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GW released a new balance patch today (14 March) that awards bonus VPs for the destruction of certain units, giving even more bonus VPs if that is done by certain armies.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/03/14/will-you-become-predator-or-prey-in-the-latest-warhammer-age-of-sigmar-battlescroll-update/

For example, Fulminators, Stormdrake Guard and Vanguard Raptors with Longstrike will each give a bonus 1 VP to their opponent for destroying them. A Nighthaunt army would receive a further bonus VP for example.

Looks quite punishing in certain circumstances.

- Just realized this had been captured in the AOS News and Rumours...oops

Basically win more mechanic.

Utter crap.

Make cool new models, make cool new models decent+, hype cool new models.... And then F the players for using them.

Not really. You win as before.. If you lose you lose by bigger vp margin...but then again 1 vp loss or 10 vp loss is same. You can just always consider it the 1vp loss if you care about that.

tneva82 wrote:
Basically win more mechanic.

Not really, the point was to help bad armies deal with problem units, those bad armies cant kill these units, that is the problem. Nothing changes SoB vs Gitz other than Gitz might get 1 point more than before now losing by 19pts instead of 20pts. I don't see how it is a Win more at all, especially when these units themselves can not get Priority Target points.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
Basically win more mechanic.

Not really, the point was to help bad armies deal with problem units, those bad armies cant kill these units, that is the problem. Nothing changes SoB vs Gitz other than Gitz might get 1 point more than before now losing by 19pts instead of 20pts. I don't see how it is a Win more at all, especially when these units themselves can not get Priority Target points.

Eeh. You kill gargant per turn, you win. You don't, you lose. So in future when you kill gargants and win the game you do it by bigger win more.

Aka win more.

Local legion of first prince player is happy about this "nerf". He loses units that gives points he's generally losing anyway. So either he wins as before or opponent wins by bigger margin.

Win more.

Everything should be viable.

Not just part of the game.

Everything.

So yeah if you have some busted units running amuk I'm 100% behind giving players a bonus for having to endure sitting at that table with a bent army pissing all over a for fun army by giving the for fun army some kind of handicap.

And having seen this exact mechanic be used in the past, I can also say it doesn't really add up to much because the bent armies are still going to be winning. An extra vp for dropping a busted unit is just a feel-good but doesn't ultimately really change the outcome of the game.

Its the exact same type of thinking behind handicaps in blood bowl where the team that doesn't have as much gets to draw extra cards or get some extra things.

If you're still clubbing baby seals down at the store, this isn't going to change the outcome of your games and if you're playing adepticon list vs adepticon list you are both likely fielding this type of unit anyway so you both get the chance to get extra points.

And really to turn the table back on anyone complaining that their op units now give up extra points, I remind you of what I am often told when I complain I don't want to buy new armies every 6 months to keep up: "git gud".

Not actually same because you get those handicaps before game. Here you need to kill the target which is a) generally the problem in the first place b) by the time you get it can be way too late.

You are basically saying "it doesn't matter if gloomspite gets 3000 pts to build army".

Handicap underdog gets right from get go is vastly different to handicap you get post-fact.

If this was extra VP's you gain RIGHT AWAY it wouldn't be "oh your win became bigger margin but your win rate still stays basically same" but would actually change win rate. Of course with scenarios that result in anything from 22-21(like my bonesplitters vs be'lakor host) to 51-9(gloomspite vs mega gargants) with different scenarios giving different amount of vp's per side and one not even using vp's to begin with would be still bad system.

This is just GW admitting that they can't balance unit warscrolls.

It might as well say 'sorry guys, we suck! Our bad!'

Experimented with these last night using my Stormcast vs Ossiarchs. Actually added some interesting dynamics in how i was using my dragons. I like how it worked personally.

I think the Priority Target is pretty functional, if hamfisted. It'll heavily disincentivize certain models at least. The Prime Hunters thing is pretty insulting though and won't really do anything to make those factions more viable.

I think there is a lot of inexperience and misunderstanding in the opinions surrounding this.

To start, games are not as binary as some are presenting it. It is not as simple as 'these models live, the controlling player wins, they die, the controlling player loses'. Especially at tournaments, which this is geared towards, those models DO get killed quite frequently. But many times it isn't enough, or even the extra effort to finish them off is not made in favor of a secondary goal, because by that point in the game they have already done what they needed to do. An example was raised above where someone mentioned needing to kill a mega a turn to win, if you can't you lose. With this, failing to kill one of them may not be damming thanks to the extra points gained from killing the others.

Any buff to any faction will inherently make them 'win harder' when they already were; that statement means nothing. The criticism being made by those statements is that this will not make a difference in close games, yet many people are avoiding phrasing it that way.


Secondly, this is a band aid. This is in ADDITION to other balance mechanisms, not replacing them. We are still getting points updates, we are still getting warscroll updates. Just not four times a year, and personally I'm actually happy about that. Now this method could still prove to be ineffective for a variety of reasons, and there is obviously ample room for criticism of how GW handles balance, but criticizing this for not being something it was never presented as or intended to be isn't productive. It muddies the waters and obstructs movement towards a better game.

Its a nest lever they can use.

But I'm a bit worried about the trend in AoS 3e of increasing the mental load required to play the game.

While this system in itself isn't very complex, it's another thing to add to the pile and I'm not too keen on that.

One of the things that attracted me to Sigmar over 40k were the cleaner rules, with less documents to reference. And I'm a bit worried at the continued erosion of that.

