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 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
I guess my concern is the point of the FAQ was to clear up improper or poorly worded rules that were causing concern among the community, not always balance per say.

That being said, does anyone in here think there are GLARING issues that need clearing up, non-balance related? I'm not talking RAW/RAI, but honestly garbage rules that need to be re-written to make them less ridiculous.

Infinite shooting? What counts as movement in regards to embarking/reinforcements? Do you get Grinding Advance with the Ravenguard reinforcement?

There are multiple issues that could have been addressed in this faq, as they just released the codexes with poor writing. Instead, they let us know that point changes are reserved for CA, and guard get D6 shots on Democannons. Nothing corrected, nothing re-worded.

Then I ask again, what is the point of a FAQ?

Even with the worst rules you can make a balanced game with proper pts, it's more about creating the wrong experience and the wrong incentives. I also feel like the big FAQs are supposed to be what creates errata for badly written rules, as has been mentioned, outside of wholly new datasheets and rules that's not something CA does. I don't like the following rules and would like to see them changed in no particular order:
*Tau Empire Saviour Protocols ability for Drones.
*Alaitoc stacking with flyers.
*Necron Night Scythes and Monoliths abilities are too bad to be usable and don't make thematic sense.
*Sub-faction benefits skew armies too much, fielding a more diverse list is discouraged outside soup.
*AOE abilities that are worse against characters should instead just be worse against characters with a wounds characteristic less than 10. I get not wanting to punish the character blob too much, but three Tank Commanders standing close together should be punished as much by these abilities as three Leman Russes for example.
*Many Stratagems with broad applications are too good in combination with high-PL units, that's a design issue with these individual Stratagems and not the fault of the unit.
*Too many abilities, WL traits and Stratagems stack power on top of power leading to units being more effective than the sum of the parts being put into them. It's compounding interest but instead of getting rich you're gakking on your opponent.
*Too many Stratagems for some mono-factions armies and all multi-faction armies to allow the opponent to read before the game starts.

Some things like faction benefits is an issue I've made out to be bigger than I now think it is, I kind of like Battalions being the mainstay for most lists and no-troops lists being a rarity. Soup is also a smaller problem than I initially thought, it does make more sense for many armies to have Astra Militarum allies than to fight alone, Tyranids and GSC are doing better in ITC than tentacle soup. Summoning a horde of Plague Bearers before the battle to act as a screen is super thematic on further inspection, even or maybe especially for Thousand Sons since Tzeentch has his labyrinthine plans that involve not only mortals but also other daemons. What I am saying is that I might change my mind on the list, a nerf to shield drones (or enough buffs to other drones that they are essentially getting nerfed) might make me totally ignore the "OOLOS drones can make suits invulnerable to lascannons for the first three turns" issue.

Yeah, it is kind of hard to design a book with powerful knight stuff, saying to yourself that high point cost and lack of CP is going to balance the whole thing, when at the same time CP farms existed.

And the fix to something is never a fix. It is always a make thing, so bad it gets never take kind of a nerf.

 alextroy wrote:

Alcibiades wrote:
Wait. Do Chaos Marines get Bolter Discipline? I thought they did, but I don't see it anywhere.

Umm. Umm. Great Job GW. They removed the Spring BIG FAQ from the FAQ page, meaning not only did they remove the rules for Bolter Discipline for all Astartes not in C:SM other than those in the Space Marine Update file, they also removed the CP update for Assassins since there is no Errata Document for Index: Assassins.

If the Assassins update isn't in the Autumn file, I'd email GW about that one.

Karol wrote:
Yeah, it is kind of hard to design a book with powerful knight stuff, saying to yourself that high point cost and lack of CP is going to balance the whole thing, when at the same time CP farms existed.

And the fix to something is never a fix. It is always a make thing, so bad it gets never take kind of a nerf.

That's not true, the Castellan got several nerfs (Raven Strat, no 3++ and pts) and in the end it's still a competitive unit. The Necron Tesseract Vault got a top placement after getting 70 pts increase, I think it was a bit too large but it's still not useless, now it's probably gotten power-creeped too hard to be useful. Lootas are still good despite not being able to Mop Up. Agents of Vect is still one of the more powerful Stratagems in the game despite costing another CP.

