Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

SecondTime wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
My other concern is a lot of the imbalanced marine rules are heavily influenced by all the marine-centric lore.

That's not a problem, but only if other armies are built along their lore as well (ref: stories where they beat marines). The real problem is they're taking the marine-lore at face value, and ignoring other lore...
... or in other words, favoritism.

There's far more lore for the marines, so the favoritism is really built-in. I'm just amazed it took this long, really.

As long as it's consistent, then it doesn't really matter the quantity. If Marines have 100 books in which they fight, and Guard have 10, you can still draw conclusions about the average power of Marines and the average power of Guard.

Of course, if the quantity of fluff is wildly inconsistent, then you have to trim the outliers to approach a mean. But that type of outlier trimming is common in large data sets and isn't an ill-understood or arcane process.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
Fluff is largely inconsistent and sometimes contradictory, and generally prefer balances issues. However, this particular issue makes very little sense in genre for a couple of reasons.

My issue with this is twofold. First BA would likely lack the restraint to pull off a tripoint as presented in the rules. Secondly, it makes no sense for 9 guys to stand around and get killed because one guy is surrounded. I dont' have to get into the weeds of the lore to have these objections.

Fluff is largely inconsistent and sometimes contradictory, so we should ignore fluff, except on some issue where suddenly it matter?

I guess it's too nuanced to be a general point. So just drop that point then.

The whole situation underscores the fluff to tabletop translation problem. To play narratively, I'd have to get my opponents to agree not to use fall back. That's the take home message here.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
My other concern is a lot of the imbalanced marine rules are heavily influenced by all the marine-centric lore.

That's not a problem, but only if other armies are built along their lore as well (ref: stories where they beat marines). The real problem is they're taking the marine-lore at face value, and ignoring other lore...
... or in other words, favoritism.

There's far more lore for the marines, so the favoritism is really built-in. I'm just amazed it took this long, really.

As long as it's consistent, then it doesn't really matter the quantity. If Marines have 100 books in which they fight, and Guard have 10, you can still draw conclusions about the average power of Marines and the average power of Guard.

Of course, if the quantity of fluff is wildly inconsistent, then you have to trim the outliers to approach a mean. But that type of outlier trimming is common in large data sets and isn't an ill-understood or arcane process.

I think quantity matters quite a bit, because of its ability to cause bias.

SecondTime wrote:
I think quantity matters quite a bit, because of its ability to cause bias.

You can have bias in 10 pieces of literature just like you can in 100. If you're saying that the mean is too high, then again, the mean doesn't really care how many pieces of lore you have. It just cares what those pieces say. If the average power of SM in the lore is too high, then that's a problem with GW's lore writing ability, and Marines should not be that powerful (or conversely bring up the mean of every other faction).

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
I think quantity matters quite a bit, because of its ability to cause bias.

You can have bias in 10 pieces of literature just like you can in 100. If you're saying that the mean is too high, then again, the mean doesn't really care how many pieces of lore you have. It just cares what those pieces say. If the average power of SM in the lore is too high, then that's a problem with GW's lore writing ability, and Marines should not be that powerful (or conversely bring up the mean of every other faction).

You can, but the bias in the 100 pieces have 10X the likelihood of being read, right? That's how propaganda works, I think. If you spam X message in abundance, it becomes the narrative, even if other messages are just as valid. But marines are almost certainly depicted as far too powerful in most lore as well. It's not called bolter porn for no reason.

SecondTime wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
I think quantity matters quite a bit, because of its ability to cause bias.

You can have bias in 10 pieces of literature just like you can in 100. If you're saying that the mean is too high, then again, the mean doesn't really care how many pieces of lore you have. It just cares what those pieces say. If the average power of SM in the lore is too high, then that's a problem with GW's lore writing ability, and Marines should not be that powerful (or conversely bring up the mean of every other faction).

You can, but the bias in the 100 pieces have 10X the likelihood of being read, right? That's how propaganda works, I think. If you spam X message in abundance, it becomes the narrative, even if other messages are just as valid.

