists against each other.





However in the real world when you can't just make GW do what you want and you have a rules set with in balance and you have players with varied skill levels; there ARE practical tools and ways you can address it so that both can have an engaging and fun time gaming.

Again this isn't hand waving away GW's problems, its simply addressing that there IS a problem and presenting options to mitigate it since GW isn't going to hand wave those problems away in a second. Furthermore its the same tools that overcome player skill variation without relying purely upon one player "magically getting better" at playing.

 kodos wrote:
Exactly what I meant

It is not GW's fault to make Gristlegore stronger, but the players fault for not ignoring it (even if he likes the fluff).

I guess there was no possibility for GW to do anything about it but calling people out (instead if doing a better job in the first place)

GW already did a very good in getting people into believing that not the bad rules are the problem but the players who use them.

And if it is that clear to everyone what is over the top and should not be used in friendly games, why was it impossible to spot for GW before printing it.

That is the biggest question of all. The "OP" combos are found within minutes, but GW constantly misses them. It's really weird. If it's intended, then all that talk about picking which appeals to you the most is horsegak because you can inadvertently pick the most OP choice because you like it the best and be "that guy" because you did what GW said you should. If it's not intentional then it's incompetence of the highest magnitude since they aren't discovering basic things.

My issue with sub-faction traits is that they should either have their own point cost for units or you pay for the faction trait(via points). Currently it's just free tricks that vary wildly in effectiveness.

I have a hunch I have a good direction on what could make GW care more about balance and not releasing the easy to spot OP stuff within 30 seconds of getting the book in the players' hands.

Players not buying their products anymore until they pay more attention to the rules quality.

 Overread wrote:

However in the real world when you can't just make GW do what you want and you have a rules set with in balance and you have players with varied skill levels; there ARE practical tools and ways you can address it so that both can have an engaging and fun time gaming.

One possibility would be to stop hoping that stuff get fixed by GW and go back to community comp/point systems (simple solution if the too strong options would also cost more points per model)

AoS had them because GW did a bad job.
GW is still doing a bad job but now it is acceptable because the players can always decide to not use the rules.

 auticus wrote:
I have a hunch I have a good direction on what could make GW care more about balance and not releasing the easy to spot OP stuff within 30 seconds of getting the book in the players' hands.

Players not buying their products anymore until they pay more attention to the rules quality.

Bwahahahaha. You know that won't happen. Enough people don't care about quality or quality is "good enough".

The community point systems existed because GW had no points at all. (and I felt that this was the golden time of AOS because even the ones that weren't as good were still better than our current point system)

Trying to get people to use a community point system would be pointless (lol pun) because the vast majority of players don't want houserules or comp, they want to use the official rules.

It would take an ITC equivalent to change the rules for AOS or the points for AOS and have them accepted on a mass scale.

Bwahahahaha. You know that won't happen. Enough people don't care about quality or quality is "good enough".

Oh absolutely it won't happen. The last five polls I've seen, what two from this site by itself, have shown that there is a huge number of gw players that rate balance and rules quality as lower on the totem pole of things they care about. I was just commenting that that is the only way you're going to see them start to care, start qvc testing better, or actually actively stop putting in spike-builds in their book intentionally.

 kodos wrote:

 Overread wrote:

However in the real world when you can't just make GW do what you want and you have a rules set with in balance and you have players with varied skill levels; there ARE practical tools and ways you can address it so that both can have an engaging and fun time gaming.

One possibility would be to stop hoping that stuff get fixed by GW and go back to community comp/point systems (simple solution if the too strong options would also cost more points per model)

AoS had them because GW did a bad job.
GW is still doing a bad job but now it is acceptable because the players can always decide to not use the rules.

That's why GW "canonizing" SCGT points as official wasn't a good thing. There were way better fan comps out there (take a bow, auticus!) that did a much better job of balancing the game. But at least some of the GW guys were close to the SCGT guys and now that there are "official" points, it's not only an uphill battle to not use them (muh balance!) but god forbid you want to use a fan comp (if any are still maintained which isn't likely) to balance it better.

The main reason I didn't like SCGT point system was that it intentionally (as in this was on warhammer.org.uk from the author's account posting) made monsters cheaper to incentivize players to take more of them. Or... it intentionally made the points imbalanced to encourage a certain type of models to be showing up regularly.

I think they did a good job in most of the other areas, but that one thing is why I never would use SCGT points and why when it was adopted for the first GHB that I had my reaction that I did.

Azyr and PPC were different but both by and large got you to the same destination. There was another one I can't remember that was similar. One of the podcasters took the four of those and did a break down of rosters and found that three of our comps (all but SCGT) made rosters that were pretty much very similar, but SCGT gave you more monsters, which was "more fun" at the expense of balance.

The other three couldn't be used to move product as well since everything was in line with itself largely. I can't speak for the others but Azyr had its Win % for all factions down to a max of 58/42 (and under 60 was our goal). Game balance across the board was our #1 objective.

I will point put that it is natural the average GW player does not care as much about balance, because a player that does care about balance is more likely to move to other games. Those are lost sales GW could claim/reclaim if they improved, whereas the player who like imbalance will still be playing GW because seriously where are they going to go?

I think the ability to move to other games will be dependent on the player's local scene and how readily available other games are to them though.

I know a lot of people have voiced how they would love kings of war or conquest but no one near them will play it so they stick with AOS to get *something* in.

Its Star Wars Legion, X-Wing, Infinity, and Malifaux that people move to at my FLGS.

In unrelated news, FAQs are going up with adjustments.

Our area is dominated by 40k. As in... I'd say 80% of the community is 40k easily.

The AOS group had a mini revival with one of the tournament guys now running regular tournaments at another store so they are up to about 16 players now, down from 6 active. (so tournaments are responsible for directly bringing back 10 of those 16)

Legion in my area is mostly dead with a small gruop that plays occasionally. XWing was the king daddy for two or three years, trumping even the 40k group with an active membership over 60 players and filling the stores every friday night every week for months and months, but it is now mostly not something I see except for the random tournament.

Malifaux has a tiny group as well that plays sporadically. Infinity has been mostly dead.

Its 40k40k40k40k. (and our blood bowl always has 20-24 players in a season but we only run once a year from jan - may)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Wayniac wrote:
In unrelated news, FAQs are going up with adjustments.

This will be interesting. I wonder what happens to the daddy filth tier?

Blightkings get the "unmodified 6" wording, as of todays FAQ!!

And some adjustments to Battalions that I'll have to look at later.

I see slaanesh has no points updates. Neither does the masters of the universe undead. I guess the team feels they are working as intended.

 auticus wrote:
I see slaanesh has no points updates. Neither does the masters of the universe undead. I guess the team feels they are working as intended.

Ossiarchs only released a month or so ago. It's no surprise that they don't have updates. Also besides Petrifax most people don't think Ossiarchs are undercosted for points at present.