Most of the 200+ pt Titanic nerfs are stupid, I think GW were making sure that these units would only be usable in PL games which I think I'm fine with, so it's not really stupid. I had some wonky games before they nerf-hammered these things to oblivion and I think I prefer these units to be for PL games, they need to be bad if not terrible to avoid the creation of a mega-Titan meta ever coming close to being a thing and it was kind of close at one point with big bird. I don't think anyone wants to see every tenth table include a model costing more than 800 pts, it's already an issue for a lot of folks that 400 pt models are on a tenth of tables.

Yeah. I agree. 5 pt Cultists without legion traits also won Slaughterfest. Caladius still wrecked LGT post-nerf

Most of the 8th ed. nerfs aside from Ynnari and the "big bird & friends" nerf seem to have been pretty spot on, keeping the units playable and in the right build even competitive, while no longer being the spammed no-brainer choice they were before.

The could easily go back to the % method for lists or no units over X points.

 BroodSpawn wrote:
No company makes money from 'balance ', every game on the market has some form of imbalance that drives sales. GW are interested in balancing to a degree as not doing so does not drive sales, look at 7th compared to current as an example of the difference in balance and sales as an example

Except game balance is even funkier. 8th ed is good example however how good PR makes people buy worse product gladly.

 vict0988 wrote:

Karol wrote:
Yeah, it is kind of hard to design a book with powerful knight stuff, saying to yourself that high point cost and lack of CP is going to balance the whole thing, when at the same time CP farms existed.

And the fix to something is never a fix. It is always a make thing, so bad it gets never take kind of a nerf.

That's not true, the Castellan got several nerfs (Raven Strat, no 3++ and pts) and in the end it's still a competitive unit. The Necron Tesseract Vault got a top placement after getting 70 pts increase, I think it was a bit too large but it's still not useless, now it's probably gotten power-creeped too hard to be useful. Lootas are still good despite not being able to Mop Up. Agents of Vect is still one of the more powerful Stratagems in the game despite costing another CP.

Most of the 200+ pt Titanic nerfs are stupid, I think GW were making sure that these units would only be usable in PL games which I think I'm fine with, so it's not really stupid. I had some wonky games before they nerf-hammered these things to oblivion and I think I prefer these units to be for PL games, they need to be bad if not terrible to avoid the creation of a mega-Titan meta ever coming close to being a thing and it was kind of close at one point with big bird. I don't think anyone wants to see every tenth table include a model costing more than 800 pts, it's already an issue for a lot of folks that 400 pt models are on a tenth of tables.

if the armies post nerf look exactly the same as they do pre nerf, and the army still is on the top of the heep, then it was not much of a nerf to begin with. How many times were dark reapers nerfed 7-8 times or something like that? they were all used up to castellan showing up, and then gone with the wind, then Inari change arrived.

This is the type of fixs GW makes. They don't change Inari to be a still good, but fun to play against army. They kill it. From what I understand from people telling me, the stuff that made GK good, was cut out of the codex as part of fixing them being too powerful. Same thing was told to me about necron, they were suppose to have some detachment that was really good, and now they are paying the price for it. And if legends are true then legion space marines are paying for their 3ed codex, meaning they are in a hell hole for 5 editions. Am not sure there even are people who played chaos back then.

tneva82 wrote:

 BroodSpawn wrote:
No company makes money from 'balance ', every game on the market has some form of imbalance that drives sales. GW are interested in balancing to a degree as not doing so does not drive sales, look at 7th compared to current as an example of the difference in balance and sales as an example

Except game balance is even funkier. 8th ed is good example however how good PR makes people buy worse product gladly.

Maybe.

But GW has it easy with the PR, given all competitors only ever put out far inferior products on the gaming/balance side of things.

Making a car that drives 300 mph might sound great, but 150 mph is fine, if all your competitors only ever manage to get to 50 mph.