A valid concern IMO. 40k is a case of individually simple rules being piled on like their quantity doesn't matter.

While this method to affect balance has proven somewhat divisive, there has been a seemingly (to my eye) uniform approval of the 17 warscrolls on the priority target list. I personally haven’t seen much “whataboutism” when folks talk about this new rule addendum. Example: “Well, you got Fulminators on the list, but what about “X” unit as well?” , I think thats a great sign.

Anyone else make a similar observation or is it just me? Does anyone think they missed a warscroll or two on the Priority Target list?

I also like how they subtly distinguished how mercenary Mega-Gargant were excluded, as that demonstrates an understanding that an army that includes a Mercenary Mega isn’t getting the full product that a SoB army would get, which is where the issues arise. The easy/lazy thing to do would’ve been to not make that distinction.

With that said, I’d argue that BoC and BoK may need to be on the Prime Hunter list. Though BoC stock has risen since their White Dwarf update, and BoK get theirs soon. Haven’t looked too much into how BoC are doing since the WD update, but the FB page was excited for it.

All in all, this is a gentle touch. Certainly beats another round of points changes or having to revamp Warscrolls.

 nels1031 wrote:
While this method to affect balance has proven somewhat divisive, there has been a seemingly (to my eye) uniform approval of the 17 warscrolls on the priority target list. I personally haven’t seen much “whataboutism” when folks talk about this new rule addendum. Example: “Well, you got Fulminators on the list, but what about “X” unit as well?” , I think thats a great sign.

Anyone else make a similar observation or is it just me? Does anyone think they missed a warscroll or two on the Priority Target list?

I also like how they subtly distinguished how mercenary Mega-Gargant were excluded, as that demonstrates an understanding that an army that includes a Mercenary Mega isn’t getting the full product that a SoB army would get, which is where the issues arise. The easy/lazy thing to do would’ve been to not make that distinction.

With that said, I’d argue that BoC and BoK may need to be on the Prime Hunter list. Though BoC stock has risen since their White Dwarf update, and BoK get theirs soon. Haven’t looked too much into how BoC are doing since the WD update, but the FB page was excited for it.

All in all, this is a gentle touch. Certainly beats another round of points changes or having to revamp Warscrolls.

BoC is now Mid up to High Mid tier now for sure, BoK still struggling with their WD from what I read over, but time will tell.

 nels1031 wrote:
While this method to affect balance has proven somewhat divisive, there has been a seemingly (to my eye) uniform approval of the 17 warscrolls on the priority target list. I personally haven’t seen much “whataboutism” when folks talk about this new rule addendum. Example: “Well, you got Fulminators on the list, but what about “X” unit as well?” , I think thats a great sign.

Anyone else make a similar observation or is it just me? Does anyone think they missed a warscroll or two on the Priority Target list?

I also like how they subtly distinguished how mercenary Mega-Gargant were excluded, as that demonstrates an understanding that an army that includes a Mercenary Mega isn’t getting the full product that a SoB army would get, which is where the issues arise. The easy/lazy thing to do would’ve been to not make that distinction.

With that said, I’d argue that BoC and BoK may need to be on the Prime Hunter list. Though BoC stock has risen since their White Dwarf update, and BoK get theirs soon. Haven’t looked too much into how BoC are doing since the WD update, but the FB page was excited for it.

All in all, this is a gentle touch. Certainly beats another round of points changes or having to revamp Warscrolls.

Good observation, and I agree. I can respect the exclusion of BoC and BoK, the latter because GW does not know the impact of the upcoming update and the former because they got a really potent buff from theirs. Far more than other armies (which is good, they needed it).

I just played a three round tourney with Stormcast Eternals to include three of the target units (sorry). It only came up once, but since it was a very lop-sided game it really didn’t matter.

Early days, but I think they should fix the troublesome interactions such as shooting/fighting in the Hero phase instead of this VP method. Yes - a single local tourney is not much to go on, but that is my finding thus far! At least it shows they are aware of problem areas and are trying different ways to solve it.

Single tournament that matches with basic logic.

This ain't going to shift win rates noticably. You will have bigger effect with terrain placement and that doesn't have huge effect in aos.

So goofy.

I went up vs Lumineth (which I don't think got any Primary Target units) with my Taker Tribe (a Gatebreaker and 3 Kraken Eaters).

Super close game and I lost by 2 points....after tallying all my 4 dead megagargants! Yes, I would have won even if they'd have done just 1 extra VP for my megas, but 2 was too much, and I'll say completely unjustified.

Not complaining about losing, complaining about a half-fisted attempt at balance falling completely flat of balancing. So surprising that Teclis and 30 Sentinels manage to kill a megagargant per turn, and they get rewarded even more for it!

This so-called balancing act will only force those with Target units to reinforce them to greater sizes to make them harder to kill if they are able (Megagargants of course cannot do that). So battleline Fulminators and Drakes go to 4 or 6 for sure. Also the Hunters are armies that struggle to kill this Targets anyways, so yay, they get 1 extra point here and there and meanwhile these OP units still go rampaging unhindered. Hopefully the GHB will reign in some of their use by raised points.

I think the problem is more that Teclis should be a priority target and Sentinels are a problem in general. There would inevitably be some units just not quite OP enough to make the cut.

Also sounds like you could have won by swapping a mega for some mancrushers, or by using warstompers. Using only the best options doesn't make for the most sympathetic narrative.