Yes but GW is writing the narrative, not reading it. It doesn't particularly matter if Xenomancers thinks that a Space Marine can solo 15,000 Avatars of Khaine or if I think that a single Aspect Warrior can destroy a planet with a twitch of his ears. GW can vomit out as many books as they want on whatever they want - so long as the power levels on average roughly match, it doesn't really matter what any individual player thinks. Just what the aggregate power levels are in the lore, and you can take the mean of 100 as easily as you can 10.

And yes, if Marines are too powerful even in the lore, then chalk it up to GW being gak at writing and most importantly recognize then that lore MUST NECESSARILY be divorced from game balance. In which case, 2 wound Marines is absolutely a balance problem, even if it "feels right" lorewise.

I guess? My concern is that GW is both writing it AND reading it, and is reading their own Mary Sue marine lore to inform their rule writing at this point.

Yes, 2 wound marines are absolutely a balance issue. It was others saying that it wasn't necessarily.

SecondTime wrote:
I guess? My concern is that GW is both writing it AND reading it, and is reading their own Mary Sue marine lore to inform their rule writing at this point.

That's so obviously flawed that not even a company as wrong as GW could be doing things that badly. Right? RIGHT?

And yes, I know. My response is largely directed at that discussion.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
I guess? My concern is that GW is both writing it AND reading it, and is reading their own Mary Sue marine lore to inform their rule writing at this point.

That's so obviously flawed that not even a company as wrong as GW could be doing things that badly. Right? RIGHT?

And yes, I know. My response is largely directed at that discussion.

I think that's exactly what GW is doing at this point. They are buying into their own press.

SecondTime wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
I guess? My concern is that GW is both writing it AND reading it, and is reading their own Mary Sue marine lore to inform their rule writing at this point.

That's so obviously flawed that not even a company as wrong as GW could be doing things that badly. Right? RIGHT?

And yes, I know. My response is largely directed at that discussion.

I think that's exactly what GW is doing at this point. They are buying into their own press.

Then we're back to what I said at the beginning: favoritism. GW is actively favoring one of the factions in their own tabletop game. thisisfine.jpg

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
I guess? My concern is that GW is both writing it AND reading it, and is reading their own Mary Sue marine lore to inform their rule writing at this point.

That's so obviously flawed that not even a company as wrong as GW could be doing things that badly. Right? RIGHT?

And yes, I know. My response is largely directed at that discussion.

I think that's exactly what GW is doing at this point. They are buying into their own press.

Then we're back to what I said at the beginning: favoritism. GW is actively favoring one of the factions in their own tabletop game. thisisfine.jpg

Oh yeah. It's completely favoritism. I didn't know that was in dispute, actually. It's a total wankfest now. It only wasn't before because they'd write Mary Sue marine lore, and then the marines would be taken out like target dummies on the tabletop. So rather than toning down the lore a bit and boosting the tabletop a bit, they just went full Mary Sue on the tabletop.

SecondTime wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
I guess? My concern is that GW is both writing it AND reading it, and is reading their own Mary Sue marine lore to inform their rule writing at this point.

That's so obviously flawed that not even a company as wrong as GW could be doing things that badly. Right? RIGHT?

And yes, I know. My response is largely directed at that discussion.

I think that's exactly what GW is doing at this point. They are buying into their own press.

Then we're back to what I said at the beginning: favoritism. GW is actively favoring one of the factions in their own tabletop game. thisisfine.jpg

Oh yeah. It's completely favoritism. I didn't know that was in dispute, actually. It's a total wankfest now. It only wasn't before because they'd write Mary Sue marine lore, and then the marines would be taken out like target dummies on the tabletop. So rather than toning down the lore a bit and boosting the tabletop a bit, they just went full Mary Sue on the tabletop.

My original post said as much:

Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
My other concern is a lot of the imbalanced marine rules are heavily influenced by all the marine-centric lore.

That's not a problem, but only if other armies are built along their lore as well (ref: stories where they beat marines). The real problem is they're taking the marine-lore at face value, and ignoring other lore...
... or in other words, favoritism.

Just discussion whether or not that is built in; I don't believe inherently that "quantity of lore" means, by itself, power escalation.

I guess I should have pointed out that its easier to ignore the other lore if there's far less of it AND it's not as lopsided as the marine lore.

Of course quantity doesn't mean that, because it wasn't like that for about two decades. But I think it's a contributory factor right now. For all I know, the current devs read one marine book and then decided to go nuts, though.

SecondTime wrote:
I guess I should have pointed out that its easier to ignore the other lore if there's far less of it AND it's not as lopsided as the marine lore.

That's just more favoritism if GW is doing it. Outright ignoring their own published lore should be a no-no.

Players can ignore it (and be wrong) at their own peril, but the company less so.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
I guess I should have pointed out that its easier to ignore the other lore if there's far less of it AND it's not as lopsided as the marine lore.

That's just more favoritism if GW is doing it. Outright ignoring their own published lore should be a no-no.

Players can ignore it (and be wrong) at their own peril, but the company less so.

Who's going to stop them? Just as 5th ed didn't seem right when GW made AP2 accessible enmasse and marines were dying in droves, the current gap between marines and necrons/eldar/orks doesn't seem right either. Honestly, I don't even know what kind of lore they were basing 5th ed marines off of. Maybe they wrote the marine book, forgot about it, and then decided other factions needed mass AP2? I don't get it.

SecondTime wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
I guess I should have pointed out that its easier to ignore the other lore if there's far less of it AND it's not as lopsided as the marine lore.

That's just more favoritism if GW is doing it. Outright ignoring their own published lore should be a no-no.

Players can ignore it (and be wrong) at their own peril, but the company less so.

Who's going to stop them? Just as 5th ed didn't seem right when GW made AP2 accessible enmasse and marines were dying in droves, the current gap between marines and necrons/eldar/orks doesn't seem right either. Honestly, I don't even know what kind of lore they were basing 5th ed marines off of. Maybe they wrote the marine book, forgot about it, and then decided other factions needed mass AP2? I don't get it.

So now we're getting into deliberate power vs indeliberate power.

There are 2 problems:
1) What we are seeing now is deliberate imbalance. GW just says "For the time being, Marines should be ridiculously powerful. Make it so."
2) What we saw then. GW doesn't understand their own game, so they accidentally give everyone mass AP2. This is contributed by their out-of-touch-ness with the player base.

GW: "Alright. We gave IG a Grenade Launcher, Plasma Gun, Meltagun, and Flamer options. GLs and Flamers are 5, Meltas are 10, Plasmas 15. No doubt they will need a good spread of options."
Player: "Buuuuut GLs are useless."
GW: "Nonsense, you can shoot and charge with them because they're Assault, and they have a bit of flexibility and a fairly long range compared to Meltas."

Player: "Flamers are short ranged and don't penetrate the armor of most opponents so ignoring cover is useless."
GW: "Nonsense, the majority of people don't play Marines, surely, so AP 5 is fine. Plus, it hits multiple models, eh, eh?"

Player: "Meltaguns are too short-ranged and only get the bonus at an even shorter range, while my mobility options are limited and fragile."
GW: "They're your best anti-tank, so you will need them to kill tanks!"

Player: "Plasma has the same range as a GL (and I don't want to charge things with Guardsmen), penetrates the armor of my common foes and doesn't rely on them making an error by bunching up, and kills tanks at 12" about as well as a meltagun and can engage them from further away."
GW: ........

"What we are seeing now is deliberate imbalance"

We assume its deliberate. Could it possibly be indeliberate? Are they that stupid? They were SHOCKED by that Tyranid flyrant list a few years back. You know, the one everyone else was completely aware of?

SecondTime wrote:
"What we are seeing now is deliberate imbalance"

We assume its deliberate. Could it possibly be indeliberate? Are they that stupid? They were SHOCKED by that Tyranid flyrant list a few years back. You know, the one everyone else was completely aware of?

It could be not deliberate, but the new breed of post-Kirby developers are all fairly youthful and Warhammer Community is far more engaged than it was in 5th. They'd have to be pretttttttttty damn silly not to, idk, read the internet or whatever.

Back in the day? THAT GW didn't get it. This GW, made up of younger folks who probably read the internet (even if they don't go to Dakka Dakka) and are capable of basic maths? I would put my money down on "they know pretty well what they're doing and just choose to muck it up anyways, whether by personal choice as designers or because of pressure from on-high/marketing."

My money is on deliberate as well. But i just dont get it really.

The only primaris in my theoretical list are eradicators. If i were to play such a list, id be buying almost nothing new. The extra wound was the selling point for primaris.

Dudeface wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
" not the red thirst as per the current codex,"

I don't think we need to discuss this any further.

I agree, clearly the fluff in your mind is different to their most recently published book. Unless you're telling me GW wrote their own fluff wrong somehow of course.

Well, considering GW retconned Tau fluff when they introduced the Riptide to make it seem like it was deployed to combat heavy armour such as tanks and titans when the Hammerhead was superior at this task and was not an experimental new weapon and so available in superior numbers and within existing logistics channels, I'm going to go with the latter option.

The hammerhead was too sensible i guess.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:
"Does it lead to an accurate representation of the lore?"

Well, which lore are we talking? Marines from the perspective of Marines in Marine-centric novels? Novels where they're the antagonists and get zapped by lasguns or pulse rifles? Or novels where they show up as a third-party?

Once upon a time I got the sense that what we saw for in-game stats was ground truth for the setting, and lore was always skewed to favor the protagonist. I'd go so far as to say that this is how GW intended it; given how they published a Movie Marines list which gave you '''lore-accurate''' Marines, but was overtly written with the understanding that it's action movie exaggeration (the opening quote is Eddie Murphy saying, paraphrased, 'I'm not a tough guy, but if we fight in a movie I'm starring in, I'll kick your ass'), not a 'true' representation of the setting. In stories told from non-Marine perspectives- one of my go-to examples being Fall of Malvolion, where an entire company of Marines is wiped out within 40 minutes by a Tyranid swarm- they're not nearly as powerful as they are in the Marine-protagonist action-movie-style stories.

So looking back to when I was active in 3rd-5th, a Marine was as tough as an Ork, as skilled and well-protected as the heaviest Aspect Warriors, and stronger than either. They were outclassed on a one-on-one basis with some of the more potent horrors of the galaxy (Cult CSM, Genestealers, Nobz), but where those units were the elites in their respective armies, Marines were just grunts in theirs- and Marine elites like Terminators could take them on.

Over time, this seems to have changed. I'm not sure when exactly it happened; I think it may have been the Horus Heresy novels. The power level ascribed to Marines in Marine-focused works gradually became accepted as the baseline, with new ideas like 'transhuman dread' suddenly making Marines not just those weirdly augmented mon'keigh or more durable gue'ron'sha, but now lords of the galaxy that all the other races fear and respect. In other words, the Marine-centrism of the novels has been expanded to become Marine-centrism in the entire setting, and then people complained that their T4/W1/Sv3+ Marines didn't live up to how good they 'really are'.

To me this reads like watching Die Hard, and then taking to the Internet to complain about how the latest 28mm modern skirmish system doesn't accurately reflect the training and expertise of NYPD cops, and if a single cop can't take on an entire trained terrorist cell on the tabletop and win then it's not lore-accurate. The understood skew of our exceptionally capable and lucky lone underdog protagonist has become ground truth, and that feels utterly bizarre.

So, hot take: I don't think lore should matter all that much here, partly because it changes so much, and partly because it's easier to make the lore fit the tabletop than to make the tabletop fit the lore.

Now with that burden removed, what's best for the game? And on that point, I think W2 Marines were and are a mistake, be they Intercessors or Tacticals. It has a couple of problematic implications for the design space. Some off the top of my head:
-With Marines being the most common army, units are evaluated against that baseline. Instead of a diverse spread of 'better than Marine', 'equal to Marine', and 'worse than Marine' units which put basic Tacticals right in the middle, there's now a handful better, a handful equal, and a lot that are worse. For example, Genestealers and Hormagaunts are now both just different flavors of fast horde melee troops- that's not right.
-Marines as elite-of-the-elite causes them to start encroaching on the design space of other factions, especially when their lack of design limitations ensures they have units for every conceivable role. You stop being able to say 'my army is better than Marines at [x]' and have to settle for 'my army is more efficient than Marines at [x]'; or worse, Marines get to do something that fits your army's theme but you can't do.
-It weakens the consistency of design, since 'common infantry are W1, T reflects how hard they are to kill' was a core design principle for the game up until 8th. Having humanoid infantry almost universally at W1 allows for clear conceptual niches between D1 and D2 weapons, with the latter being explicitly anti-vehicle/monster/Big Thing. Now that distinction is gone- why ever take an autocannon when a heavy bolter, newly D2 to deal with Marines, is just better?

More fundamentally, as a general rule for game design, the greater the delta between the 'baseline' stat profile and that of the weakest or strongest units, the harder they are to balance. With Marines as the de facto baseline, this means every other army becomes harder to balance against them effectively. We're already seeing some of the effects of this:
-To kill Marines now you need to load up on W2 weapons, which are significantly worse at dealing with those W1 non-Marine armies. But those W2 guns kill Marines very effectively, and now they're more efficient at it than they were.
-As well, Marines being the most common army in the game means that the meta inevitably tailors against them. Part of why we're seeing success with green tide lists is because everyone's kitted up to fight a W2/Sv3+ meta, so a horde of t-shirts is a hard-counter. So if you tailor against Marines you kill them even better than before, but get shafted harder by W1 horde lists, and building a balanced list that doesn't just suck against both is harder.

It's basically the same issue that resulted from Knights being commonly fielded- more minor because obviously a Knight is a lot farther from the baseline than a Marine, but then magnified by the fact that a large majority of armies hitting the tables are exclusively some flavor of Marine.

Custodes are an example of how this concept can work in practice, but there are two keys to Custodes working- firstly, that they have inbuilt limitations (namely a lack of shooting and a very small number of units) that weaken their inherent skew advantage, and second, that they're relatively unpopular, rather than representing a majority of armies hitting the tabletop. It's not specifically a Marine issue, it's just that having the most common army archetype be significantly different in core design from all the armies causes problems.

tl;dr Irrespective of fluff, Marines being W2 means the most common army no longer has average stats, and this has a warping effect on the rest of the game.

That's my $0.02.

SecondTime wrote:
The hammerhead was too sensible i guess.

The whole Tau schtick of combined arms was too sensible. It would have got in the way of selling ever bigger robot kits for ever bigger profit margins.

It takes effort to design an army around a balanced mixture of mechanised infantry, auxiliaries, elite battlesuits, armoured vehicles and air support. Much easier to make a big overpowered robot as the centrepiece.

I believe that diversifying the wound profiles of the game was and is still a necessity after bringing back the damage stat, and bringing back the damage stat was a good thing.

Yeah, they gave a couple wounds to some characters and gave more wounds to vehicles, but they leaved all infantry with exactly the same wounds for no reason whatsoever.

I'll say again, I'm an advocate to modify the statlines of probably most infantry units in the game. The game tryes to represent too much stuff from gretchin to imperial knights. It needs to use ALL the values. Statlines that have been keep the same when the bigger thing in the game was a Dreadnought or a Carnifex has just made that points keep getting lower and lower to allow for a place to the small stuff because bigger stuff is being added. And many people will arguee thats a problem on itself, but this is a product. GW needs to keep expanding it, so theres a point where old design paradigms no longer work. The problem with the prevalence in the competitie meta of marines and the need to taylor agaisnt them, or Imperial Knights of old, is not because their stats but because the missions werent designed with imperial knights in mind, and marines are just too good for their points, if you can't win without tailoring agaisnt them. And that was also true when conscript spam was OP on the index era: you tailored agaisnt hordes or you losed before starting the game.

I'll say, if they make all marines 2wounds and let most other infantry in the game the same it will become a grave mistake. But I don't believe modifying most statlines in the game is a bad thing. Diversify the number of stat profiles, make taking optimized weapon profiles harder, make room for everything that has been added. And give the job to people with actual game design careers please.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
The hammerhead was too sensible i guess.

The whole Tau schtick of combined arms was too sensible. It would have got in the way of selling ever bigger robot kits for ever bigger profit margins.

It takes effort to design an army around a balanced mixture of mechanised infantry, auxiliaries, elite battlesuits, armoured vehicles and air support. Much easier to make a big overpowered robot as the centrepiece.

Tau players that still play them mechanized and with a ton of tanks represent!

Yeah, bringing back the damage stat had a lot of unforeseen design implications.

As an ogre/minotaur player in fantasy/aos and custodes in 40k I'll admit that I love my infantry with a good bunch of wounds. And yeah, those armies work because they are the exceptions not the baseline. But whats the problem with the baseline of the game being heavy infantry with 2 wounds and squishy one with 1 (Ignoring all the variances , inmortals are 1w but in no way squishy), barring GW bad rules and codex release cicle?

The #1 problem is the damage skew. Just like Martel's AP2 spam in 5th edition example, if the baseline is 2 wounds (or a 3+ save in 5th) then people will only take D2 weapons.

The only way to not make that the most efficient option is to have hordes be so hordey that you NEED to spam cheaper D1 weapons to beat them. This has 2 implications:
1) You either brought enough D2 weapons for Marines, or enough D1 cheapness for Hordes, or you lose to one or the other. Because what 40k needed was skew lists employing basic infantry.
2) Horde armies become so freaking massive (hundreds and hundreds of models) that they become a chore to play, and never get played anyways, making the D2 weapons the default.

When the D2 weapons become the default (either in case 1, where the baseline is 2 wounds, or Case 2 Premise 2), W2 Marines become bad again. Shall we make them W3? Surely that will solve the problem!

 Galas wrote:
As an ogre/minotaur player in fantasy/aos and custodes in 40k I'll admit that I love my infantry with a good bunch of wounds. And yeah, those armies work because they are the exceptions not the baseline. But whats the problem with the baseline of the game being heavy infantry with 2 wounds and squishy one with 1 (Ignoring all the variances , inmortals are 1w but in no way squishy), barring GW bad rules and codex release cicle?

Marines aren't the baseline though. Guard Infantry are since they're the regular folk. What you're confusing there is that the baseline = most popular.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Galas wrote:
As an ogre/minotaur player in fantasy/aos and custodes in 40k I'll admit that I love my infantry with a good bunch of wounds. And yeah, those armies work because they are the exceptions not the baseline. But whats the problem with the baseline of the game being heavy infantry with 2 wounds and squishy one with 1 (Ignoring all the variances , inmortals are 1w but in no way squishy), barring GW bad rules and codex release cicle?

Marines aren't the baseline though. Guard Infantry are since they're the regular folk. What you're confusing there is that the baseline = most popular.

They kind of are, though. Most popular morphs into the baseline because of list building realities.

The damage skew is avoided by point costs and having a more diverse range of statlines. Lucky for GW designers, models have wounds, toughtness and save to make enough varied profiles exactly to avoid the problem of one weapon being the best.
Sadly they have failed at that for 30 years so I doubt they will get it right this time.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Galas wrote:
As an ogre/minotaur player in fantasy/aos and custodes in 40k I'll admit that I love my infantry with a good bunch of wounds. And yeah, those armies work because they are the exceptions not the baseline. But whats the problem with the baseline of the game being heavy infantry with 2 wounds and squishy one with 1 (Ignoring all the variances , inmortals are 1w but in no way squishy), barring GW bad rules and codex release cicle?

Marines aren't the baseline though. Guard Infantry are since they're the regular folk. What you're confusing there is that the baseline = most popular.

I define baseline based on what I consider my most common threat that I have to skew to counter would be.

If, in my meta, that's Knights? Knights are the baseline. But for most metas (and most tournaments) that "profile against which capability will be measured most commonly" is MEQ.