You'd need to actually have a non-GW company make a somewhat playable game at some point to test whether or not it's purely PR.

tneva82 wrote:

 BroodSpawn wrote:
No company makes money from 'balance ', every game on the market has some form of imbalance that drives sales. GW are interested in balancing to a degree as not doing so does not drive sales, look at 7th compared to current as an example of the difference in balance and sales as an example

Except game balance is even funkier. 8th ed is good example however how good PR makes people buy worse product gladly.

I wonder what your playing when the balance in 8th looks worse then it was in 7th.

Sunny Side Up wrote:
Yeah. I agree. 5 pt Cultists without legion traits also won Slaughterfest. Caladius still wrecked LGT post-nerf

Most of the 8th ed. nerfs aside from Ynnari and the "big bird & friends" nerf seem to have been pretty spot on, keeping the units playable and in the right build even competitive, while no longer being the spammed no-brainer choice they were before.

Point of order, some of their " balances " just destroyed units. Conscripts, straight trash and I've seen no one take them, not even me since it happened and I took them all the time from 3rd/4th edition forward till now. They nerfed them into a total waste option. Commissars, I always fielded them since 3rd, in as much number as I could, now they rarely see the table as they are awful. So yeah, some choices may still get used, what choice do some armies have ? Other choices just get nuked from orbit, as it apparently, was the only way to be sure.

AngryAngel80 wrote:

Sunny Side Up wrote:
Yeah. I agree. 5 pt Cultists without legion traits also won Slaughterfest. Caladius still wrecked LGT post-nerf

Most of the 8th ed. nerfs aside from Ynnari and the "big bird & friends" nerf seem to have been pretty spot on, keeping the units playable and in the right build even competitive, while no longer being the spammed no-brainer choice they were before.

Point of order, some of their " balances " just destroyed units. Conscripts, straight trash and I've seen no one take them, not even me since it happened and I took them all the time from 3rd/4th edition forward till now. They nerfed them into a total waste option. Commissars, I always fielded them since 3rd, in as much number as I could, now they rarely see the table as they are awful. So yeah, some choices may still get used, what choice do some armies have ? Other choices just get nuked from orbit, as it apparently, was the only way to be sure.

Its because they are chasing the "balance units" instead of balancing rules, the problem is the core rules, when str 3 mass fire is better at killing tanks than a few str 8 and when fire power is so strong wounds that dont spill damage is better than elite units (unless it has 3++, fnp's, negatives to be hit, etc...), then when you have units that are 4-6 points, making them 1pt more basically breaks them, when you riase the cost by 25% for 1 model vs a 200pts model lowering by 15pts (8%) it can be extreme, b.c lower points is better, and mass fire/bodies is mostly better unless its extremely point efficient (see old Castellan)

But as soon as the core rules change its completely different, you are not trying to balance every unit on this TINY ASS feth thin line where once you are 2-3% over the line i points you break the unit for better or for worst. If all "Heavy" units had an extra rule to take -1 to be wounded vs "light" guns, then that Str 3 can no longer hurt T6+ now there is no reason to nerf them b.c take 120 wont have any effect on many units in the game.

I know why they do it. Maybe they should fix their crap core rules though as opposed to just nuking units from orbit. It does bother me as for all these editions conscripts did something worthwhile, now junk. Commissars less so but still pretty crap as a unit choice goes.

It was an over reaction, and then with regular infantry squads being the same cost you really didn't get rid of the problem, you just got rid of units.

The commissar nerf would have been enough to make conscripts poop, or even the point cost increase, or the order thing but all together was way too much.

 vict0988 wrote:

Karol wrote:
Yeah, it is kind of hard to design a book with powerful knight stuff, saying to yourself that high point cost and lack of CP is going to balance the whole thing, when at the same time CP farms existed.

And the fix to something is never a fix. It is always a make thing, so bad it gets never take kind of a nerf.

That's not true, the Castellan got several nerfs (Raven Strat, no 3++ and pts) and in the end it's still a competitive unit. The Necron Tesseract Vault got a top placement after getting 70 pts increase, I think it was a bit too large but it's still not useless, now it's probably gotten power-creeped too hard to be useful. Lootas are still good despite not being able to Mop Up. Agents of Vect is still one of the more powerful Stratagems in the game despite costing another CP.

