State of meta

[Thor]

Hello  internet! Today we are going  to talk a little  about  the state  of the metagame in the aos  competetive  scene. So since  the release  of generals  handbook. The tournament enviroment for aos  have gotten more and more attention and i myself  am  craving  some of that  action.  But how is it playing  out so far ? Please  feel free to share  Your experiences and opnions. Do you encounter  the same 4 lists each  time  ? What do you consider to be the strongest  "army" out there ? Are different  battle plans stupid  and should you only stick to one? 

 

-Thor 

[daedalus81]

I'm reassessing after a few games with the new khorne book.  It seems poised to swing very soon with that and ghb2 on the way.

[Bradifer]

I think you really only play against it often if the players in your local scene are into that. This hobby goes in a lot of different directions so many of us don't really encounter the top tier of filth. We might see something like it, but I doubt I'll play against 18 Skyfires any time soon.

The top tiers do eventually trickle down though, everyone sorta knows about them even if they don't play it.

On the meta game...I haven't played since the beginning but this is my take:

I think it has evolved a lot, starting out with highly mobile and precision alpha strike lists being the best.

Mixed chaos has Sayl the Faithless launching a unit of Stormfiends 18 + 8" inches at you for 12D3 mortal wounds, everything but chaff horde is dead. Mirror that with 30 Bloodletters. Screens of defensive Plague Bearers hold objective and force map control. This list has mostly mortal wounds, some normal damage, ranged, melee, heroes for 3-Places. Movement is key to making this army work.

You've also got fast Khorne Bloodbound lists that stack multiple layers of offensive synergy + immune to battleshock, and you've got a bunch of glass cannon blobs. Somewhat fast movement and banner stacking makes this work. (KBB usually backe dup by mortal wounds via Warp Lightning Cannon).

Stormcast - Warrior Brotherhood showed up, and those were some goofy rules. You could basically just deepstrike everything wherever you wanted without fail. Buttloads of attacks and mortal wounds mixed in made Retributor alpha lists powerful. Coupled with lots of board-wide shooting. Movement enabled list.

Mixed Order has had a few top tier slots utilizing Celestial Hurricanum's +1 to hitting & +1 to magic aura and Mortal wound spam in addition to a bunch of Kurnoth Hunters to become Age of Sigmar Tau gunline. Underpriced Hunters and lack of LOS rules/terrain makes these lists hard to interact with.

Destruction saw Ironjawz - Brute spam was a decent list. It was really fast and hit really hard. It just doesn't have Mortal Wounds or Rend-2/-3. Which doesn't give it the tools to deal with everything, including...

Sylvaneth is incredibly popular. Unkillable Treelord Ancient + Very Tanky Spirit of Durthu, some objective grabbing teleporting battleline and kurnoth hunter spam to fill out. This army is very mobile, very very defensive, and decently offensive. You basically need to outplay your opponent and have the flexibility in your list to deal Mortal Wounds and/or rend-2/-3. Otherwise their undercosted Kurnoth almost always reroll saves, the Treelord ignores rend-1 and sits on a 2+ Save rerolling 1's. That said, armies with the right counter can handle Sylvaneth's low model count.

Mixed destruction evolved into a monster. 2-3 Thundertusks that are mortal wound cannons and also offer healing every turn. Stonehorn is incredibly fast, quite tanky, and no matter where he falls on the damage table, he still rips units apart with rend (-)(-1)(-2) and mortal wounds. Add in Kunnin' Rukk and arrow boys for large amounts of non-elite damage combined with mortal wound elite damage. You have ranged, melee, speed, model count for objectives, heroes for three places of power. Battleline units with Fanatics to interrupt your opponent's charges, buying you significant amounts of time. Highly flexible list with tools to deal with anything, and difficult to counter without playing very top-tier lists.

Death has had a few spurts of power. Mourngul & Vampire Lord on Zombie Dragon are both fast, healing, flying, hard hitting combat units. Coupled with Abyssal Terror and you have Death's version of Sayl the Faithless. Big blobs of skeletons or zombies hit decently hard and can hold objectives or chaff it up. Mixed Death can be competitive if the rest of the field isn't top tier 1 stuff. Lack of new rules and efficient/undercosted units. However If competitive Death lists play non-optimized lists, they tend to stomp them as they self-heal and regenerate.

