ZergSmasher wrote:
BorderCountess wrote:
Lathe Biosas wrote:Overall, do you consider these detachments to be more flavor, or more competitive... or a even mix of both?
I think most of these are about adding fun and flavor, and mostly they succeeded (see: Thousand Sons as a counter-point). Making a Librarian-focused detachment for Marines, adding new ways to ally, the Bile-themed
CSM detachment... and especially what they did with Daemons. They added more FUN to the game, which I think it needed. I'm okay with releasing a month's worth of content that isn't focused on the hyper-competitive meta, for once.
They should do this more often.
Hear, hear. And I'm agreeing with this as someone who plays in tournaments fairly regularly. Sometimes it's fun to put the less competitive stuff on the table and just roll some dice while making pew pew noises.
Yeah. Fun/fluffy-but-suboptimal is what I was hoping for from these. I think most of them probably hit that mark. My disappointment is reserved for the places where they failed to produce something flavorful or at least fun. So like, the craftworld one let me down (for now) because it doesn't really provide me with a new playstyle. It just provides me with a worse version of the index playstyle. The only tricks it really opened up were deepstriking wave serpents and disembarking (but not charging) after vehicles move. And neither of those tricks really do much to change up playstyles because we have a very limited number of units that actually want/need to disembark but not charge. And one of those units is fire dragons who would rather be in a falcon for the rerolls meaning they don't benefit from the deepstriking serpent trick.
Similarly, the Thousand Sons one just doesn't really tell me a story or open up a dramatically different playstyle. It's kind of just a generic kill-more detachment with some slight differences from the index detachment. If Thousand Sons had gotten the librarian detachment instead, I'd be thrilled.
Detachments like the tyranid warrior one have some cool ideas (I like how it potentially helps warrior spam survive long enough to be viable and how it emphasizes the synergy between them and gants), but those ideas largely boil down to kill-more benefits. Which means it's undermined somewhat by other detachments that also provide lethality buffs. If they'd leaned a little bit more into the aspects that make the detachment unique, I think they'd have landed in an even better place. But as-is, the 'nid one is still nice to have for those who happen to have a pile of warrior laying around.