Most of the 200+ pt Titanic nerfs are stupid, I think GW were making sure that these units would only be usable in PL games which I think I'm fine with, so it's not really stupid. I had some wonky games before they nerf-hammered these things to oblivion and I think I prefer these units to be for PL games, they need to be bad if not terrible to avoid the creation of a mega-Titan meta ever coming close to being a thing and it was kind of close at one point with big bird. I don't think anyone wants to see every tenth table include a model costing more than 800 pts, it's already an issue for a lot of folks that 400 pt models are on a tenth of tables.

If that was their reasoning then why do knights, baneblades, wraithknights, scorpion tanks, and whatever the tau low is called still have sane points costs? Is a fellblade that much scarier than a baneblade? A stompa that much worse than a castellan?

Sunny Side Up wrote:
Yeah. I agree. 5 pt Cultists without legion traits also won Slaughterfest. Caladius still wrecked LGT post-nerf

Most of the 8th ed. nerfs aside from Ynnari and the "big bird & friends" nerf seem to have been pretty spot on, keeping the units playable and in the right build even competitive, while no longer being the spammed no-brainer choice they were before.

That doesn't make them good. They were a literal tax for CP and nothing else at this point.

Karol wrote:
If the armies post nerf look exactly the same as they do pre nerf, and the army still is on the top of the heep, then it was not much of a nerf to begin with. How many times were dark reapers nerfed 7-8 times or something like that? they were all used up to castellan showing up, and then gone with the wind, then Inari change arrived.

This is the type of fixs GW makes. They don't change Inari to be a still good, but fun to play against army. They kill it. From what I understand from people telling me, the stuff that made GK good, was cut out of the codex as part of fixing them being too powerful. Same thing was told to me about necron, they were suppose to have some detachment that was really good, and now they are paying the price for it. And if legends are true then legion space marines are paying for their 3ed codex, meaning they are in a hell hole for 5 editions. Am not sure there even are people who played chaos back then.

If it's not on top of the heap, but merely in a good-ish position then it's a perfect nerf. Going out and completely invalidating all the money and work people put into their Castellans by making them gak instead of just taking them down a notch to just be good would be a total git move. Dark Reapers weren't nerfed that many times, it was 3-4 times.

The Ynnari book was poorly written, but no more poorly written that what came before it. It's ten times better to produce a gak codex nobody uses outside casual than a completely OP codex that prevents most other factions from competing and wins the majority of competitive events. Index GK were not good, GK were amazing in 5th and good in 6th and 7th as far as I remember. I don't know what was cut from the codex, but I don't see it, in fact the codex added a new relatively OP datasheet in the form of the Dreadknight Grandmaster. Space Marines were amazing at the start of 8th and did really well again when their codex came out before everyone else. CSM have also done quite well this edition and were amazing in 6th before Heldrakes were nerfed and I think they were fine even after that. More or less all factions have had their time in the limelight and many factions have been utter gak at one point or another.

I am not saying that GW gets it right every time, but saying they are always torpedoing competitive choices is just wrong, it's more like GW aren't that good at balancing and sometimes they undershoot and need a few times to get it right (like with the Castellan), other times they overshoot and nuke a unit (or faction like the Ynnari). It's not a policy of always nuking units, GW just isn't that good at their jobs. But no game designer is perfect, LOL is another popular example that often makes big mistakes. If GW learns to embrace stats and math they'll be on the right path instead of going with gut feeling and marketing. Tournaments could perfectly well increase or decrease the costs of units, stratagems, relics, WL traits or faction abilities, it wouldn't be that hard and it was done all the time in European WHFB tournaments. Whether you make things cost CP to bring, give rewards for taking bad units, do it through pts or introduce a cheese score that gets higher the more meta units you include and then give rewards each round based on how few cheese points people have. A bunch of smaller formats might let GW more accurately see what effects different buffs or nerfs would have to the game. I have no idea how good their playtesting format is, I suspect it's still pretty bad when the playtesters knows that something OP is about to be released but GW still releases it.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Sunny Side Up wrote:
Yeah. I agree. 5 pt Cultists without legion traits also won Slaughterfest. Caladius still wrecked LGT post-nerf

Most of the 8th ed. nerfs aside from Ynnari and the "big bird & friends" nerf seem to have been pretty spot on, keeping the units playable and in the right build even competitive, while no longer being the spammed no-brainer choice they were before.