Tomb Kings represented the best army for a while, at least until the nerfs come in. Settra enables high mobility, and powerful offense on the undercosted NecroKnights combined with the Sphinx. NK are generally launching across the table, doing mortal wounds on 4's, hitting and wounding on 2's, and regenerating up to 3 models (15 wounds) per turn. Two highly flexible, highly offensive, fast, defensive units of NK's controlled the board while Settra and Sphinx could move about and punch other things. Plus you've got the catapults in the background attempting to snipe heroes and soften hordes. A few other heroes and battleline units and you've got a list with the tools to do everything. This list did not play itself and required a lot proper use from the general, it offer many choices from movement, buffing, shooting, charging, screening, casting spells, positioning via regeneration, etc... Much opportunity to outplay the opponent.

Tzeentch book came out. Not a lot of competitive matches since. However Mortal Wound spam from spells and tons of chaff via horrors seems to be the strategy. Some lists prefer Skyfire heavy versions for very fast, highly ranged shooting units with a split of mortal wound and normal damage. Destiny Dice reduce randomness and ensure tactics are dictated in a way they can choose. Tzeentch has its tricks, such as 1-battleshocking a unit of horrors to regenerate more, or Folding Reality on the Skyfires to resummon D6 of them (4 wounds ea). Lots of tools in this army to deal with the field i.e. mortal wounds, chaff, shooting, horde clearing via gaunt summoner, Tzangors in melee. Would expect more skyfire spam lists, and possibly more balanced lists if your local group isn't tier-1 oriented.

New Stormcast looks strong in many ways, but no longer OP. Normalized Deep-Striking rules reduces 100% reliability. Lots of flexibility in that army between melee/shooting, slow/fast, average/highly defensive, dropping in/normal movement and mortal wound options.

Haven't played against new KBB. But it should offer more options to the Push-my-melee-troops-at-you kind of BB armies. Gunline armies may have trouble dealing with their speed as discussed on the Age of Sigmar Daily podcast. Lots of decision making for both sides of the table in regards with what units to kill/weaken or avoid/killing.

Well that was a lot. Hope that gives you a rough breakdown of my understanding of the meta (roughly in that order).

EDIT: On battleplan-scenarios. Personally I don't like the ones where Major victories are nearly impossible. Take & Hold is really boring, tactically, usually people just sit there and push weak units up waiting for the other player to interact. Blood & Glory is fun, but usually hard to major on. Escalation is weird in general. It's very unique but feels somewhat like a gimmick.

Personally I love Border War, Gift of the Heavens. Three Places of Power is neat to have, but makes some armies significantly better than others (i.e. Unkillable Sylvaneth heroes, Tanky Nurgle heroes, Skryre lists deleting heroes instantly, etc.) but I like that it pushes your army to have more heroes in it. I generally prefer these where getting the major is very realistic and requires tactics every turn to determine point values.

[Mune]

Well excapt for the "old" SC shock lists it feels like a boring shoot out game atm.

 

I'm not even sure if I have seen a non shooty list winning a big tournament.

[Mune]

Well, units being able to fire like 30"+, LoS to almost everywhere are by far more ridiculous.

The next GH should bring back LoS blocking terrain rules, this should shift shooting/melee into a lil bit more even position.

 

Right now it feels like: to bad you cant hide your heros, they all will die turn 1.

 

[Bradifer]

I feel like all the anti-shooting sentiment has been pretty well noted previously.

Did anyone want to specifically talk about the current meta, or where they think it's going, or what some counters might be that nobody has thought of?

[tolstedt]

 

44 minutes ago, Bradifer said:

I feel like all the anti-shooting sentiment has been pretty well noted previously.

Did anyone want to specifically talk about the current meta, or where they think it's going, or what some counters might be that nobody has thought of?

The Slann gives save re-rolls in the shooting phase.  Could be something there if Seraphon points get reduced in GHB2.  Seraphon suffer from expensive heroes and battalions at the moment.  (A spell lore would be nice but unlikely)

[Gauche]

I think the meta will stay shooting heavy, I've seen nothing in the new Khorne book that makes them do much against the top tier shooting armies. Kharadron may shake things up but I'd have to see the Warscrolls, depends entirely on the transport rules and what they can actually deliver, we're still in the dark about most of that.

Non-shooting armies have won some large events, I believe the UK Heat 1 was won by the standard BCR list and the UK Masters was Tomb Kings, this was before DoT though. I'm shocked no one has won a major event with Kunnin' Rukk, I believe it to be the most well-rounded of the Tier 0 shooting armies but it does have some counters. AoS is still very fledgling as an actual competitive game even at big events, there's probably a myriad of reasons you don't see more people taking the hardest possible lists and I don't pretend to know them all.