That doesn't make them good. They were a literal tax for CP and nothing else at this point.

If Cultists at 5 pts get used in competitive armies that win tournaments then they clearly should not be 4 pts, even if you nerf their support so we don't see big blobs become common again, you'd still an abundance of Cultists as CP fodder. You can't just ignore the fact that you are getting relatively cheap CP compared to the factions that pay 2-4x what you're paying for a troops choice, if they were really truly terrible people would have more success with armies with actual CSM or just entirely without troops. If anything, the units that buff Cultists need buffs to allow the big units to have a small comeback and let them keep VotLW.

I think the Commissar and the Conscript nerfs were too many too fast, I'd like to see the Commissar come back and see if that's enough to whip the Conscripts back into being more useful, I've played against Conscripts once since they received all their nerfs and they were pretty underwhelming. I'm glad to see Infantry Squads being more common than Conscripts though, I feel that Infantry Squads should be an option on par with Conscripts.

Sunny Side Up wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

 BroodSpawn wrote:
No company makes money from 'balance ', every game on the market has some form of imbalance that drives sales. GW are interested in balancing to a degree as not doing so does not drive sales, look at 7th compared to current as an example of the difference in balance and sales as an example

Except game balance is even funkier. 8th ed is good example however how good PR makes people buy worse product gladly.

Maybe.

But GW has it easy with the PR, given all competitors only ever put out far inferior products on the gaming/balance side of things.

Making a car that drives 300 mph might sound great, but 150 mph is fine, if all your competitors only ever manage to get to 50 mph.

You'd need to actually have a non-GW company make a somewhat playable game at some point to test whether or not it's purely PR.

I'm honestly not sure if you're being serious or sarcastic here.

 Nithaniel wrote:
Bit dissapointed that there was no beta rule on flyers. Was hoping for a 0-3 flyer limit. Guess this means GW are happy with flyer spam lists...???

They will probably get point increase.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ordana wrote:

 Nithaniel wrote:
Bit dissapointed that there was no beta rule on flyers. Was hoping for a 0-3 flyer limit. Guess this means GW are happy with flyer spam lists...???

I wouldn't go that far before seeing CA. No one outside of Eldar is spamming flyers (and if they are they aren't dominating nearly as much) so its entirely possible they will 'fix' the eldar problem by increasing the points.

What I am dissapointed by is not changing Alaitoc to match the Raven Guard trait.

yea, that will need new codex.

Marin wrote:

 Nithaniel wrote:
Bit dissapointed that there was no beta rule on flyers. Was hoping for a 0-3 flyer limit. Guess this means GW are happy with flyer spam lists...???

They will probably get point increase.

Is anyone but eldar spamming flyers?

If no, then eldar are the problem, not flyers.

 Jidmah wrote:

Marin wrote:

 Nithaniel wrote:
Bit dissapointed that there was no beta rule on flyers. Was hoping for a 0-3 flyer limit. Guess this means GW are happy with flyer spam lists...???

They will probably get point increase.

Is anyone but eldar spamming flyers?

If no, then eldar are the problem, not flyers.

Putting a max of 3 on Flyers is just an insurance policy, Alaitoc Craftworld flyers would still have to be nerfed regardless as they'd most likely still be 3-of in every Craftworld list. Same way as rule of 3 is an insurance policy against any single unit being OP, no 7x Plague Crawler means regardless of whether it costs 0 pts, you still won't see more than 3 on every table. Same reason why Tau Commanders are max 1/Detachment, they technically still deserve to be nerfed, but it can't get too bad because you can't run 7-10 of them. The ITC format really needs to change their policy on flyers and secondary objectives if they don't get a pts update in CA19.

 Jidmah wrote:

Marin wrote:

 Nithaniel wrote:
Bit dissapointed that there was no beta rule on flyers. Was hoping for a 0-3 flyer limit. Guess this means GW are happy with flyer spam lists...???

They will probably get point increase.

Is anyone but eldar spamming flyers?

If no, then eldar are the problem, not flyers.

True, until IH start bringing flyers and then you realize players will bring things that work.
There is reason AM bring guard, GSC bring guard and Imperium bring guard. That is single unit spammed and not role, CWE have 5 unit of flyers.

 Jidmah wrote:

Marin wrote:

 Nithaniel wrote:
Bit dissapointed that there was no beta rule on flyers. Was hoping for a 0-3 flyer limit. Guess this means GW are happy with flyer spam lists...???

They will probably get point increase.

Is anyone but eldar spamming flyers?

If no, then eldar are the problem, not flyers.

Eldar Flying Circus in ITC are a problem. Without house rules that boost them, they're still very strong but not nearly as effective.

 Jidmah wrote:

Marin wrote:

 Nithaniel wrote:
Bit dissapointed that there was no beta rule on flyers. Was hoping for a 0-3 flyer limit. Guess this means GW are happy with flyer spam lists...???

They will probably get point increase.

Is anyone but eldar spamming flyers?

If no, then eldar are the problem, not flyers.

You dont see CWE flyer spam outside of ITC, maybe ITC is the problem and not CWE Flyers, when killing gives you more points than objectives, players will always take what gets kill more and max out secondaries, then if they have room they will take units for hold more.

Also b.c of units like Knights and now IH crap, why even take normal vehicles? OH and when a Transport gives up 2 points, why take those?

Look at ETC sometime you'll see transport, and yes you still see some flyers, but its not spam, 3-5 WS's, Fire Prisms, Nightspinners, and some flyers is the normal, but even DE will take some flyers and they have 1/2 the rules the CWE ones have.

Yea, ITC is a killpoint fiesta.

You can't expect GW to balance things to fit to people who don't play GW missions to begin with.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

Marin wrote:

 Nithaniel wrote:
Bit dissapointed that there was no beta rule on flyers. Was hoping for a 0-3 flyer limit. Guess this means GW are happy with flyer spam lists...???

They will probably get point increase.

Is anyone but eldar spamming flyers?

If no, then eldar are the problem, not flyers.

You dont see CWE flyer spam outside of ITC, maybe ITC is the problem and not CWE Flyers, when killing gives you more points than objectives, players will always take what gets kill more and max out secondaries, then if they have room they will take units for hold more.

Also b.c of units like Knights and now IH crap, why even take normal vehicles? OH and when a Transport gives up 2 points, why take those?

Look at ETC sometime you'll see transport, and yes you still see some flyers, but its not spam, 3-5 WS's, Fire Prisms, Nightspinners, and some flyers is the normal, but even DE will take some flyers and they have 1/2 the rules the CWE ones have.

You are wrong even on ETC almost every team had flyer list. The winner team England have player with 8 flyers. Fly spam counters alot of builds.
Flyers spam should be addressed, but sadly to many of the aeldar things got addressed it making the army really hard to play. So leds hope they touch gently and not repeat the mistakes with Ynnari, reapers and spears nerfs.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

Marin wrote:

 Nithaniel wrote:
Bit dissapointed that there was no beta rule on flyers. Was hoping for a 0-3 flyer limit. Guess this means GW are happy with flyer spam lists...???

They will probably get point increase.

Is anyone but eldar spamming flyers?

If no, then eldar are the problem, not flyers.

You dont see CWE flyer spam outside of ITC, maybe ITC is the problem and not CWE Flyers, when killing gives you more points than objectives, players will always take what gets kill more and max out secondaries, then if they have room they will take units for hold more.

Also b.c of units like Knights and now IH crap, why even take normal vehicles? OH and when a Transport gives up 2 points, why take those?

Look at ETC sometime you'll see transport, and yes you still see some flyers, but its not spam, 3-5 WS's, Fire Prisms, Nightspinners, and some flyers is the normal, but even DE will take some flyers and they have 1/2 the rules the CWE ones have.

You guys are super uninformed, there were 105 Crimson Hunters at the ETC (some number of which were Exarchs), it's not just an ITC problem.

Transports are doing fine in ITC, there was exactly 1 guy bringing Chimeras in ETC, so another one that isn't just an issue with ITC. Chimera lists have topped events using the Champions Missions. Nova has less of a focus on killing stuff than ITC, but ETC is way further away from any other format than ITC, ETC is a team event, ITC is not. There are missions in both Maelstrom and Eternal War that heavily reward killing units, not to mention First Strike being quite punishing for an army without enough punch to go through a unit T1.

ITC missions require you to hold objectives. Secondaries are the only ones that require you to kill and make up 12 out of 42 total points. Of those 12 points - Recon, Behind Enemy Lines, Ground Control, King of the Hill, and Engineers all do not require you to kill anything.

 vict0988 wrote:

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

Marin wrote:

 Nithaniel wrote:
Bit dissapointed that there was no beta rule on flyers. Was hoping for a 0-3 flyer limit. Guess this means GW are happy with flyer spam lists...???

They will probably get point increase.

Is anyone but eldar spamming flyers?

If no, then eldar are the problem, not flyers.

You dont see CWE flyer spam outside of ITC, maybe ITC is the problem and not CWE Flyers, when killing gives you more points than objectives, players will always take what gets kill more and max out secondaries, then if they have room they will take units for hold more.

Also b.c of units like Knights and now IH crap, why even take normal vehicles? OH and when a Transport gives up 2 points, why take those?

Look at ETC sometime you'll see transport, and yes you still see some flyers, but its not spam, 3-5 WS's, Fire Prisms, Nightspinners, and some flyers is the normal, but even DE will take some flyers and they have 1/2 the rules the CWE ones have.

You guys are super uninformed, there were 105 Crimson Hunters at the ETC (some number of which were Exarchs), it's not just an ITC problem.

Transports are doing fine in ITC, there was exactly 1 guy bringing Chimeras in ETC, so another one that isn't just an issue with ITC. Chimera lists have topped events using the Champions Missions. Nova has less of a focus on killing stuff than ITC, but ETC is way further away from any other format than ITC, ETC is a team event, ITC is not. There are missions in both Maelstrom and Eternal War that heavily reward killing units, not to mention First Strike being quite punishing for an army without enough punch to go through a unit T1.

Can you point me to the Chimera list? I cannot for the life of me find a role for them in the current game, curious to see how someone else made them work, usually it seems the points would just be better spent on more grunts.

 vict0988 wrote:

Karol wrote:
If the armies post nerf look exactly the same as they do pre nerf, and the army still is on the top of the heep, then it was not much of a nerf to begin with. How many times were dark reapers nerfed 7-8 times or something like that? they were all used up to castellan showing up, and then gone with the wind, then Inari change arrived.

This is the type of fixs GW makes. They don't change Inari to be a still good, but fun to play against army. They kill it. From what I understand from people telling me, the stuff that made GK good, was cut out of the codex as part of fixing them being too powerful. Same thing was told to me about necron, they were suppose to have some detachment that was really good, and now they are paying the price for it. And if legends are true then legion space marines are paying for their 3ed codex, meaning they are in a hell hole for 5 editions. Am not sure there even are people who played chaos back then.

If it's not on top of the heap, but merely in a good-ish position then it's a perfect nerf. Going out and completely invalidating all the money and work people put into their Castellans by making them gak instead of just taking them down a notch to just be good would be a total git move. Dark Reapers weren't nerfed that many times, it was 3-4 times.

The Ynnari book was poorly written, but no more poorly written that what came before it. It's ten times better to produce a gak codex nobody uses outside casual than a completely OP codex that prevents most other factions from competing and wins the majority of competitive events. Index GK were not good, GK were amazing in 5th and good in 6th and 7th as far as I remember. I don't know what was cut from the codex, but I don't see it, in fact the codex added a new relatively OP datasheet in the form of the Dreadknight Grandmaster. Space Marines were amazing at the start of 8th and did really well again when their codex came out before everyone else. CSM have also done quite well this edition and were amazing in 6th before Heldrakes were nerfed and I think they were fine even after that. More or less all factions have had their time in the limelight and many factions have been utter gak at one point or another.

I am not saying that GW gets it right every time, but saying they are always torpedoing competitive choices is just wrong, it's more like GW aren't that good at balancing and sometimes they undershoot and need a few times to get it right (like with the Castellan), other times they overshoot and nuke a unit (or faction like the Ynnari). It's not a policy of always nuking units, GW just isn't that good at their jobs. But no game designer is perfect, LOL is another popular example that often makes big mistakes. If GW learns to embrace stats and math they'll be on the right path instead of going with gut feeling and marketing. Tournaments could perfectly well increase or decrease the costs of units, stratagems, relics, WL traits or faction abilities, it wouldn't be that hard and it was done all the time in European WHFB tournaments. Whether you make things cost CP to bring, give rewards for taking bad units, do it through pts or introduce a cheese score that gets higher the more meta units you include and then give rewards each round based on how few cheese points people have. A bunch of smaller formats might let GW more accurately see what effects different buffs or nerfs would have to the game. I have no idea how good their playtesting format is, I suspect it's still pretty bad when the playtesters knows that something OP is about to be released but GW still releases it.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Sunny Side Up wrote:
Yeah. I agree. 5 pt Cultists without legion traits also won Slaughterfest. Caladius still wrecked LGT post-nerf

Most of the 8th ed. nerfs aside from Ynnari and the "big bird & friends" nerf seem to have been pretty spot on, keeping the units playable and in the right build even competitive, while no longer being the spammed no-brainer choice they were before.

That doesn't make them good. They were a literal tax for CP and nothing else at this point.

If Cultists at 5 pts get used in competitive armies that win tournaments then they clearly should not be 4 pts, even if you nerf their support so we don't see big blobs become common again, you'd still an abundance of Cultists as CP fodder. You can't just ignore the fact that you are getting relatively cheap CP compared to the factions that pay 2-4x what you're paying for a troops choice, if they were really truly terrible people would have more success with armies with actual CSM or just entirely without troops. If anything, the units that buff Cultists need buffs to allow the big units to have a small comeback and let them keep VotLW.

I think the Commissar and the Conscript nerfs were too many too fast, I'd like to see the Commissar come back and see if that's enough to whip the Conscripts back into being more useful, I've played against Conscripts once since they received all their nerfs and they were pretty underwhelming. I'm glad to see Infantry Squads being more common than Conscripts though, I feel that Infantry Squads should be an option on par with Conscripts.

That's because the Cultists are being used to fuel things that are good or too good, and not being bought on their own merit. So why do you nerf the Cultists? You completely avoided the subject.

Brandon Grant (ITC winner last year) was running a list with a couple chimeras for a lot of this seasons ITC (got to play against it a BAO, man that guy is good).

Uses the chimeras to move block, deploy guard squads up for board control, protect characters from snipers, charge things that don't want to be bad touched and flame the random tough to shoot things. I'm pretty sure he's talked about it or it's been talked about (google Brandon Grant Chimera gave a pretty good list).

Eldar flyers have been a problem for a long time in 8th (I've been crying about them for at least a year now) and GW doesn't seem to want to fix them. My guess is there is a fix in CA 2019 (everyone gets raven guard rules) and GW isn't going to step in when they already have a fix out to the printers.

It's pretty obvious that GW doesn't know what makes a strong unit and is unaware of the power combos out there. When your lead rules designer is wandering around a tournament taking notes on what players are doing this far into an edition it speaks to the amount of in house testing that has been done. The initial release of the SM codex vs what they have now really underscores just how bad GW is at balancing the game theoretically. If early 8th SM were supposed to be balanced for this edition space marines 2.0 is an admission of just how badly GW screwed that pooch.

Things as basic as the re-roll mechanic (all vs all failed), when to apply modifiers and character targeting rules show a lack of planning, consistency and general lack of top down leadership in the rules design studio (IMHO). Until GW knows what kind of game they are trying to make and how they want that game to function there's no way they can make balanced units. It's hard to design a coherent tight rules set when everyone gets to put a thumb on the scale and you have art/design and marketing running the show.