Imho the meta is very unlikely to change until the next GHB even if Kharadron are great against guns. There is under-used anti-shooting tech available to most armies, which gets discussed pretty often, but most of it just doesn't matter. I play one of the filthy shooting lists and actively ask people to take counter lists but the tech just isn't punishing enough and usually makes for very lopsided armies which would never make it through an event.

AoS is in a weird spot right now where GW is still recovering from the initial demand to have the game lean more towards Matched Play. You can see that in their attitude towards new armies and remaking old armies, there's a philosophy change that came about. I'm optimistic about the future of the game.

[Mohojoe]

I think a lot of it will depend on ghb2 introducing rule changes as to where we go from here as opposed to new armies.
As a few people have hinted at, I think it will be a shift toward tanky armies for staying power to counter the shooting lists.
Expect nurgle, sylvaneth and death to have a resurgence just due to being able to stay on the board to capture objectives and hold them.
I don't necessarily believe a shooting meta is bad, just that it needs to be reigned in slightly. The double turn already favours a shooting army so the benefits do need to be reduced.
I would like to see stricter LoS rulings, referring to terrain and not being able to shoot through a unit to hit something behind them for instance ( unless stated as with certain artillery)
Also making a unit in combat only be able to shoot into that combat? Or reduced ranges in combat? I'm waffling but I guess my main point is that metas change and most of us will never be affected by them too much. Shooting is just the latest, and while powerful it just needs tweaking, not casting away.


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[Chrisbo]

1 hour ago, Mohojoe said:

I don't necessarily believe a shooting meta is bad, just that it needs to be reigned in slightly. The double turn already favours a shooting army so the benefits do need to be reduced.

Could you elaborate on that? Sure, Shooting units get a bonus in CC with being able to shoot AND strike, but in my opinion this is (in most cases) negated by the mediocre at best cc capability of shooty units in comparison to dedicated cc units

 

best regards

Chris

[Mohojoe]

Could you elaborate on that? Sure, Shooting units get a bonus in CC whilst being able to shoot AND hit, but in my opinion this is (in most cases) negated by the mediocre at best cc capability of shooty units in comparison to dedicated cc units
 
best regards
Chris

If you get the double turn with shooting armies you get to have two rounds of inflicting damage at range, while receiving damage only in combat. If you take turn two and get the initiative roll for turn three with a shooting army you have a large chance to cause enough damage to sway the game in your favour.
It's not overpowered like that , it just works in favour of armies that focus on ranged damage


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[Chrisbo]

Ah, you ment in a "whole game" term! Yeah, I can see that the Tau-Tactic of "shooting anything to pieces and dealing with the tattered remains that actually make it to you" is in effect here. At my FLG they houseruled the Turn-mechanic meaning you always stay in the order you started with...I decided against using this as this is one of the tactical plusses that AoS has in my opinion

[Mohojoe]

Ah, you ment in a "whole game" term! Yeah, I can see that the Tau-Tactic of "shooting anything to pieces and dealing with the tattered remains that actually make it to you" is in effect here. At my FLG they houseruled the Turn-mechanic meaning you always stay in the order you started with...I decided against using this as this is one of the tactical plusses that AoS has in my opinion

I like it, it's definitely not a flaw, just makes shooting very popular!


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[Chrisbo]

Maybe in the future we'll see some high-movement armies that can counter this with being in cc on turn 1 for example

[Gauche]

Being in Combat Turn 1 is already possible with quite a few builds and doesn't counter shooting because screens exist. It would have to to be a unit that can get into Combat Turn 1, break most screens in the game with reliability, and be very resilient to shooting. There's one build that I've ever seen which can do that and it still has issues with the tippy top shooting lists. An entire army that could get into Combat Turn 1 would do it but that would break the game in half even if they were extremely glass cannon.

[N_Watson]

5 hours ago, Gauche said:

Non-shooting armies have won some large events, I believe the UK Heat 1 was won by the standard BCR list and the UK Masters was Tomb Kings, this was before DoT though. I'm shocked no one has won a major event with Kunnin' Rukk,

"Craig Namvar won the event with Destruction using a Stonehorn, 2 Thundertusks and Moonclan." From Bad Dice list page for heat 1. 
Also, I am pretty sure kunnin ruk won Warlords last year. 

It is getting to the point where the game will need to change in a relatively dramatic way in order to balance shooting lists. Penalties for shooting obscured or distant targets or shooting a single model vs shooting a large unit. Increasing points will just encourage melee armies I think. There needs to be an incentive to taking shooting, but not only shooting. 

Should shooting be powerful? Yes, it should.
Should it be as powerful at 24 inches as it is at 1 inch and in melee combat? No, it probably shouldn't. 
I'd like to see some incentive to taking balanced armies.
 

Will it ever happen? I doubt it. 

[Gauche]

I hope that the big three shooting lists just win every Major until the GHB. Probably won't happen but I firmly believe the game is extremely well designed outside of a few army lists which are only a problem with very, very, very few things in the game being too cheap. There will of course always be tiers and all that but even if shooting were to remain exactly as it is now the game would be very well-balanced for competitive play with some points increases. You don't see Duardin, Free People, or even modern shooting unit spam beating people left and right.

If I saw a nerf to Arrowboys, Skyfires, and Kurnoth Hunters I'd be a very happy man. Probably can throw Thundertusks in there too but they're more of an issue when combined with other things.

[PJetski]

I think that the Aetherstrike Force is so powerful that it will define the next phase of the meta. I literally can't think of a list that can beat it. Skyfires do well but they struggle getting damage through 2 lines of protectors giving you a -2 to hit, castellant making you reroll hit6, and then a 2+ save on the raptors (staunch defender + castellant buff).

Maybe Stardrake + 4 Castellants? It can survive one turn but you can easily tie down the stardrake with birds+judicators+protectors, snipe castellants then the stardrake drops quick the next turn.

[Thor]

From what ive gathered . Shooty lists  or lists  that  put  out  a lot of mortal  wounds tend to perform  well.  To No suprise  18 skyfires  and a few  lord of changes  performed  really  well adepticon. Ive tried running a stormcast  equivilent  with mass longstrikes  protected  against  shooting. This  should perform  at the same level i think.

[Thor]

5 minutes ago, PJetski said:

I think that the Aetherstrike Force is so powerful that it will define the next phase of the meta. I literally can't think of a list that can beat it. Skyfires do well but they struggle getting damage through 2 lines of protectors giving you a -2 to hit, castellant making you reroll hit6, and then a 2+ save on the raptors (staunch defender + castellant buff).

Maybe Stardrake + 4 Castellants? It can survive one turn but you can easily tie down the stardrake with birds+judicators+protectors, snipe castellants then the stardrake drops quick the next turn.

- this. You posted this seconds  before  i did.  Lol

I believe any type  of magic  will burn them to a crisp. Thinking  of the DoT spells  and lord of change.

[PJetski]

They're certainly weak to magic but you can easily out-range their spells with longstrikes. If you are fully aware of the threat range of enemy spells then you should never lose a raptor to a spell

I would be worried about a LOC on Balewind Vortex but most good tournaments ban the vortex.

A tzeentch list tailored to beat Aetherstrike can do well but I'm not sure if it's a viable strategy to make a list that is so hyper-focused on beating a single list. You need to be able to beat aethstrike AND settra and those are two completely different armies.

[Gauche]

Not going to stray too much into my armchair general rants but as a Kunnin' Rukk Player I have zero fear of that SCE build. Cannot comment on it into the other "top" builds. Every time I play against SCE or make lists for them I find them so balanced, such a well designed army but they don't do anything that I consider over the top. All in all that's a good thing, just my thoughts with respect to their place in the meta. They're the number one army I see mentioned for anti-shooting but I think others can do it better.

[Thor]

44 minutes ago, Gauche said:

Not going to stray too much into my armchair general rants but as a Kunnin' Rukk Player I have zero fear of that SCE build. Cannot comment on it into the other "top" builds. Every time I play against SCE or make lists for them I find them so balanced, such a well designed army but they don't do anything that I consider over the top. All in all that's a good thing, just my thoughts with respect to their place in the meta. They're the number one army I see mentioned for anti-shooting but I think others can do it better.

For couriosity sake. What makes you so unafraid  ?

[Gauche]

The output from the army just isn't that great and depending on the build it can have a lot of Scenario issues. It's the fair version of Kunnin' Rukk, it has requirements. SCE also generally struggle with what the higher end shooting lists bring. Very hard to get the -1 to Hit Prayer off without throwing that model away and using other Prayers to deliver him, Mirror Shield doesn't have a real powerhouse to go on except a Star Drake but those are a bit overpriced. Mortal Wounds from Magic or Shooting are a big issue for any SCE list and that is the in thing right now.

I've personally played quite a few shooting heavy SCE builds and had no issues but that's anecdotal. My point is not that they're weak, just that I don't feel they fit into the existing power curve at a top position. But I love being wrong. :]

[Thor]

3 hours ago, Gauche said: